Video Description:
Join us live for this week’s City Council Meeting – City Council Regular Session – February 15, 2022
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: https://otter.ai/u/bT6NGjvQS3OYv2y7_oFp7buv2Jg
Unknown Speaker 0:02
Welcome, everybody, and I’d like to call the February 15 2022. City council study session to order you can watch the meetings they’re being held live stream remote, you can watch them remotely do I’m sorry, I’m gonna start this over there being held remotely due to the ongoing novel Coronavirus pandemic. To view the live stream you can go to Longmont colorado.gov forward slash agendas or the city’s YouTube channel. You can also view it on the Longmont public media.org or Comcast channels eight or eight ad. Could we please start with the roll call?
Unknown Speaker 0:44
Absolutely. Mayor Peck. Peck present? Yes, yes. Councilmember Duggal Ferring. Here, Councilmember Martin, present. Mayor Pro Tem Rodriguez. Here. Councilmember waters here. Councilmember Yarborough? Here. Mayor you have a quorum.
Unknown Speaker 1:09
Thank you. As a message to the public. Anyone wishing to provide public comment must watch the live stream of the meeting and call in only when the meeting for public comment is open. callers are not able to access the meeting at any other time. The Toll Free call And number is displayed on the screen it is 887880099. Watch the live stream and write down the meeting ID when it is displayed at the beginning of the meeting, as it is right now. Wait for rate to be invited to call in and then dial the toll free number. Enter the meeting ID and when asked for your participation ID press the pound sign, mute the live stream and listen for instructions on the phone. callers will hear confirmation that they’ve entered the meeting will be told how many others are already participating in the meeting, and will be placed in a virtual waiting room until admitted into the meeting. callers will be called upon by the last three digits of their phone number and allowed to unmute to provide their comments. Comments are limited to three minutes per person and each speaker will be asked to state their name and address for the record prior to the proceeding to proceeding with their comments. Once done speaking callers should just hang up. Thank you Dallas for displaying that. So we need to have a special report by the city manager Harold, do we have a report on COVID-19?
Unknown Speaker 2:45
Oh, yes, Mayor. Give me a second to share your slides and share the screen. Are you all seen the one with the single slide? Yes. So this actually is a report that’s going to be a fair amount of good news as we talk through the information that we received today. Start off with counseling that I know Marika sent you the information. And it’s probably it’s also been reported that the Boulder County Public Health Board voted last night to rescind the two remaining public health orders that were in effect and regarding masking. And so those will end at 5pm on February 18. So I’m going to go through some of the data and then we’re going to have some questions for counsel. And once we get to the end of this are once you asked your questions on the numbers, so key information numbers are still declining. At a fairly rapid clip. hospitalizations are decreasing or stood they’re still experiencing some stress. But that’s regarded regarding the broader input. deaths continue to rise. But that’s a lagging indicator and the positivity is decreasing. And in terms of the vaccination front, over 300,000, or 92% of our residents have at least a partial course of the vaccine. We’re still seeing data gaps based on timing and the amount of data that was coming into the system. When we look at the actual cases and what we’re what we’re seeing today, looks we’re down at 270 3.3 that numbers moving daily in terms of the decline. What we’re seeing, I think they’re anticipating that in probably within the next couple to three weeks we should be below the red line. In high transmission. When you look at the decrease in the numbers builder counties now that three 18.83 400,000, again, another week of decreases in this number. And this is what it looks like by age group. And so all the age groups are trending downward at this point. And so then you go, Well, what does it look like in the future, and this is our wastewater data. And you can see that, you know, this is the one that we’ve been really looking at is a leading indicator, you can still see that we’re not getting the case information. But if you look at where we sit today, terms of our wastewater data and what it looked like, you know, we’re really back into that. Right now, that August September, kind of look in terms of the number of copies of the virus within our wastewater stream. So that’s also giving us a look to the future that really corresponds with what they talked about in terms of the number of cases continuing to go down. When we look at the public health component, you can see that the seven day average of hospitalizations decreased by 30%. We’re still seeing tight staffing, but it is going down. The ICU bed availability is averaging around 10%, which is up a percentage point in med search beds is holding stable 11% of the available hospital beds are occupied by confirmed COVID patients. So that was 20% last week. So that’s where we’re seeing those numbers all trending downward. And then the seven day average of 30 pediatric confirmed hospitalized hospital cases. Again, this is just a graph so that you can see kind of what’s happening within the hospital world. And then when we look at vaccination, one of the things that they talked about in the meeting today was really, if you look at this first category, number of people 73,000 with one course 229 With a full course of the vaccine. So that’s that 300,000. So when it you know, you look at the percent of the total 92.4%. And it’s 96.4% of the eligible population. And so what that really means is, this was a big data point for them as they were talking to the Board of Health last night. And it’s really just the the amount of people that have been vaccinated in Boulder County. They did talk about how they I guess there’s some delays in vaccine for the youngest group,
Unknown Speaker 7:45
the youngest population, and they were talking about maybe continuing that, but the board decided not to on it. So where we are today is that basically there are no more public health orders from Boulder County Health. And, and so the question for council really is, you know, we talked about what is this look like in terms of council meetings? And so, before we go there, I’d be happy to answer any questions on the data. But also wanted to get counsels opinion of when you all want to pay, do you want to go back in person? And if so, when do you want to go back in person? And what are some of the triggers that you’re looking at?
Unknown Speaker 8:40
We have any comments from counselors on any questions for Harold or any opinions about when you would be ready to go back in person?
Unknown Speaker 8:51
Harold,
Unknown Speaker 8:57
it looks like we are back where the numbers are down where we were in, in person when we were holding them in person earlier this year. Am I correct in saying that?
Unknown Speaker 9:10
We’re getting there? Okay. We’re heading there, but we’re not quite there. Okay. But you know, I would say based on what they what they seem to indicate, I think within the next two to three weeks, we should probably be there based on the trend. Okay. And in the wastewater data. We’re still in high transmission, but we’re moving we’re dropping down pretty fast.
Unknown Speaker 9:34
Okay. Counselor.
Unknown Speaker 9:37
Yes, I don’t see how Boulder County could have done anything else but what they did, given that we are the last county with any mandates above what the governor has expressed. But I believe the last time we talked about it, we wanted to get below the red level before we Again reconvening in person I would like to give it a couple more weeks of online just to see if we can get there. Because it’s not just us, it’s, you know, the people who come to the meetings. I’m eager to get back in person because we are not getting the number of callers that we would get the number of speakers if we were in person. But I also want to think about the health of the public and so I would say, let’s give it till the end of the month and M decide where decide them.
Unknown Speaker 10:41
Okay, Marsha, do I mean Councillor Martin? Do you want to put that in emotion and we cannot vote on it.
Unknown Speaker 10:47
So moved. Okay.
Unknown Speaker 10:49
Is there a seconder for that?
Unknown Speaker 10:53
I’ll second. Okay.
Unknown Speaker 10:57
It’s been moved by Councillor Martin and seconded by Councillor waters, that we continue virtual meetings for a couple more weeks. All those in favor? Please raise your hand.
Unknown Speaker 11:09
All those opposed?
Unknown Speaker 11:14
Okay, it has been Moved by Councillor Yarborough myself and Councillor waters. And Martin that we continue virtually and against a post where Mayor Pro Tem Rodriguez and Councillor Hidalgo faring. So I guess we’ll stay for weeks. Councillor Hidalgo? You have a comment?
Unknown Speaker 11:37
Um, yeah, actually, I do have a question. Um, and then, you know, I guess, you know, since it it passed, and I you know, I’m not going to explain why I voted the way I did. But, you know, I wanted to ask about one thing that came up in conversations I’ve had with families, the last couple of weeks, that I really couldn’t answer was, you know, folks wanting to know, you know, as far as side effects with the vaccine among kids, you know, I’m hearing more and more parents who’ve kind of refrained, you know, held back from vaccinating their children, because they weren’t sure of, you know, any side effects. I was listening into the meeting. And then I got cut off my zoom on my phone, I was trying to do it on my phone, and it just didn’t, I got cut off, and I couldn’t get back, logged back on. So um, you know, I was just wondering, was there any conversation around around that component? Are they tracking numbers?
Unknown Speaker 12:40
So I think the answer is yes. And it depends on the the actual side effect that you’re talking about. And so we we brought in a physician in my all city calls that I do that he kind of talked about that. And, you know, the the question came up regarding cardiomyopathy, and because that was one of the issues that they were seeing in younger age groups. And he actually did, I can’t remember the numbers exactly. But I will kind of talk you through this good job of explaining it to say yep, there there are side effects, potentially with But when they looked at cardiomyopathy, at least when they had the numbers, then it’s basically you are much more likely to have an issue with cardiomyopathy as a as a kid if you got sick, versus if you receive the vaccination. And so he and so really, it’s a range of what it is, and it’s a risk based on each one of these individual components. And we can try to grab that information from you. But generally, what he said is, are there risk for side effects? Yes, but there are greater risk for the same side effects if you don’t get vaccinated, and you get sick. And I think, you know, they’re, you know, the thing that everyone’s still seeing and all of this is there still a lot of learning going on in terms of how people are recovering what they’re going through what are the long term issues just related if you’ve got the virus versus if you didn’t and so generally that’s what he said and Sandy no Sandy’s on if I miss something out of that conversation, you can help me with that. Maybe not, but
Unknown Speaker 14:43
you got it all.
Unknown Speaker 14:44
Okay, but we’ll get you that information because it was much more specific. Okay. Surely have that. I think we have that recorded. Okay. We’ll see what we can do to pull that and send it to your cause. He did a great job explaining all those issues to us?
Unknown Speaker 15:02
Okay. Okay. Very good. So yeah, that was pretty much the only question I had mine. I was listening till I got dropped. But thank you.
Unknown Speaker 15:13
Okay. The other thing that I wanted to touch base with council on this council set the policy, and we’ve really been following the policy of following guidance of CDC cdphp, Boulder County Hill. And so based on that policy direction, we’re assuming then that on February 18, at 5pm, the masking order will not apply to the organization. Based on that policy directive and operational directive that we’ve looked at, as we’re moving forward, they still are recommending that, you know, if people wear the mask if they’re not vaccinated, or you know, these other issues, and so we have some signs that we’ll put up. But I wanted to also clarify that with City Council today.
Unknown Speaker 16:04
So Harold, I know that we are putting this on our own city council and the city employees. But on February 10, then does that mean that restaurants don’t have to mandate it’s for everyone.
Unknown Speaker 16:19
All all, all public health orders are being removed. And that’s where I’m saying, our direction has been, we’re going to remove it. I think, you know, to your point about what you talked about when you now let me be clear, there are still some large events where there’s still some statewide orders that come into play, I think that ties with what you all were looking at in terms of bringing more folks together, congregate, living still has some orders that are in place. And so it’s not a wholesale, removing all of this, it is outside of those specialized categories, it’s removed. And you know, one of the things they talked about to kind of pointed out is, when they created the rule, it was really under delta, which was much more virulent than omachron. And so there are distinctions in this the third looking at, so they’re looking at now people that are vaccinated, they’re looking at, you know, we’re gathering but then also omachron is still tended to be more infectious but less virulent in terms of impacts, not meaning that there’s not the other one that you will see that there still orders in place, public transportation, will still be a mass requirement in public transportation. So not a wholesale removal, but it’s generally for the things that the county put in place. That’s what will be removed.
Unknown Speaker 17:43
Okay. Thank you for that clarification. Do you have any other thing, things on your agenda that you want to tell us about?
Unknown Speaker 17:51
No, that was just these two are the big ones that I wanted to make sure I was still in line from your policy perspective, and what we talked about and see where you wanted to go. And what we will do is continue watching it and when we see it drop below, high transmission will let you all know via email.
Unknown Speaker 18:06
Great, great,
Unknown Speaker 18:07
thank you. So I’m going to go back on the agenda and as counselors if you have any motions to direct the city manager to add agenda items to future agendas. I don’t see any hands. So I’m assuming we don’t need to add any items. Let’s move on to our special reports and presentations. We I’m sorry, we already had that tour study session items.
Unknown Speaker 18:33
May or I’m sorry. Any good go back to public invited to be hurt. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
Unknown Speaker 18:41
We’re all sorry.
Unknown Speaker 18:45
to the public. Okay, at this time, we have the screen up if you would like to comment and public invited to be heard. Please call in now. The toll free number is 1-888-788-0099. Thank you. We’re gonna take a five minute break and we’ll be back
Unknown Speaker 19:04
in five minutes.
Unknown Speaker 24:03
Mayor, we are at about the five minute mark. I do see we have some callers. Great. Is
Unknown Speaker 24:10
anybody still in the waiting room?
Unknown Speaker 24:12
No, we’ve got everyone in. Okay, let’s
Unknown Speaker 24:14
go ahead and start.
Unknown Speaker 24:16
Sure thing. All right color with the last three digits 468 Color 468. If you would hit star six on your device to unmute yourself, please go ahead and do so and then as you begin, say your name and address for the record. Hey, caller 468 Hi, can you hear me? Yes, we can.
Unknown Speaker 24:42
Hi, my name is James. We’ll see I’m at 613 Elliott Street. I’ve been Longmont resident for over eight years. Now. I would like to implore the city council to do something about the illegal fireworks that happens across the city every year on the Fourth of July. Launching off fireworks that leave the ground is illegal. In an illegal for very good reason. We live in a state that tends to be extremely dry and constantly in a state of drought. This is exacerbated becoming more frequent each and every year by climate change. All it takes is one errant spark to light the city on fire. We just witnessed firsthand 1000 houses burning to the ground in a matter of hours, only 15 miles south of our beloved city. Now imagine that same thing happening at night on a holiday where the vast majority of population is drunk and emergency services are already maxed out. Despite the fact that laying off fireworks leaves the ground is illegal. There are currently no no consequences for someone who does this within Longmont. The police quite frankly do not care nor do they have the resources to deal with it. If you ask the police about this last Fourth of July, they’ll let you know they received over 400 calls about legal fireworks on that single night. They will explain further that there’s so much legal fireworks going off around town that the patrol cars literally cannot move anywhere because they get stuck within the illegal fireworks madness. They do not have the resources to deal with this problem, nor do they care to write tickets for it. I personally sent an hours of video footage of my Unruly neighbors letting off illegal fireworks and nothing came of it but please do not care. The City and the police is current stances it is up to the neighbors to police themselves. With the city in the police failed to realize is when you have very inconsiderate neighbors do not care about you or anyone else in the neighborhood. That leaves us with absolutely no recourse. The people who lied off these illegal fireworks claiming their right to do so is their right to launch Roman candles we are feet over the roof of houses that have small children inside whom are trying to sleep is their right to cause fire during down on houses dry trees and unsuspecting neighbors who are trying to peacefully and respectfully celebrate the holiday. They claim to have all these rights bestowed on them by the Fourth of July. But what about my rights? They ignore the fact that the fireworks being led off is illegal to begin with. What about my rights? Not have my house burned down without my rights to live in a safe community? What about our neighbors right? To let their kids sleep without fear of their houses catching on fire? What about the rights of people with PTSD who cannot deal with what sounds like a complete and utter battle in the midst of a war. These people claim to have all of these rights and celebrate but they blatantly ignore the rights of everyone else around them. We all have rights. We are all American, we all want to enjoy freedom in our own way. No single person’s rights are more important than another’s. In fact, I would argue that the rights of the community as a whole to live in a safe, compassionate and caring city outweighs the rights of any single person. So when our community burns to the ground due to nobody caring, not only will the city be liable, not only will the police be liable, but each and every one of you on the city council will be liable if you choose not take any actions to prevent our town from burning down. If you choose to do nothing. Then you know the blood of the deceased will be on your hands and you can all explain to kids why they no longer have houses to live in. How about you take some action implement a zero tolerance policy of an extremely high fine for offenders. And give
Unknown Speaker 27:54
us me your three minutes or up. Thank you so much for your comments.
Unknown Speaker 28:01
All right, we’re going to move on to the next color color with the last three digits 752. Color 752 If you’re there, do you mind hitting star six to unmute yourself. Caller with the last three digits 752. If you were there, hit star six, please. Hey, I see you there.
Unknown Speaker 28:36
Can you hear us? Yes, I can hear? Perfect. Thanks.
Unknown Speaker 28:42
Should I start?
Unknown Speaker 28:44
Go ahead. Give us your name and address the last three digits seven, five.
Unknown Speaker 28:50
And do you mind muting your live stream? We can hear that in the background right now. Okay.
Unknown Speaker 28:58
Hi, I’m Mary Headley. I live at 1615 Bowen Street, and I’m a member of sustainable resilient Longmont. They’re always they’re always committee. I was very concerned to read the latest annual report on the state of recycling and composting in Colorado, by the Colorado Public Interest Research Group and eco cycle. This report found that Colorado is still failing to meet its waste diversion goals, making us one of the country’s most wasteful states. In 2020, Colorado’s statewide recycling and composting rate was just 15%, less than half the national rate of 32%. That year, Coloradans buried close to 6 million tons of materials in our landfills, the majority of which could have been diverted and which greatly contributes to our worsening climate crisis. The report concludes that unless Big changes are made, Colorado will also likely fail to meet its next waste diversion goal of 28% and the national goal is it 2% by 2030. Importantly, the report notes that, quote, lack of funding is the most commonly cited barrier by municipalities. That is why it’s crucial for our city council to direct staff to take meaningful action to change this harmful course. Also news is that some Colorado communities are recovering more than 50% of their discarded materials, in large part because of strong actions by UNESCO governments. Loveline, for example, has a residential recycling and composting rate of 58%. Allowance rate is only 41%. Why so much lower? Well, one important factor is that long months residential waste management fee is less than $3 a month, one of the lowest on the Front Range, while Loveland fee is $12 over four times that of long month. Netherlands fee is used to fund important waste diversion programs, including a recycling center that accepts many hard to recycle materials, General General recycling, education and outreach. Long run speed could also be raised to enlarge waste diversion programs, and expand education and outreach efforts to avoid disproportionately affecting our more vulnerable population. Some of the revenue from this fee could be earmarked to help the sector. Our next speaker will say more on the potential that raising this fee creates for bettering our state’s our city’s waste diversion rates, followed by two other zero waste committee members sharing more IDs. Ideas. I would be proud to see Longmont live up to its potential and become one of Colorado’s leaders in Zero Waste Management by directing city staff to modernize and take impactful impactful actions on this front now. Thank you.
Unknown Speaker 31:55
Thank you very
Unknown Speaker 31:59
much. Yeah, the next color is color 192 Color with the last three digits 192 Do you mind getting your live streaming? Hey, I see you there. Can you hear us? Perfect. Do my name and address.
Unknown Speaker 32:13
Yep. Hi, this is Naomi Kurland at 2073. Goldfinch court. I’m the board chair of sustainable resilient Longmont and SRLs Zero Waste Committee, which hosts monthly Park cleanups and larger annual Greenway cleanup. In 2022, we volunteered to help with door to door outreach for the upcoming cat Zero Waste survey, and also secured a Boulder County grant to increase waste diversion and multicultural festivals through zero waste education. We are committed to seeing Longmont improve our waste diversion by empowering registered residents with more opportunities. Mary spoke about how lack of funds is one of the key reasons municipalities cite for their low waste diversion rates. long ones incredibly low waste management fee has not been raised in 20 years. This fee hasn’t even come close to keeping up with inflation. based on figures provided by city staff. If this fee were raised even by only $1 a month, it would raise close to $360,000 a year, raising it to a more reasonable fee for Front Range cities of say 750 would raise 1.6 million annually. City staff recognize the race management fee is long overdue for an increase. They also recognize that long ones waste diversion rate appears to have plateaued and that different programs and facilities are needed to move the needle upwards. And analysis of high potential waste diversion programs could be the first step determining costs associated for those programs, which then could help the city land upon an appropriate waste management fee increase. as Mary mentioned, incorporating equitable fee assessment to address the needs of all our residents should also be part of the of a rate restructuring plan that has already identified some high potential programs. The first is a regional composting facility, which Boulder County has already been working on. Long launch could help drive that initiative by studying suitable sites within the city limits. And by talking with nearby municipalities to assess their willingness to participate in building and maintaining such a facility related to composting the city could adopt an opt out model for residential composting rather than the current opt in one and structure the SSI package to be inclusive of all waste diversion, as a residential recycling program already is another high potential program would be to expand our current waste diversion center to include more hard to recycle items, which another way they’re a waste committee member will speak to a little later. These staff are ready to move. They just need city council to direct them to do more in depth studies of initiatives that have high tech tend to increase our waste diversion. As we see ever worsening climate disasters in our daily news. It is beyond time for us to get creative and bold in our thinking. Sherry will speak next about why timing is of the essence here. Thank you so much.
Unknown Speaker 35:18
Thank you, Naomi.
Unknown Speaker 35:21
Next color
Unknown Speaker 35:22
next color is the last three digits 452 Color 452 Do you mind hitting star six to unmute.
Unknown Speaker 35:30
Hello. By sharing the line 1632 Seven way member of SRL Zero Waste committee speaking to waste the waste update, timeline and process. When Waste Services presented to city council all in almost exactly one year ago, council directed staff to move forward with a plan that included updating our old and weak Zero Waste resolution and drafting a universal recycling oranges or URL. Waste Services gave these tasks to the sustainability department. Now one year later, a process and timeline. Just to begin on both is being presented tonight. A two phase approach is suggested splitting these two directives. The plan is to do community engagement for z w resolution this spring with a draft Council in June. When that is finished, they will start public engagement for the URL and come back to council with a draft in December 10 months from now. Timing aside, doing two public engagements is confusing to the public. This approach needs streamlining, it would be much more effective and efficient for staff to draft a DW resolution for your consideration and then use that as a framework for public engagement for a URL. This would be more public friendly and helpful considering the department’s resignations and vacancy. We already have it CW resolution. It just needs to be updated and include accountability and metrics, not finding resolutions or guiding principles to help hold city council and staff accountable to the values expressed. Council approves resolutions over time for many issues and projects such as climate action, transportation, housing, etc. These important issues didn’t require a protracted public engagement process or resolution to improve our waste diversion should not be required to go through a rigorous, publicly confusing, staff heavy and lengthy process either. The draft resolution should be easy to develop and bring back to Council for approval in early spring. The county and several neighboring cities have very good resolutions that can be used for reference. If adopted soon the public outreach for the URL could happen this summer with a draft ready for your consideration by August or September. Using engage long my long long public media both newspapers next door and other social media outlets, as well as offering in person or better still hybrid opportunities. Two months should be more than ample time to engage the community about improving waste diversion services, and talk about the universal recycling ordinance. Like a DW resolution there are many good models for a URL. Our committee has offered to help with the whole process, including graphic language, promoting public engagement and whatever else is needed. Tonight, we’re asking council to direct staff to come back for the draft VW resolution in two months and use this as a framework for the universal recycling ordinance community engagement this summer and returned to council with the proposed ordinance this fall Council taking action to make zero waste a priority aligned with resident values that are Climate Action Plan.
Unknown Speaker 38:40
Thank you, Sherry. Yeah, three minutes is up. Thank you very much for your
Unknown Speaker 38:44
comments.
Unknown Speaker 38:47
And then moving on to our last caller caller with the last three digits 778 Color 778 demand and meeting hitting star six. A color 778 Mrs.
Unknown Speaker 39:03
Yeah. Can you hear me? Yes. Hi. Hi, this is Jessica shaver at 1829 Sweeney place. I’m a board member at sustainable resilient Longmont and member of the SRL Zero Waste committee and I’m also a member of the city’s equitable Climate Action Team. Maryanne Naomi spoke on how municipal support is needed to improve recycling and composting efforts in our city. And Sherry mentioned our disappointment with a slow moving but much needed metric based update to the zero waste resolution. They all spoke about the need for bold and impactful actions. So I am here to suggest one. In October 2021, the city partnered with green Grove recycling to host a hard to recycle event. But even with COVID restrictions was an overwhelming success. According to city’s own website. Whoever this highly successful event was quite limited regarding what items were accepted. mainly limited to large electronics such as TVs, computers and printers. We would like to see the city increase the number of hard recycling bins and expand what items are accepted. While we recognize that many large items such as plate glass or large household appliances like refrigerators pose logistical issues for these events, there are many small household items that can and should be recycled such as textiles, yoga mats, fire extinguishers and outdated media, such as CDs, DVDs and VHS tapes. These are all materials that eco cycle can process at its boulder center for hard to recycle materials also known as charm. There should be regular hard to recycle events, not just one or two a year. Also partnering with eco cycle could enable ongoing hard recycled collection at the Longmont waste diversion center. And if needed, the city could support these programs with a per car fee of $33. As is already the case at the term facility. Increasing the number of hard to recycle events affords the ability to gauge the convening and outreach and education about recycling and composting. Something that is desperately needed for the city to meet the Zero Waste targets that will be updated outlined in the updated Zero Waste revolution. Many residents including myself are regularly confused about what items belong where, and hard to recycle events would provide a great opportunity for clarifying our confusion with something as simple as flyers. For example, the October hard recycle event taught me and other members of the Zero Waste committee that we can recycle fewer back books in our curbside bins. Who knew in conclusion Council must act now to increase the city’s waste diversion efforts. We presented several ideas that council can direct city staff to implement now to improve recycling and composting. Increasing our low waste management fees with consideration of low income residents pushing timelines forward for the updated Zero Waste resolution and universal recycling ordinance. And expanding the hard to recycle materials, events and opportunities. We’ll all move the city closer to achieving the Zero Waste future that is necessary to curb the worst of climate catastrophe. Thank you. Thank you, Jessica. Do we have anyone else Dallas?
Unknown Speaker 41:55
That was our last caller?
Unknown Speaker 41:56
Or last caller? Thank you. Those were exceptional recommendations. So let’s hear what the Waste Services program actually has to offer. Is this Charlie Kim Anytus. That is going to do this waste service program update.
Unknown Speaker 42:19
There you are Child
Unknown Speaker 42:24
Marriage Marriage counseling think Bob Allen is going to launch us off in this presentation. Okay, are you there? I am here. When we are ready and have it cued up. We are. We are ready to move on.
Unknown Speaker 42:39
Okay, great. Thank you. Hey, Bob, do you mind Turn on your camera for me?
Unknown Speaker 42:46
Perfect. Right.
Unknown Speaker 42:49
I am Bob Allen, Director of Operations and public works in natural resources and want to kick off our discussion tonight of our waste services program. Could you move us to the next slide Dallas, help. So we we began this discussion in 2020. We were looking to kind of update way services, look at what program needs might be there for the community what what services are desired. And to that end, we kind of started with an open ended discussion about what we could do to improve the program overall, we in 2021. Working with council came up with four key areas that we were working with and you heard a lot of them just recently in the public comments, but those four programs included looking at our education and outreach and specifically the GreenStar school program. educational component, looking at at least interim options for hard to recycle until maybe possibly we could look at a facility that could take a broader range of hard to recycle items in the northern part of Boulder County looked at updating the Zero Waste resolution from 2008. And then universal recycling ordinance. Universal recycling ordinance referring to trying to make composting and recycling available to most or all residents in Longmont and in businesses depending on how we are to structure that ordinance. So we want to give you an update on these four programs. Tonight. Charlie’s going to talk to you about the education and outreach hard to recycle. Charlie is the manager of our waste services program. And Lisa Knobloch our sustainability program manager is going to talk to you about the Zero Waste resolution and the universal recycling ordinance. The progress that they’re making on those two projects. And then if you don’t mind, we’d like to get through the presentation, which is fairly brief, and then answer your questions and have the discussion that that I think is important for the community. So with that, I’m going to turn it over to Charlie and Dallas, if you could advance us to the next slide. That would be great. Thank you, Bob. Mayor Peck and council Charles cominius Waste Services wanted to start the presentation, just reflecting on the residential waste diversion for 2120 21. We achieved the 42% diversion rate in our residential sector. And the slide also illustrates the split between our different size containers. It’s a question I get frequently. So I thought I’d share that today. About 57% still have the large container 32% have the weekly small container and about 10% have the every other week container. Dallas. Next slide please. The other frequent question I get is where we’re at with our often program. So we have about 24% participation with our opt in curbside composting program. And that seems to be aligning with what our consultant had instructed us or projected when we started our program. Looking at a plateauing around 25%, I could say that we’re still having customers, residents signing up, but it’s it’s a little slower, but we’re getting there, we’re inching along, we have over 7000 of our residents who are opt in. And just as a figure, we, since the inception of our program divert almost 10,000 times a little over 9000 tons of compost. Next slide, please. So this is part of the four directives, the hard to recycle service that we offered last October. And again, our strategy initially from from our discussions was to was to explore interim options, you know, whether that’s doing some setups, and some location, hard to recycle events, but doing something in the interim, so that we can seek and look at those long term solutions that we were talking about earlier. We did hold our first event in October and I, I thought it was rather successful. Next slide, please.
Unknown Speaker 47:34
As we heard from the public, we did contract with a local company, green girl recycling. And we did a two week event as opposed to a one day event that held, you know, at a location with people in a line. But over that two week period, we did serve over 1000 households. And the feedback from customers and from our contractor was, it really helped to reduce traffic problems. And of course, during the pandemic, having a two week event that had reservations that really made it a little bit more friendly and safer, people felt safer bringing their materials overall at this this interim event that we had, we collected over 11 tonnes of material, and we stayed within what we thought was our budget of around $41,000. Next slide, please. The this is just I don’t want to go through each bit of it. But these are the types of materials that were brought to give an example of the material so we it was primarily televisions, flat screens and, and computers, but there was a number of hardback books and toner cartridges and bicycle tires and the such. We heard that potentially, residents would like to see different materials and we could explore that as we continue our program forward. Next slide please. Next thing I’d like to share with you all and I’m going to quick just let you know, we partner with eco cycle and eco cycle does a number of school outreaches as we call the GreenStar school program. And currently we are serving 11 Out of the 27 schools in Longmont and in the st frame school district. And we will be adding two more schools to that list this school year. In general the scope of work adequately starts school has to do with staff training parent meetings and working with student groups at the particular schools and then eco cycle as well holds kickoff assemblies that teaches the school as a whole about renewable and non renewable resources, natural resource depletion, landfilling versus recycling. The impacts of landfills on the environment, proper sorting and container identification and they like to emphasize as welding unique, the uniqueness of being a zero waste school. So I think this is a really great program and we look forward to continue working with eco cycle to add more schools and continue to teach the youth about the recycling and hopefully they can take back home and then that works as well
Tim Waters 50:21
at the curb.
Unknown Speaker 50:24
Next slide, please. Mayor council that that does it for myself. I’m going to turn it over to Lisa Knobloch. And she’s going to carry us through to the work being done for the Zero Waste resolution and some conversation around the URL. Lisa.
Unknown Speaker 50:49
Hey, Lisa, I can see you and it appears you are unmuted but we can’t hear you did a mic change? Since we initially did set up?
Unknown Speaker 51:05
You hear me now? Yeah, yeah, we can.
Unknown Speaker 51:09
Okay, sorry. I have my headset in. Hopefully, the small ones in the background will be quiet. I apologize. If it gets noisy. I might mute for a second and I’ll come back on. But good evening, Mayor Peck and council. I’m Lisa Knobloch and the sustainability program manager. And I’m going to be giving you a brief update on the progress and timeline for the Zero Waste resolution in the universal recycling ordinance. As Charlie mentioned, you can go to the next slide, please. So just as a quick reminder, the city passed the existing Zero Waste resolution in 2008, which staff was then directed by council to update last year as part of the four focus areas that both Bob and Charlie spoke to. As you see on the left, there’s items in gray those were included in the original resolution. And the items in green are the areas that we want to include in the update some more of a focus on health and pollution, as well as a tie to climate and community impacts. In addition, we want to go through a stakeholder engagement process, which I’ll talk more about shortly. But that’ll help us identify community needs and priorities, as well as potential equity issues around waste and how how to address those potential issues. Net space. So we’ll also be doing some data analysis about the best ways to determine the pathways to reach our targets. I think I forgot to mention sorry. The other thing that we want to include in this resolution is some specific targets that the original resolution doesn’t include, which I think some of the folks in the public invited to be heard comments mentioned. So we want to go through a stakeholder engagement process to help us identify what those targets should be. And we’ll also be doing some data analysis to determine what are the best pathways to help us reach those targets. And then all of this work will not only help us build out the content of the resolution itself will also create buy in and support for next steps, including the development of the universal recycling ordinance. Next slide, please. So we’re our work is guided by three primary principles. And that’s it, everybody lives in a clean and safe community, we want to increase access to recycling and composting for everyone. And then of course, that reducing waste also supports our climate action goals. Next Steps please. Sorry, next slide. So as I mentioned, community engagement is a really important component and understanding community needs and priorities as well as equity issues so that we can really craft both a resolution in ordinance that adequately reflects those needs and priorities, and also helps us build trust with our community members. It creates greater support and investment in helping us meet our targets because we know that we can do a lot from the city, but we can’t do it all and it’s going to be really important that we bring the community along with us in this process, and that residents, businesses and other folks in the commercial sector all participate in helping us achieve our zero waste targets. There’s three main components to the community engagement process. And the first of which is reaching out to residents to understand that awareness, access barriers and other issues that folks face. The second part is talking to key partners like our advisory boards, folks like sustainable resilient Longmont, Boulder County resource conservation Advisory Board, Boulder County pace and recycle Colorado, as well as peer communities that have been doing great Zero Waste work that can provide their expertise and lessons learned for us. And of course, our own staff from various departments who are impacted by and have a role in our zero waste efforts. So folks like our parks folks, recreation planning facilities, public safety and others, and then targeted engagement with the commercial and multifamily sector, which will be specifically impacted by a universal recycling ordinance. So it’s really important We have these initial conversations with the folks in the commercial sector, and engage them really early on so that we can develop a resolution that has both those high level goals and priorities. And an ordinance that includes waste diversion requirements that helps fit the long context and community. And then again, also really helps create that support and investment in helping us to achieve our goals. So I do want to clarify some comments from the public invited to be heard that we are going through one community engagement process, that we we will utilize that feedback to inform both the high level goals and priorities of the Zero Waste resolution, and also the details of the universal recycling ordinance. Next slide, please.
Unknown Speaker 55:43
So waste is a specific focus area already in the sustainability plan. And this slide just shows the targets listed here, we’ve already met our household trash consumption targets. So we’ll be revisiting that when we update the sustainability plan. We’re doing pretty well in the in the residential sector close getting close to meeting our 50% target by 2025. As Charlie mentioned earlier, although he did also mention that our composting rate is starting to plateau at that close to 25%. We’ve been doing a lot internally, but we’re still working on establishing a baseline there. And then our commercial efforts today have largely been done through our sustainable business program, which has been really successful. But as you can see, we’ve never had a specific target for the commercial sector. So that’s a really big opportunity to include in this process, as we know that commercial waste accounts for about 57% of the waste generated with an additional 10% coming from construction and demolition. Next slide, please. So as I mentioned, in addition to the community engagement process, we’ll also be also be doing some data analysis, starting with the two scenarios that we identified in our waste lifecycle analysis that was completed in 2020, which looked at the impact of waste on our greenhouse gas emissions. So we’ll be evaluating possible programs and policies needed to achieve the targets in those two scenarios, as well as costs associated with those options so that we can bring that back for discussion with council. Next slide, please. So lastly, just some key dates to note. So January to March is focused on the community engagement portion. And that’s already begun. We recently launched an engage Longmont page, and it’s scheduled numerous stakeholder meetings with our boards, economic partners and key staff. And we’ve also had conversations with the cities of Fort Collins, city, Boulder and Boulder County, the April through May timeframe, we’ll be drafting a resolution that will be then taking the boards and other key partners to get feedback with the goal of them bringing the final draft resolution that council in June. This is in keeping this is keeping with with the initial timeline that was given to us by council last year for the Zero Waste resolution update, which was to be completed by mid 2022. And then from there, we’ll continue the targeted outreach with the commercial and multifamily sectors to help refine the universal recycling ordinance and bring the final draft of that to council by the end of the year. So by engaging the commercial stakeholders early on and helping to shape the high level goals and priorities of the Zero Waste resolution, we’re able to bump up that timing for bringing the universal recycling ordinance back to Council, which was initially set for mid 2023. So that does help us bump up that timeline. Next line. So with that we can have questions, comments or other thoughts.
Unknown Speaker 58:34
Yes, thank you. Do we have any comments from Council?
Unknown Speaker 58:39
Or thoughts?
Unknown Speaker 58:44
Councillor Martin? Yes, it was not part of the presentation. But we had a white paper in the packet that had a lot of really good information about our the costs of our present waste diversion program. And, in particular, it had a pretty high cost for the compost pickup.
Unknown Speaker 59:17
Program.
Unknown Speaker 59:20
Mr. Academy Kemeny DS. Can you refresh my memory on that it was $85 per
Unknown Speaker 59:25
one unit.
Unknown Speaker 59:29
It may or pick a council member Martin. I think you’re referring to the cost of the disposal fees for the material that we pick up at curbside? Yeah, so currently, I think in the paper, it’s an older paper but I think we’re a little over $86 a ton to have disposal of the material we collect right now.
Unknown Speaker 59:49
Yes. And so. I am wondering if you have estimated what the cost would be if we changed to change the opt in strategy to an opt out strategy, considering that that? Well, what our fees have to go up just to cover the cost of doing it, or would we be losing money on it? How would that work? Go ahead. If I
Unknown Speaker 1:00:25
may, Mayor pack and Councilmember Martin, that cost right now is reflecting the higher cost of having to haul that material to keansburg. And it’s one of the reasons why we are a proponent of trying to find a local option for that, or local transfer stations that could reduce that cost, it’s not likely that expanding that program will reduce that cost by much, if any. Thank you, I
Unknown Speaker 1:00:57
wasn’t expecting that outcome, that it would reduce the cost. That’s why I was asking about the impact of expanding the composting program.
Unknown Speaker 1:01:14
Any other comments?
Unknown Speaker 1:01:17
Councillor Hidalgo?
Unknown Speaker 1:01:18
Fine. Thank you, Mayor. I do have a question about the the event that a hard to recycle event. You know, I did see that it was 41,000 for that one particular event. Now if we hosted and it was open for two weeks, so if we were able to host more throughout the year at a shorter duration of time, so maybe, you know, going for a week or you know, four days or you know, extended weekend type thing. With that kind of allow us give us the capacity to be able to host more of them throughout the year. What are your thoughts?
Unknown Speaker 1:02:05
Mayor pack and Councilman, Councilmember Hidalgo, fairing. The the problem with that program is that it is only an interim program. So it has limitations as to what we can do financially. We partner with eco cycle and we partnered with green girl. So that partnership had to reflect the constraints on all three parties. It’s still really only an interim program that would really need to be expanded with enhanced facilities, new facilities, or something different than what we have today, potentially more funding, but I’m not going to say that just adding more dollars in there would change that without you know, some some kind of capital improvement, whoever was to do that to have a facility in the northern part of the county that could take more. With that said, we do think we can and Charlie mentioned we could do more. And we can look for some options to improve that program. The possibility of maybe doing that twice a year exists, but we would have to make sure our partners would be on board with them.
Unknown Speaker 1:03:15
Okay, okay. Yeah, I mean, that would be something that I would support, even if we we did the the two times a year, you know, you think of people who do their spring cleaning, and then you know, towards the end of summer fall cleanup. So, you know, that might be something that would, you know, be more beneficial to our car community and pull things out of the landfill. So thanks.
Unknown Speaker 1:03:44
I do have some comments, a couple of comments is as the commercial recycling program, or even composting with these commercial carriers. Least had said that we were in talks with him. Can you tell me what some of those conversations are about? And are we any closer in getting the commercial industry to buy into our composting or recycling?
Unknown Speaker 1:04:13
Yeah, I’m sorry. Sorry. I apologize
Unknown Speaker 1:04:24
for that. Mayor packing council members. Yeah, so we we’ve scheduled a lot of meetings with those key partners. So those are later in February and in the March timeframe, so I haven’t had a lot of those conversations as yet. I will tell you what I can share with you from our way waste like lifecycle analysis that was done in 2020. That was using 2019 data about who I just had that up let me pull it for reference here. In the commercial stream, about 18% from from the data that we have available is currently being recycled and about three percent is currently being composted. So that’s some initial data that we have around folks, businesses and folks in the commercial sector that are already participating through private haulers and recycling and composting. As as you probably know, we we don’t provide any of that service. We provide residential service through our curbside composting, mostly to single family homes and some of the some of the smaller multifamily units. But there are a lot of folks that are already participating in that we already have some we already have a hauling requirement that all haulers provide recycling service. But I haven’t had we are we’re not into those conversations yet for for me to be able to give you any more feedback than that, but I will throw that to Charlie or Bob. They might have some other insight in some of their work with folks.
Unknown Speaker 1:05:48
No, definitely like they do. So, during the pandemic, Lita, I noticed that a lot of nut quite a few businesses, especially restaurants, fast food restaurants, were going to compostable dinnerware or what happens to that. If they are compost if they are collecting it. And using compostable utensils. What what happens to that? Does it go to a commercial hauler and just go into the trash?
Unknown Speaker 1:06:21
I’m going to tap Charlie for that one.
Unknown Speaker 1:06:23
Yeah, your pack is a great make great question. So for those businesses that have a subscription for compost, you know, the implication is that they’re collecting that separating it and it’s going to a commercial composting facility. I think I think where Lisa’s working on with this potential resolution and ordinances that we have a better understanding of that happening in the country. It goes in that direction.
Unknown Speaker 1:06:52
Good. Thank you. And the other thing was mentioned quite a bit was our low fee for the services. Is there any talk in staff about raising that fee? And if we do, what would it go to? Would it go to? Well, I doubt from listening to your hard to recycle conversation, that it wouldn’t necessarily allow us to have more hard to recycle. But what would the fee cover? And are we operating at a shortage now?
Unknown Speaker 1:07:27
Mayor pack the the current fee is a fee that I can’t really attest to how it was set, originally. But it when it was first initiated it I think marginally was paying for the things that by law it could pay for. So it was at the max capacity of what we were using it for at that time. Meaning that that fee can only fund certain types of services, it cannot be used for things that would compete with private haulers. Now fast forward to today. And we believe that that fee if it were changed, and this is entirely up to council, if you want to change it and to what level, it could do anything from funding more education and outreach to you know, building a facility for compost materials or hard to recycle or something like that in Longmont. Those are allowable expenses on that fee. So I’m not going to say the sky’s the limit, because it’s not because you’re your residents are only going to be willing to pay so much. But you could certainly use more revenues from that fee to do more. With waste diversion in Longmont
Unknown Speaker 1:08:48
would raising the fee allow us to buy smaller compost bins,
Unknown Speaker 1:08:55
we would have to actually pay for that from regular subscriptions. We can offer smaller bands now what we can’t do until we come back to you with a rate discussion is changed the fee for a smaller band. Okay.
Unknown Speaker 1:09:11
I personally would like to see an opt out program and to come back with a rate schedule so and what that would give us and and Bob, I was wondering and I don’t think we answered are we operating at a deficit? Now, as far as rate goes.
Unknown Speaker 1:09:34
Mayor Peck that’s that’s always a really good question because it even I have to refresh my memory. We are currently funding the program as it exists today with the revenues we collect. Okay, and we expect that that’s going to be true for another year. That will probably not be the case after another year meaning that within the next year we need to come back and start talking about rates. At that time, we were hoping to talk about rates, fees, different container options. And and I would have to say a different strategies for pay as you throw. If you want to really incentivize more waste diversion, it has to be expensive to throw trash away. That’s still probably the number one way to achieve that goal. So we would like to explore with you those options of how you would like to see that, that schematic maybe change over time, as you remember, the last time we changed rates, we did go to a pay as you throw schematic, we could probably be more aggressive, but that’s the desire of counsel.
Unknown Speaker 1:10:48
Okay, um, I just want to make sure that we are reaching our goals in on a timeline that gets us to where we want to go. If we’re going to change the rates in this is just my thought process. If we’re going to change him in 2023, I would like to have the discussion at some point in 2022. So that we are not using six months of 2023 to discuss this, that we can move faster in the timeframe
Unknown Speaker 1:11:17
and may or we do not need to change rates, probably until the end of probably more like the beginning of 2024. In less we desire to start looking at different systems for how we set our rates. So if counsel wants to direct us to start or move that up, then that’s certainly your prerogative. As it stands. Now, we probably would not bring that discussion to until mid of 2023.
Unknown Speaker 1:11:47
Okay, one last question. And then I’ll call on Councillor Martin. Um, are we in discussions right now with the county on getting a compost? It was compost facility in the one that they were discussing failed. But I do remember that it was the old landfill site in Longmont that we had offered up. Are we in discussions with them now to continue that? Or is that been?
Tim Waters 1:12:15
Yeah, Mayor Peck.
Unknown Speaker 1:12:17
They’re aware of our offer to use that site or an alternative site that’s also nearby. We have not really heard that much from them recently. But the offer is standing. I know that they did hire a new employee who is working toward that end, but we’ve heard different conversations about whether or not the county wants to do a facility or maybe look at other options. Charlie, if there’s anything that I’ve missed there that’s newer than what what I’ve heard, if you wouldn’t mind, adding that into the conversation, that would be appreciated. Thanks. But no, you you’ve covered it pretty well. And I think the county is not right now in a position to move forward with that. And, you know, as Bob had indicated, you know, we have the landfill or another location within Longmont that maybe we could look at but that would be upon direction. Okay, then we could include them in that conversation.
Unknown Speaker 1:13:21
I would like that. Let’s move forward. If we can. Councillor Barton.
Unknown Speaker 1:13:33
Sorry, finicky spacebar again. I’m actually maybe you should come back, Dale. Because this is a question about all of the utility rates. I remember when we vote for rate increases, or bakkie. Yes. But I tend to be not pay as much attention as to when they go into effect. So I am wondering which of our utility charges and rates and fees have gone up in it in 2019 2020 2021 and 2022? Because it seems like if you go across that whole span of years, it’s all of them. And I am therefore hesitant to think about voting for a mandatory increase in waste diversion.
Unknown Speaker 1:14:44
I’ll defer to Becky Hardy you are correct that from electric to water to wastewater storm. Many if not all, those fees have been increasing and Certainly it’s not staffs goal to do that necessarily, but it is based upon the cost of providing those services.
Unknown Speaker 1:15:10
Yes. And I mean, I remember, you know, at heart, the the justification for the electric rate increases for the stormwater fee increase, obviously, for the water rate increase, you know, those are all things that we absolutely need. And I believe that we have taken the most prudent and, you know, cost effective in terms of, of making sure that the people get the best deal way of getting them done. And in every case.
Unknown Speaker 1:15:54
However, it just seems to me that we should kind of let the effect of those things even out before we contemplate another increase. That’s all. Thank you.
Unknown Speaker 1:16:15
So it isn’t like we have any other comments. Oh, Councillor waters.
Tim Waters 1:16:21
Thanks, Mayor Peck, Bob, in the in the council communication. Under Council options, you asked for directions specifically, on the zero waste, waste and universal recycling, have you gotten the direction you need.
Unknown Speaker 1:16:39
As it as it stands, now, we’re going to continue on the path that we presented unless you have an alternate path for us, or would like to tighten those timelines. In other words, move them up. But I will warn that that becomes a matter of staffing and the time to conduct some of that engagement. I am entirely sympathetic to some of the comments that SRL brought into the public forum tonight. And we are sensitive to those, we would like to do everything you know, as quickly as we can, obviously, we also want to do them correctly. And we want, you know the time to do that. So that would be an area, if you want to give us alternate direction. We’re certainly open to that. And And if I may, on on the rate discussion, keeping in mind that, particularly with the solid waste program, if we can divert more waste, that becomes a commodity. So rates on the solid waste program are a little different than they are on some of our other utilities. If you conserve water, and that leads to higher cost and water, you get the benefit of more water in the stream system. But you don’t get a financial benefit from that in solid waste. You do, we can actually and we are starting to see that commodities market come back up so that we are getting revenues now. And composting is a reusable material too. So even though it does calculate into the rates that our residents have to pay, pay as you throw options along with waste diversion can actually still give our residents an option to pay less if they desire to do that.
Tim Waters 1:18:32
Well, I appreciate your response. I I would have asked if we were going to move change priorities and move things up. What are we not going to do that are in the that’s in the plan right now? Because I understand the staffing issues and and the turnover rate and all the issues we’ve talked about in terms of workforce. So So I appreciate that response. I kind of would echo what I heard from council member Martin, it would really be helpful to get a summary of rate increases across the board over the last couple of years. Because I I understand the case to be made for increasing the fees and or rates given you know, the history here. But we’ve also raised rates and we hear a lot about it. We heard about it this week from a resident who is expressing her concern about her electric your utility bill and in we hear, you know, in other ways. So I’d want to have a conversation Bob, where could you trim fees if we’re going to increase another fee whenever that time comes to have that conversation? So thanks.
Unknown Speaker 1:19:44
says Good, good presentation. I would actually say stay on stay the course that you’re on. And I have empathy for our staff as we are helping out Lewisville and losing staff in March that we’re pretty tight. So let’s just stay on the path we’re going and I look forward to your your rate increases the timeline and the the history of our rate increases, and the opt out program. So thank you very much. You’re doing a great job. Thank you. Thank you. So our next study session item is an update to city council on the status of review of the city’s water rights cash in lieu policy for a recommended fee setting and a request for council to provide waterboard in staff any additional input and policy considerations. This looks like a Dale rabbit maker, conversation.
Unknown Speaker 1:20:47
Mayor, Members of Council Thank you, and Dallas go ahead and pull up the the slideshow. But what I wanted to do counsel is just really have some brief comments on on really the importance of the issue that we have in front of you tonight. Namely, looking at our cash in lieu of policy for the city, you know that that really is a a policy that the city has had in place now for a number of years. It provides developers an alternative to providing the city the water that they’re otherwise required to pay us, or provide to the city at the time that they choose to develop their property. And so it really is, you can think of it as a alternative convenience kind of alternative. I think what’s important, though, is that you can look back over the last 58 or so years, and Longmont almost uniquely in Colorado and on the front range, has has stayed the course and and and has supported its development of the water supply this community. And I think the results are really indisputable with regards to the the water supply that all citizens enjoy and can rely on both in times of drought as well as in times of non drought. So the work that the staff has done again at the direction of the council to look at whether or not our cash in lieu was sufficient to really deliver that, that water to our treatment facilities is what we have done. And staff has done that also in partnership with your with your water board. And I believe we have a combined recommendation tonight to talk with you about that particular issue. That all being said, we also understand it as a significant change in that cash in lieu amount. And I want council to keep in mind as we’re having this discussion. That Longmont also has in place policies whereby we can offset that burden on other council priority areas, such as affordable housing, and such as economic development proposals, similar to what you’ve seen on the Costco proposals that are that have come before you in recent months. So with that, I want to turn it over to Ken Houston, who is really sort of guided this process and he will take you through a brief presentation of the work that the staff has done. Again,
Unknown Speaker 1:23:41
thank you very much Dell, that’s a really excellent introduction in to the subject tonight of our cash new fee. Before we excuse me, get into the actual fee, or next slide, I would like to present to you basically our cash in lieu history and and kind of a definition, Dale quite eloquently explained really what the cash Lu does. The cash in lieu in essence is simply a funding mechanism that allows the development community who wants to develop to give cash in lieu of dedicating water as property Xanex in the city Longmont as part of the annexation agreement and process. They agree to provide to the city, three acre feet of water for each acre and extend to the community. In a typical subdivision or typical annexation, there’s usually around two acre feet of water and it’s usually direct flow water. So there’s usually around one acre foot of water that still needs to come in. And we really allow that development community to have two options. The first is they can go out, there’s a very small subset of water rights that are available for acquisition that they could acquire and dedicate to the city. Many times the cost and the time it takes to do that the developer will prefer to give us cash in lieu of going out and getting that water. And we then are able to use that cash to further our water portfolio. So that’s really the what the cash in Lieu is it’s not a requirement. It’s a little bit different than many of the other fees that are collected in other areas of the city where it’s strictly only the fee that that moves. Projects for this is really convenience to the development community. So the next slide gives us our cash in lieu fee history a little bit. As you may recall, Longmont became a homerun city in 1963. And when they did, they formed a number of boards. One of them was the Longmont water board. One of their first tasks of the Loma Water Board was to prepare and adopt a raw water requirement policy. A little bit of the policy honestly extended well before then, before the Water Board’s formation, but it was much more formalized once we got a water board. And then one of the first things they did in 1964 was established the cash in lieu fee, so that the option was was able to be moved forward. That was informally calculated from 1964 to 1988. Then 1988, we had a formal cash in lieu fee setting policy that waterboard helped develop and we’ve been following that sense. And then finally, in 2004, both the raw water requirement policy overall and the cash in lieu fee, which is part of the raw water requirement policy, were included in the city code. Prior to that they were in the code by reference. Then, more recently, last year in 2021, city council asked waterboard and staff to evaluate additional cash in lieu costs five factors. So the next slide will show you some of the methodology. In the past that cash flow has been set by really from 1964 to 2014. The cash in lieu was served primarily pursuant to the cost of korabik Thompson. We also considered native bass and water rights and a few other factors. But the CVT water at that time was a reason, fairly reasonable cost. And it was able to be used as a very good metric to use for setting caching. Unfortunately, around 2014, the cache and the CBT costs skyrocketed was was really going up and
Unknown Speaker 1:28:17
prior Council directed staff and water board to look at that fee, and see if there was a more appropriate cash in lieu fee methodology. That was done by water board and council reviewed it at the time. And so in 2014, up until the present, the cash in lieu fee was set by a number of factors reviewing a number of factors all the way from the cost of water conservation to projects, cost of individual projects, as well as reviewing CBT. That kind of gave you the the data set, but waterboard recommended that we would primarily use the windy gap firming project as the metric because it was the project that we were most heavily involved in, had really good cost drivers and allowed us to move forward. Then more recently, so since city council asked us, staff and water board review that we looked at a number of different factors. And waterboard helped us come down to basically proposing that we look at a full project cost to propose for the cash lieu and full project classes basically the full cost that it takes for the city to deliver a acre foot of water at the city’s water treatment plan that would essentially involve all the way from the water right on the stream to the diversion structure to get the water out of the stream to the pipelines and ditches and canals facilities to move the water as well as a facility to store the water for times when we need it when it’s not available. So that’s really what waterboard settled down on, and is making the recommendation today. On the next slide will show you some of our public outreach, we did have five separate Public Water Board meetings held on cash in lieu, which did include some input from the public, and also was an excellent arena for people to be able to find out about it. One of the largest impacted communities is the development community. And so we had ongoing direct one on one conversations with the active development community, as well as our planning and engineering staff who work with those developers. And then we also put some information out on the city webpage. The next slide will give you some of the projects that we looked at to compare. The first one is how we currently set the fee, which is the windy gap firming project. So that’s a single part of how do we get water, that’s the storage component. And that’s where we’re at right now currently at $18,500. We looked at there’s really three main projects that we use to both currently get water to us. And also we have four future water supply. And those are button rock windy gap and union reservoir. So the button rock enlargement project would basically be an enlargement of the existing Ralph price reservoir, or by raising button rock dam, we do already have the conditional water rights to do that we’ve had those since the 1960s. But it would also include a little bit of work on Longmont reservoir to get it fully operational and up to speed as well as additional work on the north pipeline, which is the pipeline that carries water from Longmont reservoir down to our water treatment plants. Unfortunately, this particular project, our data for that is a little bit older. And it also has probably the most on knowns in the projects, which is Federal permitting and actual ability to do the construction. So this one, while it’s a really good example of a local project, it’s not quite as well set as the others. The third one is the windy gap project. And that would include the original windy gap, diversion dam, pumping plant and pipeline that pumps the water up into like Granby that we did and have now finished paying on as well as the chimney hollow, windy got firming project that we just did start to participate in is under construction. Now. That’s probably the most
Unknown Speaker 1:33:09
set down of the we have the highest quality data because we’re building the chimney Hall project right now, that came in at 40,500. And then the fourth project. The fourth item is a union reservoir project. And sure councils familiar with we’ve had the union reservoir enlargement on the on the books for many years. So it’d be large in Union reservoir, constructing a pumping station at Union reservoir, and then building what we call the union reservoir pump back pipeline from Union reservoir to the west, possibly as far as the plants, but certainly up to about birch lake or we could exchange water into the plants. And that ironically came in pretty close, we have a little bit older data on that, but we use a construction cost index to bring it up to current and that came in about the same as the windy gap. And then finally we have the CBT which as we all know the cost of CBT has really kind of puts that on a high end. We did settle on option three, which was the windy gap project as a recommendation to council. So the next slide will kind of give you where we got those numbers. The two components are the original windy got diversion and pumping project. The cost for that is at $30,000 An acre foot. We’ve got good data on that because there’s been some recent sales of the windy gap diversion and pumping allotment contracts. Primarily Platte River Power Authority, who originally add 160 units and is moving down to 100 units. So they’ve sold some of their units and they They those units came in at, like 29. Nine. And they also have five units that they’re going to be putting on the market this spring with a minimum bid, that would be accepted of 30,000. We in and that may go up next later in the spring if, if if those are been on heavily, but right now, we have good data 30,000. And then then we got firming project, which of course is what we’re set out right now, at 18,500. That’s, that’s based upon our firming yield ratio, which is about 2.42 acre feet of storage capacity, which gives us that one acre foot firm capacity. So the two of those come up to 40,500, which is the current recommendation. So the next slide, we would basically, as councils input on whether or not to two areas. One is his council comfortable with us using a full water supply project all the way from the water right to delivering that water to the plant as the basis for our metric to calculate cash in lieu. And if that is acceptable, then we would propose to use Windgap firming project as the current metric, which is at $48,500 per acre foot. And I think Dale real adequately explained, you know, even though that’s a large increase, we do have carve outs in our code for the affordability and economic development opportunities that will so that this increase won’t in impact those. Also in your packet, Advait 447, we have kind of a summary of some of the other northern water providers cash in lieu fees. If we were to set this up 45 We’d be a little bit higher than some more than others, we’d be higher than Loveland Greeley, Frederick and birth it but we’d be lower than Fort Collins, Windsor. And all of the water districts, most of the water districts are many of those are really kind of tied in with CBT only. So they set their price on CBT. So they’re, they’re up in there. But But this puts us well off in the in this matrix of all the water providers, but not at the top and not at the bottom. So if Council approves and gives us direction, we would plan on returning to city council on March 8, with a standard resolution that we bring forward whenever there is a change in the cache a new price proposed. And so the next slide, I would like to thank Council and the board, or the excuse me, Council for the opportunity to present this to you and we’d be happy to answer any questions that you might have.
Unknown Speaker 1:38:04
We’ll open it up to questions counselor waters.
Tim Waters 1:38:07
Thanks, we repaired Ken to two questions. Is the recommendation that you’re actually you’re recommending that we change the algorithm or the formula for calculating cash in lieu. So it is not a one off thing. It’s you will adjust and you’ll be back to us those adjustments as the variables change, right?
Unknown Speaker 1:38:30
That’s exactly correct, Councillor waters.
Tim Waters 1:38:33
So going forward, going forward. Anybody who doesn’t have water rights to assign in is going to offer cash in lieu would pay the equivalent of what it has cost somebody to actually dedicate the water rights. Zach, is that that is correct and accurate statement. Last question, then would be just re remind me that you you reference Costco as an example where the the flexibility in the policy allows us to differentiate for a project like that. What are the circumstances under which the cash in lieu gets gets applied? It gets applied when finished the sentence.
Unknown Speaker 1:39:16
Okay, thank you, Councilman waters. The cash in lieu fee comes into play at the time that land is planted. So when land annexes, it has to dedicate all its historical water, the waters on the land. And then if that doesn’t equal the three acre feet, then that deficit becomes due. And you can’t plat property until you pay that so that’s, it’s well into the development planning process. But it’s before you’re actually out on the ground building because you can’t build if you don’t have a plan. And so that’s when that happens. And then in terms of development that would be proposed to be either affordable or economic development. The code is real specific language and how that’s calculated when and that would come before Council at the time that were to be proposed. It’s just
Tim Waters 1:40:15
a follow on. So a project like an LH a affordable housing project, we would, we would treat that in a particular way. So that those those costs don’t get translated or conveyed to LH a or to to the residents or tenants of LH a properties that fair
Unknown Speaker 1:40:33
and affordable housing development. But yes, and to add on to that, so as we, as we talk about attainable housing, that may be something that we want to consider as adding to the list to affordable and economic development is attainable, because that then actually could really incentivize the development of attainable housing as well, by offsetting it. And so that’s another not directly related to this, but something I wanted to put on Council’s radar in that, that could actually really have a significant impact on attainable housing being built. If you could lower that rate, it changes the economics too.
Unknown Speaker 1:41:28
I agree with that. And we’d actually like to move forward with that giving the environment that we’re in with the building situations, it’s needed now. Do other counselors, I see counselor, Martin.
Unknown Speaker 1:41:44
Um, yes, I just would like to add, having been through the long series of of meetings that the waterboard and the staff, you know, went through on figuring this out. I thought that it was just a wonderful thing to watch. Everybody did a great job. You know, we’ve got a number of paradigm shifts going on in that, in that we, you know, have gone from an era where we wanted to incentivize development at all costs to where an era we’re going to look at the cost of actually obtaining wet water for the city. And, and you know, how we’re going to balance that going through a change to more urban density, that is going to change the equation of water. And we’re really this is just the first policy analysis. That’s about water that the city is going to have to go through. And so I just want to say that I think they did a fine job and landed in the right spot. Um, any other comments?
Unknown Speaker 1:43:01
I do have, oh, go ahead.
Unknown Speaker 1:43:05
Actually, Councilman or councilmember Yarborough. I’ll sit back. Sorry.
Unknown Speaker 1:43:09
Oh, go ahead. Go ahead.
Unknown Speaker 1:43:13
Well, thank you. I just have one question. I just want to clarify that I’m back to what councilmember waters have mentioned that if we if LH A. If, you know, the developers develop something for affordable housing, and there isn’t a deficit, those extra costs won’t go to the residents of the housing, is that correct? The residents of the la ha. But what about the surrounding residents in that neighborhood, in their community where they have to pay extra where they fill in those gaps? So what the, you know what that cost be translated to them? So I’m just asking,
Unknown Speaker 1:43:56
I, my first thought on that, and Harold, defer to you. But honestly, I think that’s something that staff can analyze, and really bring back to the council’s and different options on that. One option would would be that you would push those costs over into the other housing, thereby disincentivizing, if you will, you know, the construction of large, larger homes or larger market homes and incentivizing more more attainable housing. If Council doesn’t believe that that’s, you know, equitable or appropriate. Alternatively, you could probably analyze it and only offset that portion that is being built either as or as affordable. So I think we could do it either way, I guess the answer, but did I deserve a little bit of a Analysis and Evaluation and bring that back to you. Yeah, that was to go on to that that was actually going to be one of my questions to counsel to say. So we know we have affordable and economic development. Does council want us to look at attainable in this as part of that same area, and then we can do that analysis, as in terms of bringing back options, because I think there’s several ways to do this. The one thing I would say, that comes into play in this that has to do with this, but it’s the way that it’s structured, is it does create some financial gymnastics that you have to go through because you have to pay it. And then we pay it back. In so there are some things of counsels, okay, for us looking at it in that arena that we can bring you some options to maybe streamline the process a little bit, but also give you some options that would really at the end of the day incentivize affordable and attainable housing, in a way that we deal with economic development. So if we can get some direction or head nods to proceed with that work, I think we can go ahead and get started.
Unknown Speaker 1:46:18
So let’s do a Hands up if we want staff to look at the options that are outlined
Unknown Speaker 1:46:26
for attainable.
Unknown Speaker 1:46:30
It looks like we’re all on board with that, Harold. So you, you have your direction there. Any other counsel or Adolfo firing? I thought I saw your handbook.
Unknown Speaker 1:46:40
Yeah, yes. Um, so you know, no, I do I do support. You know, if staff can come back with a, you know, variety of options that we can look at, I really want to make sure that attainable housing is included in the mix as far as incentivizing the build out of those, you know, that bracket of homes. You know, and then I guess I was just wondering, you know, as I was looking through the option description, you know, if we stick with fair market value of the windy gap allotment, do we have that flexibility? How much flexibility do we have to, to offer different types of incentives? I mean, I guess, you know, it’s pretty much up to up to us, but I wasn’t sure how strict it was. We were following a certain metric. How How, how strong do we need to hold to that?
Unknown Speaker 1:47:40
I can respond if you’d like Mayor neck? Oh, yes, please. Councilmember Ferring, the, the capacity of the city to offset, if you will, some of these deficits that might be coming forward with affordable or attainable housing, that’s really embedded in your long term, raw water supply plan. And there is a there is a set amount of acre feet, it’s quite large, I think we’d have to work really hard to use it all up to put it that way. So I don’t think and certainly staff as we, as we draw down on that, if you will, on that think of it as a bank of water, as we draw down on that, we would report that to the council. So you’re aware that that that numbers is being offset reduced, if you will, with every action that you take, you know, to support some of your other priorities, you know, such as attainable housing or affordable housing. So I you know, the capacities there I just think we need to evaluate some of the the process and and, and, and how we would apply it to ensure that we’re fair and equitable and that we’re looking at things and you know, avoid those unintended consequences. So
Unknown Speaker 1:49:09
yeah, I appreciate that. Um, yeah, because I mean, I would I agree with the number I think, you know, it’s kind of it’s right there in the middle. I was surprised shocked to see how low our rate was our cash in lieu fee was compared to to neighboring cities. So you know, I think yeah, we can we can definitely move that upward. So yeah, I support also too if we could have different options that we can choose from and and discuss when it comes back to us I’d really appreciate that. Thank you.
Unknown Speaker 1:49:44
So so we’ll probably do is run the resolution with the rate as is parallel these other options and a little bit later. Okay. Yeah, I think the first step is to get your your cash in lieu of set where you believe it needs to be set. And then As Harold said, directed, you know, you’ve directed us essentially to do that analysis and get that back in front of you as well. Okay, with regards to those other priority areas?
Unknown Speaker 1:50:15
Sounds good. Thank you.
Unknown Speaker 1:50:19
So I have a question that is probably very elementary, when we’re talking about an acre foot of water to be purchased it cash in lieu or otherwise? Does it depend upon the size of the development, for example of somebody coming in and having a 10 acre development for residential versus someone coming in with a five acre development for residential? You’re going to be using more water, obviously. So does it matter? Or is it one solid fee?
Unknown Speaker 1:50:53
Regarding Mayor pack, you’re you’re the fee is an acreage based fee. And so the deficits that exist, are the depth or is the amount of water spread out over each acre of that particular development. So you’re correct in assuming that it’s 10 acres. It within the same development 10 Acres is going to have a higher deficit than five acres in that development. So whatever, however, there could be another development that has an even greater than say deficit be the first development. So it really does depend. It varies based on each annexation that has come into the city and the corresponding deficit that results after they give us all the historic water and they’re given all that credit for the historic, that creates the deficit, but then stays with all future development within that particular annexation. Does that help?
Unknown Speaker 1:52:00
He certainly does. Thanks, Dale. My other question is if somebody decides they’re going to go out on the market and buy their own water. What if they went to your list of rates? If what if they went to another a water provider that charges them only 29,000 per acre foot? Does? Is that an option? Because to buy water rights elsewhere?
Unknown Speaker 1:52:29
No, no, you know, the the non historic water rights that the city will accept is fairly limited. It’s there’s a few of them. It’s it’s oligarchy ditch, the Pleasant Valley reservoir, like Mackintosh reservoir, it’s really water rights that have already the bulk of them have already come into the city. Okay, or strategy being to have certainly more of those particular water rights come into the city as well. So it’s limited so they can’t go out to say, another water provider and give us some sort of credit and aspects. It’s it’s a it makes code. Yeah. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker 1:53:13
And one more comment to councillor yarborough’s question about distributing the cost in around.
Unknown Speaker 1:53:23
Do we do that now?
Unknown Speaker 1:53:24
Or is this we don’t do that. We don’t
Unknown Speaker 1:53:28
do that so much. Now in less than Meijer development. For instance, in the Costco case, where we have nine acres that is, the entire nine acres is affordable housing. That is one where we applied your policy and offset it. What we haven’t done and that’s what I was getting at will take some analysis is to try to sort of parse it out within a particular development, that say has 30% affordable housing and you know, the 70% market rate, we have not done that. Not with the cash in lieu offsets anyway.
Unknown Speaker 1:54:10
Okay, great. Thank you. Well, looks like we don’t have any more questions or comments. So thank you very much. Do you have the direction you need Dale? And Harold?
Unknown Speaker 1:54:20
I believe we do. And we will return as Ken mentioned, I believe on March 8, with that resolution for your consideration to set the cash in lieu of 48,500
Unknown Speaker 1:54:33
Perfect. Thank you very much. Thank you all. Good night. Okay, the next thing on our study session items is the discussion and direction to staff regarding a special election, an overview of possible items for the November 8 2022 ballot. This looks like Don’s in Harold’s discussion.
Unknown Speaker 1:54:58
Thank you, Mayor Pat Carroll. Did you want to say anything To get started, are you now? Okay, Dallas, would you please bring up our presentation, thank you a very brief presentation mayor, for the public’s benefit more, more so than anything. And next slide, please, Dallas. So, after the November election and the successful election of Mayor Peck, we had a vacancy for the at large seat, you all gave us direction to see if we could get find a vendor and conduct an election on or before April 5 this year to fill that vacancy seat. So I’m here to share with you and the public. Why that April 5 date is not possible at this time and what our options are. So next slide, please Dallas, just a quick review of why we are where we’re at. We are in sort of some unprecedented circumstances, those kind of three big circumstances being the census. And the growth in Colorado that has necessitated congressional redistricting that the counties are implementing, as we speak early in 2022. So the counties are not available to support our election that that is by and large, pretty unheard of the pandemic is here, as we all know, and there are supply chain issues, namely a big paper shortage that is affecting elections across the country. And then, of course, the staffing issues we continue to discuss. And then also just the timing, the springtime is very busy. Most special districts and many municipalities hold their elections in the spring. So that creates a stretch on whatever resources are out there. So we’ve certainly come across that. Next slide Dallas, please.
Unknown Speaker 1:56:48
So per Council’s direction,
Unknown Speaker 1:56:49
we immediately put out an RFP request for proposal for election services. We had that out for about a month from December 9 through January 6. And tightly constructed, I would say our proposed or timeline we thought we could hit assuming we would find a vendor via the RFP. When the RFP closed on at 2pm. On January 6, we had no no responses, we did not get a vendor. And we’re kind of shocked to see that. So code allows us to then talk directly with vendors. And that’s what we turned to do. I hit the ground running and began calling the three vendors that the county had referred us to that might be able to help us out and some others that we turned over through our research. And what we found is of course, this paper shortage had driven the costs up another 100,000 based over our initial estimate we provided to you all in November. So we did find a vendor who could potentially run our conduct our election, but their estimate went up from 250,000 to 350,000. But they could not conduct signature verification for us because signature verification, which is required in a mail ballot election is as we all know, they it is done manually by the county, the vendor was was not set up to do that. So we turned to the county to ask if they can lend their expertise, their judges their signature judges and help us conduct that piece of the process. And Boulder County came back and said, yeah, they could help us and gave us an estimated cost to do so for about $40,000. And that took our estimate up to about $390,000. And next slide Dallas, please. The challenge we found, though, was that the county is only available until April 25. Because on April 26, they begin conducting the primary election putting all the processes and procedures in place, their staff gets to work on the primary. So they are only available until April 25. Our vendor is very busy right now the one vendor we found they would not be available to late May or early June. So we’re left a little conundrum their timing did not align. So next slide, please Dallas. So we wanted to bring back to council, just an update on where we were at and asked you all for direction. As as we’ve seen things, we have part two possible options. One might be first to go back to the drawing board back to the vendors back to the county and say, Do you have availability sometime between July 31 and October 7? Those dates are specific because statute allows elections. We cannot hold election within 32 days of the primary or within 32 days of the November election. So sometime in that date, would there be an opportunity that we could conduct a special election where the costs still be the same? We would assume so but we’d want to re verify that bring that information back. And then we also realize that we staff spoke up and said, We also believe that we will be requesting counsel to refer things to the November ballot. Anyway, so we wanted to put all of the pieces of the puzzle as it were on the table for you all. And then the other option would be to schedule an election for November, schedule our special election for November 8, and then put all of our questions on the ballot as it were. So you can see the cost estimate there. And that is a very rough estimate based on what we’ve seen for coordinated elections in the past and adding a 40,000 increase for paper costs, because we will certainly see increased election cost no matter what we do with everybody is going to pay paper shortage costs. So
Unknown Speaker 2:00:51
that is our kind of our big darn deal question. And I’ll just go on to one more slide. And then we can come back. And hopefully you can help us, give us some direction. So next one there. Thank you, Dallas. We wanted to ask, we also know throughout these conversations, we’ve talked about and you all have talked about some of the challenges that charter has constraints as with like, for example, the requirement to hold the organizational meeting, the Monday following the election, when results aren’t certified, and that can be dicey. So we’ve heard you talk about the possibility of some charter amendments, staff has a long list going that we’ve kept for a while wondered if you’d like us to prepare that list of possible amendments and bring that back in November, for or not in November, bring it back soon. So you could consider what you might want to put on the November ballot. And then also, public works in natural resources, would like to get some direction, if the storm drainage revenue bond, would you like them to begin their work on preparing that information, bringing that back to council, also for the November ballot? So really three big questions. Becky is also here, Becky Doyle to answer any questions about storm drainage revenue bond. That is not my gig. But I’d be happy to answer any other questions you all have. Regarding timing special election.
Unknown Speaker 2:02:26
Oh, my.
Unknown Speaker 2:02:28
Yes. And I went fast. I apologize. But no, this
Unknown Speaker 2:02:31
is this is huge and frustrating as well. I can imagine it is for you, Don. So I saw counselor Martin’s hand go up.
Unknown Speaker 2:02:40
Yes, just quickly, I think that putting it on the November ballot is the way to go. This is no time to pay three times as much to seat someone for two or three extra months. We haven’t had any real contentious issues. There haven’t been any tie votes, which is, you know, the risk of having an even number of members of council present. So, you know, I would go for calling for the novice having the special election in November. I also think, you know, we we did talk that I know the staff had a number of meetings about what to do in the case of a cliffhanger and an election because we were close enough that it was a possibility. And those charter amendments, charter amendments are pretty straightforward, and they would align us better with Boulder County processes. And I think we should consider them. Stormwater is a big deal. And honestly, I can’t remember, you know, we’ve talked we’ve had a couple of presentations over the last two years about the importance of of upping our game on stormwater management. We obviously have a lot of people concerned about the health of the riparian corridors. So I guess in that on that one. I’d be concerned about the politics of loading up the ballot with a bunch of stuff. But on the other hand, if it’s not going to totally overwhelmed the staff, I’d be really interested in looking at the state of stormwater now and what the impact of a bond would be, but that’s the one I have the fewest strong feelings about.
Unknown Speaker 2:04:46
Thank you, councillor. Any other comments? kelser Hidalgo plarn.
Unknown Speaker 2:04:50
So I’ll make it brief. I select to option two, and yes and yes. So that is free. Thank you. gives you the direction you need. That’s my my input. Thank you.
Unknown Speaker 2:05:05
Anyone else have any input, especially on the storm drainage, and on the election? Counselor waters?
Tim Waters 2:05:15
Starting with the your first question or the the last part of the proposal about stormwater revenue bond, is it fair? I guess Dale would be the person to ask. Or maybe it’s Becky, I guess it probably would be Becky, Becky, is it fair to assume that what we did with stormwater drainage rates, the decision we made late last year that are now being implemented, create the revenue to be able to service the debt from a revenue bond? Is that fair? So there would be it’s unlikely we would be proposing a tax increase or a fee increase to service the debt for the money we would generate through a revenue bond. We’re after true, fair.
Unknown Speaker 2:06:02
Mayor peg council member waters, that’s That’s correct rate the rates that you adopted last year assumed the issuance of a $15 million dollar bond to complete that resiliency and Brain Project.
Tim Waters 2:06:14
And I understand councilmember Martin’s concerns about the politics of ballot questions. Because if we have charter ballot questions along with this one, and I, I suspect we may be approached for one or more ballot questions for the November ballot. So that way, I do think we have to keep that in mind. I would I would agree with the comments have been made. As much as I regret that we don’t have that seven seat filled to fill it for two months at the cost of 330, or $90,000. Doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. And on the heels of that I think we ought to take a look at potential charter changes. The ones that that done, you know, have made reference prints to and others that we’ve that we’ve talked about. And I suppose there’s nothing we can do other than Note to self, the next time there’s a municipal election, in the same year that there’s a redistricting to have a conversation months prior to the election on the potential outcomes. And the need to to get a vendor in a queue on the off chance that there would be the need for a special election. But that said, I guess I’m curious why our county commissioners weren’t anticipating what their workload would be prior to in municipal election where multiple municipalities potentially are facing the same situation we are or as Don suggested, already have elections scheduled in the spring. And why do we have any idea why they weren’t paying more attention to what the implications would be in in what municipalities might need? And I guess that’s a question for Don.
Unknown Speaker 2:08:07
Thank you, Mayor Peck and Councilmember waters. I think that’s a great question. I haven’t asked that question directly. I certainly could pose that to Molly Fitzpatrick and her team. I don’t I don’t honestly know that they would have the information to anticipate necessarily. I guess, I guess I could ask them that question. But I don’t I don’t necessarily know what they would say.
Tim Waters 2:08:33
Well, it would be worthwhile to probably put in the tickler system for Yeah, nine, nine years and months from now. You know, ask the question of County Commissioners, are they prepared? And if not, what do we need to do? You know, in the months prior to that municipal election, but you I’ve got my questions answered I it’s the I remain frustrated that county commissioners have left us holding the bag on this. Thank you, commissioners, county clerk’s commissioners, county clerk.
Unknown Speaker 2:09:05
Any other any other questions or opinions basically on the election as well as the water bond or anything else that’s going to be added to this agenda? Seeing none, I will pipe in. I am also incredibly frustrated, which I’ve told Harold, that this was not anticipated. The very fact that there were two people that the possibility of having a vacancy on this council was pretty high that both our and I’m just gonna come out and say that our legal department as well as our county clerk did not anticipate that we could have actually been looking for vendors in October and November, knowing that we were going to have redistricting at some point. So I will I think it has to be up on the election on the ballot as well. But I do know that this is high risk for us having a six member council on see what else we’re redoing on the charter amendments, I’m glad that staff has looked at has a list of charter amendments, because when I look at that charter, some of them some of the things in there are not up to state requirements, either. They just don’t align with county and state. So my ask is because some community members have brought this up as well. So would it be okay with council if community members cited some of the things in there and see if they align with what staff has put in as well? As long as we’re going to do? Amendments? I would like to look at the whole charter and figure out how to do that. So Don, and Harold, do you think that’s an okay option? Or would you rather not use when to keep it in house?
Unknown Speaker 2:11:07
Mayor, I don’t I don’t know what Harold’s opinion is. But my guess is that we have a pretty substantial list of items besides these election items we’ve discussed. My guess is that we have already identify their list is probably on our list is my guess.
Unknown Speaker 2:11:25
Yes. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker 2:11:26
If anybody wants to welcome me or email me, I welcome their email and be happy to, to Vendrick
Unknown Speaker 2:11:32
i Okay, I’ll put that out. Thank you. So I am okay, on the charter amendments and on holding the election in November for the vacancy as well as putting the water bond when we do that language. So I would like, you know, make it very clear that this will not raise rates they’ve already been raised. Because that that’s always a huge misunderstanding with our voting public. So I’m just to make it clear for staff, can we just raise our hands on charter amendments? Let’s start with that, who want us to go forward and put charter amendments on the ballot in 2022? So we have a consensus there, the bond issue, the water bond, should we put that on? Great. And the ballot initiative. I can’t say that because I get so frustrated that we have to do this. So the election to fill the vacancy on the November election. Great. You have your you have your direction. Thank you for all the work you’ve done on this done. I know it’s painful.
Unknown Speaker 2:12:46
So we will be Yeah, we’ll be coming back in the near future with both stormwater and in those charter amendments. And I think if folks want to email Dawn, that’s fine. Okay, great. Thank
Unknown Speaker 2:12:57
you for that. Most of ours
Unknown Speaker 2:12:59
are pretty focused on conformance with state law. Good. Use the Ponderosa and things like that.
Unknown Speaker 2:13:07
Okay, great.
Unknown Speaker 2:13:09
Thank you. Would anybody mind if we took like a three minute break? Just to stretch and get a drink or whatever.
Unknown Speaker 2:13:18
Thank you three minutes.
Unknown Speaker 2:17:07
Mirapex Peck read about time. Would you like me to drop the slide? Yes, please. Sure thing. Thanks Dallas. Looks like we’re almost back. Just waiting for Marsha.
Unknown Speaker 2:17:28
So who is going to be the lead the discussion on the board applicant pre interview process? Okay, welcome back. We have two more study session items. The next one is the board applicant pre interview process outline. And our city clerk Quintana will lead that discussion.
Unknown Speaker 2:17:53
Can’t hear you don’t you’re unmuted but for some reason we go.
Unknown Speaker 2:17:59
I have to mute buttons. So okay, double muted. Thank you. Dallas, would you mind bringing up that board presentation? Thank you very brief presentation. The council communication is definitely more informative. But just wanted to do a quick review. So you all asked us to go back and create see if we can come back with a process to help boards be involved in the applicant board applicant interview process. So this is that the topic for this presentation. Next slide, please Dallas, actually, two more slides. So we took the direction you all gave us after the end of your recruitment season. I think councilmember waters made the motion. And we went to meet with the staff board liaisons to share with them the idea that clerk’s office would continue to do recruitment and accept applications and vet applicants per eligibility, but that we would like to per Council’s direction, discuss the idea of inserting board involvement before Council then interviewed applicants. So we talked through that with board liaisons. And I would say generally very, very favorably, they’re very excited to be involved in to help with this process. So it was nice to hear. We kind of landed that they might, the thought would be that they would form a nominating committee. Together with the staff liaison to the board. The nominate nominating committee might be to two board members of their choosing. It might be the chair and another board member. However, each board wanted to do that. But then the staff liaison and the two board members would interview the applicants that have been deemed eligible by the City Clerk’s Office. And we talked a lot about how to create consistency there for the applicants since all the board herds are so different. They all have just different different mannerisms, different characteristics, different work that they do. So they want to ask some consistent questions. They asked if we could help them out with a ranking sheet. So they could be consistent in how they review and think about and compare applicants. They wanted to record those interviews. So if you all wanted to go back and look at an interview, for example, before you did your interviews, or they needed to refresh their memory, or there was a question, we will only retain those per our municipal retention records retention schedule. And then when they are done with their process, they would recommend one interviewee per vacancy. So if there were three seats, on a board open for appointment that they would then make recommend three applicants assuming of course, they had three or more applicants for the vacancy. We don’t always get get that. But that would be their charge to whittle down the group to the same number of applicants or interviewees, as there are seats available, get that information back to the city clerk’s office. And then we would schedule interviews for council of those of those interviewees. So it’d be a smaller group of applicant interviews, that council would then conduct instead of the whole applicant group. Next slide, please, Dallas. What that really did was it just shifts the timeline. And we realized that we want to make sure boards had a month, a full month of time to conduct interviews, if if this are the way we go, because they meet at different times during the month. So we felt like giving them a full month. So would tighten up the application period just to a six week, we accept applications for six weeks, the following week, we would gather that eligibility and get applications to board, the board staff liaisons, they would have then have the following month to do their interviews and get their recommendations back to the city clerk’s office, then we would schedule the interviews for counsel and the rest of it would be the same as what we have done conduct interviews, and then you all would make appointments at a regular session. So we just wanted to lay out kind of what that timeline looks like for mid year and end of year recruitment. So everybody could see that, but it’s a six week recruitment period, one month for board interviews.
Unknown Speaker 2:22:34
And then the appointment timeframe is the same, that would be the same targets as we’ve been doing. Anyway. So just wanted to share that with you. Next slide, please. Dallas. And then we got some great questions from the staff liaisons to the boards. They asked if counsel expected a formal recommendation from the board as a whole? Or would it? Was it sufficient for the nominating committee to provide the recommendation? That was a really good question. And we’d love to hear your feedback on that. They asked about incumbents could Did you is your is it Council’s expectation that they would interview every incumbent? Or could there be, you know, an expedited process whereby maybe the board provides a written recommendation. You know, this has been a great board member attends all the meetings, whatever that might look like. And then, of course, looking down the line, they’re interested to know, if this worked well, if it might be a consideration to later go back to just one one recruitment and interview period for a year. This was switched very many years ago, to remove the long, long timeframe needed to conduct interviews when we did all boards at one time, so we split them out to two, two times per year. So that question just I want to do just be aware of it, you do not need to answer that at this time, we’d first need to see if this process is what you’d like to do. And if it works. So just for future thought. And then next slide, please Dallas. And then the clerk’s office, of course has all the like logistical. How do we do this questions? Would you like to interview every applicant that is recommended, including incumbents or not including incumbents? How long would you like your interviews to be? Would you like us to help create questions? Would you like to generate the questions? And would you like those to be virtual or in person? So we just wanted to get the logistical questions out of the way once you proved the concept so we did put a provide a little more detail in the council communication, but I just wanted to give a brief overview for those watching considering applying for a vacancy. Soon. It’d be happy to take any questions
Unknown Speaker 2:25:12
you’re on mute. No, I have to say that all over again. Counselor Hidalgo firing.
Unknown Speaker 2:25:20
So I do have a question. So currently our interviews are very short. So by streamlining this process, allowing for, you know, the the interviewees to be kinda have to be vetted before they come to us gives us a smaller number to interview. Would that allow us the opportunity to expand that question? q&a time? And does that need to be written in any kind of rules of procedure? If we decided to lengthen that interview time?
Unknown Speaker 2:26:01
Thank you, Mayor, Pat, Councilmember Duggal, fairing we think Yes, probably this will give you a longer interview time fewer applicants depends on how much time you wanted to spend on on doing interviews, but yes, I think you could probably could do a longer we’re, you know, five. Right now we’re doing five minute interviews or 10 minutes for the Commission’s certainly we could expand that timeframe because you are doing or the length of those interviews beat for fewer people. And then, as to your question about route, should this be included in rules of procedure? We once we determine all the changes, we’ll go back and look at Rules of Procedure, and we would bring back what needs to be added into rules procedure. Yep.
Unknown Speaker 2:26:48
Thank you. Yeah,
Unknown Speaker 2:26:50
absolutely.
Unknown Speaker 2:26:52
Uh, Mayor Pro Tem Rodriguez.
Unknown Speaker 2:26:56
Thank you very much, Mr. Beck. As far as the proposal is concerned, I still have a little bit of discomfort when it comes to not elected people such as staff liaisons, and board members and commissioners, having as much say, as they might have based on the proposal. So I would just ask that if that is the way we go, that if a council member would like to say, as somebody that was not on the recommended list, but was still a viable applicant, in the sense that they got all their paperwork turned in and did their interviews and was vetted appropriately, that we would be able to add them to our interview list, if we decided that, you know, this person was omitted for no particular reason, or that we felt that they’d be a strong candidate, even if the, you know, vetting committee, per se, did not feel them to be a strong candidate. So that’s, that’s what I would like to see is that the council is still ultimately responsible for these appointments. And so the ability for us to alter the recommended lists still be allowed?
Unknown Speaker 2:28:13
Absolutely. Mayor
Unknown Speaker 2:28:14
Pro Tem, I think that is a great idea. And the board, staff liaisons, expressed a concern with the burden of that responsibility, if you will, and wanting to make sure that everybody got their fair shake. So I think that’s a great addition, just to ensure that you can always pull forward somebody that that council feels should be interviewed,
Unknown Speaker 2:28:39
counselor waters.
Tim Waters 2:28:42
So thanks, Don, for thanks, Mayor Peck. Thank you, Don, for your your work on this along with Michelle. I think what you’ve done reflects the direction we gave or the requests we made, and I think makes way better use of our time in this process and lends itself to better decisions in terms or better matches between what boards and commission need and in the people, they get to fill the vacancies. I think I disagree with what I just heard in terms of the council role in this. One of the concerns that we’ve heard from other council members, current and former council members is that at some point in time, there was a concern about cronyism. And council members, you know, had playing or playing this playing out in ways that council members or somebody, that council member somebody else, on boards and commissions were somehow creating a process where they could get their friends or supporters appointed to these positions. I’m a little concerned that what I just had lends itself to that that if a council member can decide somebody gets an interview after after having interviewed and not passing muster with The Border commission that a council can overcome, the council member can simply say, nevermind, we’re gonna interview that people, I would be strongly opposed unless I hear a clear rationale for that. For just for the record, I think this puts boards and commissions in exactly the role they ought to be in our members, the roles they ought to be in in terms of them deciding what do they need, and what’s the best match between the candidate pool and, and the recommended folks, we get a chance to interview them. If at the end of the day, a majority of the council believes that somebody is a bad appointment, we wouldn’t normally we wouldn’t approve it. That border commission would have to go back and interview somebody else or more people to get us a recommendation that we would we would approve, but ultimately the council has to say correct with what you proposed.
Unknown Speaker 2:30:50
In terms of the appointment, absolutely. Council would make the appointments. Yes.
Tim Waters 2:30:53
So I think I think we’re still we’re still the final arbiter or decision making that decision maker in that process. And and I think the what the way you’ve laid it out is makes most sense and makes the best use of our time. Thanks.
Unknown Speaker 2:31:09
Any other comments? Councillor Yarborough? Thank you,
Unknown Speaker 2:31:18
Mayor Peck? I I’m kind of I understand both. Both concerns? Um, well, first of all, I think that the Board should create the list of questions. And I think the board as a whole, I don’t know how I feel about a nominating committee. I think the board as a whole should actually be the one to interview as well. Um, I’m not sure about the annual process. I don’t know what that looked like before and how frustrating that could have been. But I like the fact that we can have these interviews virtual. Um, I think that we can have more people to pop on. Next Next, um, I don’t know, well, I guess that will be whatever the board decides to do. But I guess when it’s our turn, I think virtual will be nice. But then again, I don’t know, you know, body language means a lot, and some is important, too. So, um, you know, this was my first time, you know, interviewing someone. So for me, I understand both concerns. I just think that for me, personally, I feel like the board, the entire board should be participants of the interview, and also create the list of questions.
Unknown Speaker 2:32:51
Okay, thank you,
Unknown Speaker 2:32:52
Councillor Martin? Yeah, my concern is, is that if the council does need to veto a nomination, which is what it comes down to the way things are structured is that, you know, there’s somebody that just the council says this person shouldn’t be on the advisory board,
Unknown Speaker 2:33:11
then
Unknown Speaker 2:33:14
it means you have to go around in the whole process again, and I don’t understand why the list has to be exactly equal to the number of seats. You know, in other words, if if there was even one additional person or maybe two additional persons than the number of seats, that way, the council would be able to, you know, just veto someone that seemed entirely inappropriate. And also would there is a phenomenon on some boards where it stacks itself based on a particular agenda that a special interest group has. And, you know, if if the council had a little bit of leeway, then that would be something that could be prevented without extending out the process. So the everything else seems fine to me, but I don’t like the idea of having the board nominate exactly the number of people that are needed to fill the seats. Okay.
Unknown Speaker 2:34:39
Good comments.
Unknown Speaker 2:34:41
My comments are to bear pro Tim and counselor waters. I see it both ways. I’ve heard of loaded boards as well, that to Councillor Martin’s point, that if there’s an agenda they want to get through. They load the board to advise counsel To vote a certain way. So I, I think that’s going to be a human thing we’re going to have to face. So as far as I agree that I would like to have a little more flexibility in just having one recommendation for a seat, perhaps we could have maybe two or three, but there would be a primary recommendation. But the the board would have somebody in waiting, basically and say, We think these two people would be good for the seat. But this is the one we would like you to and if we didn’t. And the other thing goes is that as counselors who are out in the in the community, and on different boards, we know, of people who aren’t good on the boards that we’re on and think, I don’t know, this person tends to take over the whole thing. And you know, the the board members may not know that. So, to me, it’s just another set of eyes that have gone through the process as board members looking at these applicants. So as direction do you have the direction you want? I’ve written down some of the concerns. Councillor waters. Go ahead.
Tim Waters 2:36:18
Well, I You were asking a question. I just when you were finished with the question, I would like to come in. Yeah. So I asked. Well, so I’m, I’m not opposed to the idea of a board providing a list of their nominees and alternates if that’s the way we want to think about this. Yes, I am opposed to a council member adding to that list, arbitrarily, unless, if the whole council were to interview, but then we’re right back kind of where we’ve been, I don’t think that’s a step forward. I think that’s a step backwards. Okay. Um, what I wouldn’t want to do, just for the record, if we’re going to do it that way with with nominees and alternates, I would not want it set up where because this is what happened to us in December, we didn’t do an after action review on the similar process. But when it was a a council member offering a name, we’re our option was to vote for that recommendation or against. And I’ve, in the time I’ve been on the council, I’ve never been in a position to have to count cat cast vote against a nominee for border commission, we’ve always had an opportunity to vote for people. And in some ways, somebody could argue why you voted for them, as opposed to someone else. Yes, but it’s not a vote against someone. That’s where that’s the way it played out in December. The only way to not have gone with a which an individual council member suggestion was to vote against it, I would not want to be put in that position. Again, if we if we take some approach that produces more than one name per seat to be filled.
Unknown Speaker 2:38:00
Can I just put a counter to that for a minute? Um, I see what you’re where you’re coming from. My question is, if the recommended applicant is not approved by a majority of Council, that’s where I think an alternate that is recommended by the board would be good to have in the wings, rather than have them go back to the whole list of applicants and try to decide that that’s where their expertise in being a board member on that board would come in. But there are some applicants in my past that have been on boards that you think nobody wanted them on. And but they’re the only one who applied, you’re kind of stuck. So
Tim Waters 2:38:46
I’m not I wouldn’t argue with what you what you’re suggesting. I’m just the way it plays out is going to be real important in where we’re placed in that process of bad casting ballots, right. That was the advantage when we were in person was we cast ballots with you know, multiple names, and we weren’t able to do that virtually. So if we’re, if we’re in, if we’re in a virtual and it sounds like we may not be in a virtual situation, come June, when we do this, again, my assumption is we would have the opportunity to cast ballots again, which, which is very different than what we ended up doing in December. That’s my only point I’d like to think through how to do it. So as council members, we’re not put in a position to have to, because it’s it’s just to vote no on somebody I think is said publicly to somebody, as opposed to on a ballot, voting for an alternate or voting to go to it to come to consider an alternate or something like that. Okay.
Unknown Speaker 2:39:46
Councillor Barton?
Unknown Speaker 2:39:48
Yeah, I’m a little bit nervous about the use of alternate because, you know, an alternate is somebody who’s nailed to the board for a whole term, and we’ve kind of been going away from that idea. I was thinking more in terms of, of having the board’s recommend a pool of candidates, which is smaller than all the applicants, but bigger than the number of seats. So, you know, whether we would be shooting for a pool that was 20%, bigger rounded up to the nearest person. So, you know, if they had three seats open, then they would, they would nominate four people, and the Council could decide which of the which three of the four, which again, gives you the, you know, you’re never no individual council member is ever voting against somebody, they’re always voting for their choices, and then it’s the people who are chosen the most. That way, it would seriously take down the number of interviews that we would have to have, but it doesn’t meet leave the council with no choice in the matter whatsoever. Okay. So,
Unknown Speaker 2:41:09
if I might, if I could
Unknown Speaker 2:41:10
just clarify. Yes. It was to help. Good. Okay.
Unknown Speaker 2:41:14
I was just going to say, I hadn’t thought of that perspective. So that’s really useful feedback to a larger pool than the number of seats. If you could just provide a little more direction around what we might do if,
Unknown Speaker 2:41:30
if there aren’t, let’s say there are
Unknown Speaker 2:41:35
six applicants for three seats. And really, the board finds that really, truly three of those really should move forward. They don’t come up with a fourth. What would you like them to do in that scenario?
Unknown Speaker 2:41:48
Any comments, customer waters?
Tim Waters 2:41:52
Let me just say, I don’t agree with councilmember mark on this. I think I think we ought to trust, frankly, if I look at and this is not a statement of lack of trust of us, but the people who know best what that what a board needs and would have the time to interview and do the vetting are the board and commission members. The fact that we know more about what they need, or more about the individuals, I just I don’t accept that idea personally. And I and I would not want. First of all, I would to the question of incumbents, I’d like to interview and come and frankly, I think they’ll bring a perspective, that’ll inform us about what boards and commissions mean, we’ll learn something from incumbents not to interview them to beyond but kind of what we should be thinking about terms of going forward. But I, my my preference would be to say, if you’ve got the right number of candidates, you’ve got the right slate, you recommend them if you’ve got if a board or commission says, you know, we got five people for four seats or three people for four, for two seats, whatever. And they’re, they’re all great. We just can’t come to grips with this. And they want us to make the decision. And that’s a different question than in that case. I’d say, you know, you’ve you’ve submitted three, I know don’t don’t call them alternates. You’ve submitted three people for two seats and and we’ll make the decision through our interviews.
Unknown Speaker 2:43:11
So can I see a hand raise on this counselor Martin would like a more applicants then seats available, possibly one more applicants. So we have somebody waiting in the wings that we can pull from counselor waters would like just the number of applicants per vacancies? Am I saying that correctly? Counselors. So if you want the same number of applicants as vacant seats, please raise your hand.
Unknown Speaker 2:43:47
But may or may impact your question is what happens when you have less applicants? But then within you know, so I mean, it’s kind of hard for us to decide that because we saw that. I mean,
Unknown Speaker 2:44:00
and that usually either goes out for another request for applicants or they have to wait, um, don’t you want to answer that?
Unknown Speaker 2:44:10
That’s correct me if we don’t receive enough applicants to fill the seats available, then we will re recruit, usually, depending on the timing, but usually we would re recruit.
Unknown Speaker 2:44:22
Okay. ameripro Tim Rodriguez.
Unknown Speaker 2:44:26
Thank you, man back. You know, I think it’s hard to put like an arbitrary 20% above number of seats available kind of saying on this. I would like recommendations. I guess I’ll put it that way. I’d like recommendations of the folks who are truly qualified. And if you know, this only really accounts for a certain number of boards that really get high applicant volume, such as planning and zoning and Parks and Rec. You know, these are very popular boards, right? And those are the ones that we cover commonly see more people apply for them than there are seats available? And oftentimes, there’s definitely at least a couple folks that could be weeded out. No offense, they just made me not ready yet. They may be ready in the future, who knows, but uh, you know, they’re just not quite, they’re not just not quite prepared necessarily for the duties. And so, I’d love the recommendations, as far as you know, the vetting is these folks are qualified. And if that means that if there’s three seats, and there’s five people that are duly qualified, we, we get those five people, and maybe there were two others that kind of were, you know, they got through the process, and we’re did not receive that recommendation. So I don’t necessarily want to see either, we have to do recommendations for the exact number of seats, or we need a certain amount of extra folks, then the exact number of seats, I think this will just need to play out. Initially, at least, in the sense that we get recommendations for all those folks qualified for an interview with city council, I guess that’s kind of how I would look at it. Not necessarily trying to throw a number on it one way or the other.
Unknown Speaker 2:46:17
Customer,
Unknown Speaker 2:46:18
I wouldn’t be comfortable with that. I think the Yeah, the board shouldn’t be limited in the exact number of people that they recommend, I am not comfortable with the council having no say whatsoever. And if the if the board gives us their slate, and it’s an up or down vote on each person, then first of all, that’s exactly what Dr. Waters said he didn’t want, which would mean we would be you know, in the case of each individual seat, the only thing we could do would be vote the recommended person down. And, and second, the council also is entitled to an opinion about the kind of recommendations. You know, the council has a vision to, and the council may care about the way the board aligns with its vision. And I think that that should be something that we have a chance to influence. Okay.
Unknown Speaker 2:47:21
Councillor Hidalgo firing?
Unknown Speaker 2:47:25
This, thank you. So you know, as I’m looking at the questions here, I would like to see a formal recommendation from the entire board, I think what they have to provide with would be very insightful, meaningful, you know, they do this work all the time. And they all have different points of view on how, you know how to best approach. So, you know, I would like to hear from all of them. Um, in the other, you know, I’m not ready to answer number two to go to a one year yet, I think, you know, sometimes people might that window for the one application, or, you know, that one rollout of accepting applications, it might not work for an individual at that time, then they that means they’d have to wait a whole other year to be able to try again. So, you know, my, my feeling is kind of let’s keep it split for now. I do want to interview incumbents. You know, some of the things I’ve noticed, since being on council and listening to the interviews, is that yes, you know, the incumbent does have that expertise, or have had experience on there. But we see these new folks coming in with, you know, bright ideas, you know, their own set of expertise, and something that they can bring, where, you know, maybe about one to pick, we might want to be leaning towards that person, as opposed as opposed to just sticking with the incumbent. So having that that option option open. And then and giving the comments the opportunity to, to interview as well. Um, I think, yeah, I mean, I would like to extend the time that we interview people, you know, if we have five minutes, initially, then you know, if we can up it to 10, that would be great. And same thing from the 10 to 15. Just so we can have a more clear, in depth conversation with these with these applicants. I personally would like in person, I know virtually worked with people who were out of town, but in person, you know, we’re not having to deal with a technology issue that pulls away from the time we could be having meaningful discussion. So I think some in some of the cases it’s actually inhibited our ability to, to, you know, get into in depth conversations with with folks so. Yep. And that. I think that that the other board should come up with the list of questions so you know that so that’s coming my direction. If there’s anything else you need, or any other questions, you know, let me know. But that’s kind of where I’m feeling. barreled.
Unknown Speaker 2:50:09
Thank you, Susie,
Unknown Speaker 2:50:12
Mayor Council, if I can, maybe throw something out for you all to consider. I mentioned this to Don. So what you see in larger communities, I’m not saying that we wanted but they have an appointment advisory board. So going back 20 years, when I worked in a really large city, it was almost impossible for the council to approach board and commission interviews in, we could get dawn to reach out to some of the cities because what they do on what I heard is they advise city council regarding qualified employee appointees. And so maybe we can reach out and see well, how do you advise and what do you look at as part of that? Because I think that’s what you all are interested in, in and maybe trying to learn what they’ve gone through. Because it’s similar. It’s, instead of an employment advisory board, it’s looking at all boards, you have the board looking at it, and really understanding what it is that they do in terms of how they advise City Council on that. And you know, how many people do they put forward? What’s really in that mix? That may be something we could do to bring something back with a little more clarity, to maybe answer some of your questions, if you want us to do that, we can definitely do it. I know a couple of places that we can reach out to.
Unknown Speaker 2:51:38
Okay, great. Um, let’s raise our hands if we would like Harold to. We’d like to direct staff to reach out to other communities for direction. So do we want? Do we want them on how they do their boards and commissions? I think that’d be a good idea. But it looks like only two of us are interested in that three. You I have four.
Unknown Speaker 2:52:01
And can I just clarify? Are we is it to look at other what other cities are doing just in terms of recruitment, or specifically about an appointment advisory board?
Unknown Speaker 2:52:10
What I was saying is what I was suggesting is how do they advise counsel on appointees really more? What information do they bring back to council? And how do they present that to counsel not necessarily a structure? But what is it that they provide the counsel and when they’re making a recommendation? And it’s like it wasn’t a change in what you all talk about? Just how do you present the information? And what does that look like?
Unknown Speaker 2:52:39
Okay. So, uh, let’s vote first, do we want to give direction to staff to do that to reach out to other councils? All those favor? Raise your hand? One, two. All right. My before I call on anybody I know you want to talk counselor, Martin. I would like to go through these questions one by one to give direction on each question to staff. Otherwise, we’re just having a huge conversation and not really giving very good direction. So I’m Kimmy way, counselor, Martin, until we get to the one you want to talk on?
Unknown Speaker 2:53:21
Well, actually, I was gonna say that I think we don’t have any differences, except on the one matter of how many people get recommendation recommended and how the council decides, you know, I don’t think we’ve got I was doing that after the same thing that you are Mayor pack, which is Yeah, everybody seems to agree that on on the list of questions, and everybody needs seems to agree on it being the whole board and etc, etc. And I think we’ve only got one point of disagreement. So you know
Unknown Speaker 2:53:54
what, I want to solidify that for staff. So they don’t have to go back and look at this tape again to decide what was our direction? So don’t Can you just read off those questions? I don’t have the screen up, nor do I absolutely.
Unknown Speaker 2:54:06
I have them in front of me. The first one was, would you like a recommendation from the entire board? We heard two or three of you say indicate? Yes.
Unknown Speaker 2:54:17
Okay, raise your hand if you want a recommendation from the entire board. All right. That’s unanimous. Thank you.
Unknown Speaker 2:54:25
Okay. And I’m going to skip the future question, because we don’t need an answer to that right now about rejoining or doing one recruitment or to interview incumbents, various of you said, Yes, I would. I think that that was pretty clear. Yes, you wanted to interview incumbents?
Unknown Speaker 2:54:43
Raise your hand if you’re
Unknown Speaker 2:54:44
for this.
Unknown Speaker 2:54:47
So it looks like that passes with five to one with Councillor Martin. Not quite sure.
Unknown Speaker 2:54:54
Yeah. I don’t know what it means because do you get to vote in the compa doubt or what? In
Unknown Speaker 2:55:00
stead of do we want to interview the incumbents? Do we want interview recommend that we interviewed the incumbents?
Unknown Speaker 2:55:08
Or do you would would counsel like to interview incumbents? Or would you like to do some other process with those that have already served? The answer we heard from most of you was you would like to interview them just like any other applicant.
Unknown Speaker 2:55:22
So they could be the nominee for their own seat or not. Right.
Unknown Speaker 2:55:28
Okay. They may not want to run. Thank you. Next question, Dawn.
Unknown Speaker 2:55:34
Um, when that was the same question, dude, would you like to interview all applicants, including incumbents? I’m hearing Yes, that’s answered. Okay. How long would interviews be? You may not be able to pin this down the one suggestion, Councilmember Duggal fairing suggested was adding five minutes. So if it was a five minute double it to 10 a 10 minute make it a 15 minute interview.
Unknown Speaker 2:55:57
Let’s, yeah, look
Unknown Speaker 2:55:58
how many.
Unknown Speaker 2:56:01
Let’s, um, first of all, do we want to go longer than five minutes? I and I think Don, that has to be considered later, depending upon the board, and the number of incumbents.
Unknown Speaker 2:56:14
And these this is for the council interviews. Mayor, just be here for your interviews.
Unknown Speaker 2:56:19
Yes. Right. It would be it could be longer if we didn’t have that many applicants.
Unknown Speaker 2:56:24
Who knows?
Unknown Speaker 2:56:25
It could change with each
Unknown Speaker 2:56:28
each would it be okay, if we started with the concept of 10 and 15 minutes and see how that looks in terms of the number? You know, we don’t know what this exactly looks like it see what that time commitment looks like? And if it sounds daunting, those are? Okay.
Unknown Speaker 2:56:46
You have is three this degree four. We all agree.
Unknown Speaker 2:56:51
Next,
Unknown Speaker 2:56:53
and then who would create the list of questions for your interviews?
Unknown Speaker 2:56:57
Hmm, we might have to have a chat about this. I don’t think that we’ve talked about that at all. Does anyone have a particular comment on that? Or counselor waters?
Tim Waters 2:57:11
You know, we we’ve got, we have questions that we’ve used that that are specific to boards or commissions. It seems to me that we could start with those and do some refining or editing. Based on what what we know about boards or commissions? It seems I mean, we’ve got a lot of that work, it seems done. And we could just refine it.
Unknown Speaker 2:57:34
Okay, that sounds good. To me, those who think that’s a good idea, originally, and
Unknown Speaker 2:57:40
and I think
Unknown Speaker 2:57:41
we if the board uses those questions in their initial interview, then counselors can probably add different questions of their own on which, which always seemed to work in the past. So that that’s, we have agreement on that.
Unknown Speaker 2:57:58
Okay, and the last one was in person or virtual?
Unknown Speaker 2:58:04
Maybe? My comment is, we don’t know, it depends upon what the environment looks like. It’s not essential. Big Question mark on that one done. Okay.
Unknown Speaker 2:58:20
We will see where we are at when we get to when it’s time to schedule interviews. Okay.
Unknown Speaker 2:58:25
Okay. Do you have your direction?
Unknown Speaker 2:58:29
I think we do unless there’s anything else you would like to share with us or
Tim Waters 2:58:34
tell us? Yes. Counselor waters? Did we resolve what we’re expecting in terms of numbers of recommendations in relationship to number of vacancies? Because I? If we haven’t, then that’s an unanswered question. If we have, I need to know what the answer is. That’s true. If we haven’t answered it, I just want to say, it seems odd to me that we would trust people we interviewed initially to put on boards or commissions, and we will interview. Ultimately, whoever sits on those boards and commissions and vote to place in there seems odd to me that we would have sufficient confidence in them to serve, but we wouldn’t trust their recommendations for others to join them to serve. So to get more than the the number of nominees, I still think is, is unnecessary. Number one, and more than that, then the openings, number one, number two, there was a comment councilmember Martin made about agendas or you know, programs. It seems to me, it’s incumbent upon us, if we expect boards or commissions to be carrying out some agenda or developing recommendations that are aligned with our vision or our expectations. We ought to be clear on our vision and our expectations for the work that each board and commission does. You know, we were asking The question and in our process in our work the chamber last week about what are our priorities for the next six months? And, and we had some responses. But if you were to translate that into parks and rec, housing and Human Services, you know, just go down the line planning and zoning, etc. It seems to me, we would owe it to the boards and commissions to be clear on our expectations or our vision, if we expect them to be focused on or developing recommendations that are aligned with those and I right now, I don’t think we can do that.
Unknown Speaker 3:00:36
So I hear two things in this discussion. And you’re right, counselor mark. We’ve discussed this almost ad nauseam at this point. So the options on the table that I see them and Dawn chime in here, if you see anything different is that we have one appointment, we have one recommendation for each vacancy, as recommended by the board. So that is one option. The other option is that we have more more recommendations from the board per seats that are vacant, for example, if we had three, then maybe we have five recommendations or whatever. So it’s either equal recommendations for vacancies, or more vague, more recommendations for vacancies. The number of more is to be determined by how many applicants I see. So those are the only two I see what do you see done? As far as what’s been stated?
Unknown Speaker 3:01:47
The equal is that one’s clear. The other option, what the note I wrote was a recommendation of all applicants, they would recommend for counsel to interview whatever that number is. Exactly. It’s one, maybe it’s seven, maybe it’s all of the applicants, maybe it’s three, okay, whatever their recommendation is, that’s what you would like them to bring forth.
Unknown Speaker 3:02:07
Okay, so let’s vote on a raise hands on equal recommendations for equal seats. Number of those in favor of that. Okay, that fails for lack of majority. Um, the other one is all say it again, dogs,
Unknown Speaker 3:02:31
that boards would recommend all applicants that they would like for counsel to interview.
Unknown Speaker 3:02:36
Okay, those ratio and if you want that recommendation. Okay, that passes with five to one with counselor waters opposing? Do you have a pretty clear direction done? And we
Unknown Speaker 3:02:56
do. I’m sure this new process will create other questions as we roll forward. Just bring those as we encounter them. So but I do thank you very much for going through one by one. I appreciate that. You’re
Unknown Speaker 3:03:08
welcome. Thanks for all this work. Our next and last study session item is for Sandy cedar, the 2022 recommended legislative bills.
Unknown Speaker 3:03:23
Thank you, Mayor Peck Sandy cedar assistant city manager and I have two bills for consideration today. The first one is concerning restrictions on making public the personal information of protected persons, for the risks of threats that we see. So thank you, Dallas for putting that up there. Sorry, I forget that we’re going to do that. That’s great. So currently, right now, private information about police officers and other peace officers are protected information. It’s not something that we generally will put up on our website, for example, what this bill does is this includes code enforcement officers as part of that protected class of folks. Of course, you know, we certainly have wonderful code enforcement officers, they do a great job about the community. But there are times in which it may get a little rough. And so the code enforcement association has brought this bill forward. Our staff supports it. And so we are suggesting that the City Council supports House Bill 2210 41, concerning those restrictions on making their private information public. Huh.
Unknown Speaker 3:04:27
Do we have any discussion or should we just vote on this? All those in favor of supporting this bill? Raise your hand. That passes unanimously, Sandy, thank you very much, Mayor
Unknown Speaker 3:04:40
Peck. The second one is concerning the creation of Colorado homeless contribution income tax credit. So this one is Senate Bill 2210 83. And basically what it does is it repeals the way that current income tax credits are done for nonprofits who are helping people who are homeless. What we have found is that the existing way of doing it is making it so But it’s very difficult for some of these organizations to receive this tax credit, which is a great way to be able to provide some investments and some private investment in these nonprofits. It will be replaced by a different plan, which hopefully will make more people that are helping folks who are homeless eligible for this credit, and therefore maybe some more contributions, private contributions may come their way. Currently, the Art Center qualifies for this. But I think there’s a danger that the our center won’t, because things continue to ratchet down with this particular income, credit, income tax credit. And so hopefully, this bill would fix that issue and provide more leverage for these nonprofits that are helping folks who are experiencing homelessness to be able to better fundraise. So because of that, and because the city council obviously helping people who are experiencing homelessness, homelessness is part of your work plan. The staff suggests that recommends a council support House Bill 2210 83. So in order to ensure that the our center will be able to continue to receive these types of credits, as well as other folks who are also helping people who are experiencing homelessness.
Unknown Speaker 3:06:09
So so this is specifically for nonprofit Sandy.
Unknown Speaker 3:06:14
It is yep, that’s exactly right. And so the our center has been part of this is it, it deals with the enterprise zones plus the nonprofits, it’s kind of that nexus. So for example, they are centuries in enterprise zone, and has been part of that project since 2016. JESSICA ERICKSON, from LA BP, and has mentioned this as well, that this has been really beneficial. And they have led efforts to be able to get that designation for their center. And of course, now they’re in danger of losing it because it seems to ratchet down over time. And so by changing this bill, it not only expands those opportunities for those nonprofits, but also for for others as well. Kind of expansive enterprise them. Okay. I do believe it is limited to nonprofits who are assisting people who are experiencing homelessness, I believe it’s ratcheted down to that very fine detail.
Unknown Speaker 3:07:04
Okay, great. All those who should we support this? Raise your hand if we if you want to support this bill? There you go. Thank you very much.
Unknown Speaker 3:07:13
You’re welcome.
Unknown Speaker 3:07:15
So we’re at Marin Council comments. Anybody on council have any comments they want to share? No, I know it’s late. But I do want to tell. I do want to make a comment about the PRP a retreat that we had on Friday, just to bring people up to date a little bit about what we’re doing. It was a a retreat to decide upon collaboration among the cities, as well as with PRP, a and I it was a very good retreat. The one thing that all the cities as well as Jason frisbee the CEO had was a sense of urgency to move as quickly as we can to 100% renewable. There was a discussion about having a consultant, perhaps from in REL, come to the board and help us through this process with lessons learned from other agencies. We and there is also a timeline that people wanted to have. How are we going to transition and target dates we feel in or David Hornbacher feels that we do that already with our three i RPS. But we’ll see what comes out of that the consultant is put on hold until May to decide upon one because Jason frisbee is going to be hiring two new people and he wants them on board first, to get their expertise. So I’m really I’m really excited about the the way that this board wants to work together and get information from each other. So they said that this was the best meeting that they they’ve ever been at because it was a lot of collaboration. The other thing I want to put out that I learned on Sunday, I talked to Ashley Stelson, Mayor of Lewisville. And she said that their council wants when they rebuild in Lewisville for from the marshal fire, they want it to all be green. And because of that. I’m sorry Tracy Burnett is working with Ashley to for the state to buy in bulk. Oh shoot Marcia, help me with this word. It is the heating systems that are in the ground. What are those called?
Unknown Speaker 3:09:42
Ground source heat pumps
Unknown Speaker 3:09:43
There you go to have to buy those in bulk. And I don’t know if it would be a tax credit, a rebate or whatever for these homebuyers, but that would be good for us because it would be a state thing. And Tracy feels that the demand for this would be Push retailers like Lowe’s, Home Depot, etc to stock them. And I’m excited about that. So those are the only two updates that I wanted to pass along. Thank everybody. So I don’t see any other counselor updates or comments. So city manager Harold, do you have any thing you’d like to say?
Unknown Speaker 3:10:26
No comments. Mayor Council. Okay.
Unknown Speaker 3:10:28
I’m Eugene. City man, city attorney. No comments, Mayor. Thank you. So we have a motion to adjourn.
Unknown Speaker 3:10:40
So moved.
Unknown Speaker 3:10:41
Thank you. Second. seconds. All those all those who want to adjourn, raise your hand. Good night. Thanks, everybody.