Town Council - workshop

That along to whichever private business they designate and we can essentially track exactly who's moving to and from certain locations and we could provide like the overall cost to move those passengers to and from those areas. So that is something we can do. It's not something that I've personally implemented. Min, are you familiar with that anywhere else? I know that I've had conversations about it and it's something we're looking into for Glenwood and it's my understanding that it is doable.

One aspect of this that I was thinking of with the fares, charging the fare, they were going to need to do it to some extent. But one thing that I think we should consider, and I'd be supportive of doing this, is continuing if you, or not continuing, I guess, adding a provision. And if you're going to a bus stop, We don't I don't think we should be charging a fair. I think that's great. And one dampened demand for people were just doing mass transit and so like a player here got a fair here going to ask me now be like a 50% increase in the fair. Having a dollar. And then the other part of it is that that could also dampen demand as far as how raft is working with us right so we're discouraging those rides. I think that would not be in our best interest.

Yeah, that's a great point, Mayor. I think one thing that Mike had on his last slide is we saw the percentage of rides that are going to the RAFTA parking rides and transit stops was going up, which is great because the sustainable funding model for RAFTA going forward will be based on those connections. So the more that we can encourage that number, the better the funding post next year would be from RAFTA. So that makes a lot of sense to me.

James, could you put that slide back up?

Oh, I think you need me to join again.

Oh, is that you?

Yeah, sorry about that. I left that meeting too, but give me just a second. I might be able to.

While you're pulling it up, can I ask one other question just to help me understand the numbers? When it says monthly unique riders, because I see changes month to month, so that's how many that month unique riders used it?

Yeah, Mike, you want to take that one? Oh, look, I still got it. Monthly unique riders. So that is the individual profiles that are generating those statistics. So I believe what you're referring to is the packet that Gloria shared. Yes, sir. So essentially that data set was created by whatever number that is you have there. And I apologize. I don't have that right in front of me.

Oh, so it was like 371 May 2026. Then it was like a little bit different. And we got a couple other months. It was just a little bit different. I thought that was overall, because we see the monthly versus overall. What I'm looking at here is that month. Yeah, right there. That is that month. There's 371 unique riders that took 1,989 rides. Yes, sir.

Most of the ridership we have with us are regular riders. They rely on the service to complete all sorts of tasks that they do throughout their days. So we'll see people to head up to town for work in the morning, they come back down in the evening, maybe drop the kids off at home, and then we'll see them in another hour or two to get to and from the grocery store to make dinner. I love driving in Basalt because I get to see lots of familiar faces and help out lots of families. It's very nice.

getting to help out a little community like that that 371 number i mean on one hand it's not a lot of people but on the other hand i wonder is that you have you look at our populations just over 4 000 um is that kind of a proportion of our population that's using it or has accounts anyway Does that kind of track with a percentage of the population that would be using mass transit in general, other micro transit? You know what I mean? In other words, is that strong, average, weak, as far as kind of the uptake in the service?

What this shows me, so one thing I will say is this number varies every single month. So depending on the snapshot, this is just July. I would have to kind of dig through data and see how it fluctuates. Kind of what this tells me is this is not necessarily a service. So for instance, in Aspen, we have tons of accounts where... It's someone who's in town for a week. Aspen's number might be 2,000. However, the requests coming from each individual account, it might just be one or two. One thing I've seen him to solve is I could pull up some names. It's obviously not something I'm going to do in a public setting because it's got personal details. But I have passengers who over the years have booked over 1,500 rides. I can't tell you necessarily, I'm not going to try to do math in front of everyone right now, but I can't tell you what the percentage is of that population. All I can tell you is that this service is of great benefit to the local community, and that 371, 2,000 rides out of 371 passengers, that's people who are regularly using the service and relying on it on a daily basis.

Mayor, I don't know if there's a specific benchmark that I have in mind. I think... The thought I have is when it comes to ridership for the service, if those are all vehicles that are being taken off the road and being done through a shared ride, then if the number ends up being you take that 4,000, you divide it by people who have a vehicle, people who have another option. I think it's more about, in my mind, the impact of those 371 taking the service as opposed to not taking the service. From a pure number standpoint, it doesn't seem that out of standard to me based on what I've seen elsewhere. But yeah, I think the question I would have is, you know, what would those 371 be doing otherwise? And what would be the impact to congestion and sustainability?

Yeah, I think it's important. It's just a number. It's important to put it in what's the lens we're looking through as far as the context. And is that meaningful? And if you look at the number of cars off the road. Yeah, that 371 may be a good number based on kind of how that extrapolates to ridership in general.

And do you have a sense of latent demand of people who check it, the ride wait times too long, so then they cancel their order? Like what could that be if we get wait times down?

We can track that. It's not something I have off the top of my head, but I'm happy to work with Gloria, and if it's something you want included in monthly reporting, we can definitely keep an eye on that. I do track supply and demand on a regular basis, and one thing I was talking about with Gloria recently is we're doing well on that front, but there's really not much more, like the system can't handle much more demand outside of what we're already doing. My understanding is the primary focus right now is sustainable funding for the current service. But I do know that there, like Laurie was saying, there's been a continuing conversation over the years that there's more people in the community who would like access to the service. It's just obviously more service, more dollars.

and have you seen oh sorry I was gonna say that that one I do have a benchmark for actually so for average wait time 11 minutes for a micro transit service is a fantastic number I think we'd consider about 15 to be best in class so for if a rider is turning down a ride because the wait time is greater than 11 minutes like we we don't see that too often so from a wait time perspective it's like a pretty good pretty good figure. So we wouldn't expect to see a wait time being a reason why people would be declining a ride.

It is, though, because I've done it, especially in the mornings. Half the time I open it, I click out.

Yeah, that makes sense. If we're looking at a certain hour as opposed to on average, so that does make sense.

I mean, I think that would be a really interesting statistic to see if that is something that you're able to track and provide. And if you can break it down by hour, because I suspect We have things that we suspect are going on. A lot of the traffic in the morning is to the high school. And so then that's taking up valuable rides that could be getting people to RAFTA up and down the valley for their commute. That is not your problem. That is something that we have to reconcile. But it would be interesting to have that data.

I've got two rides off the top of my head in the last six months that I've bailed in the school hour and just walked because I couldn't it couldn't get it under 30 minutes and I suspect it was because of that yeah trying to get catch a bus to go up Valley and actually I was gonna ask you on that slide that was showing a like the most common pickup locations I didn't I was unfortunately looking down when he showed that slide and I didn't see was the high school on there

No, so we don't provide service directly to and from the high school. I am aware of where certain riders are. Basically, it's the edge of our service area. I'm blanking on the name, just this neighborhood on the south side. I hear it and we do our best to manage and mitigate it. I don't think it's as big of a problem. The bigger problem I see in the morning is the traffic. Also, having that window, I know that there is a lot of demand. One thing that I'm happy to do is work with Gloria and figure out if there are realistic solutions to basically address those concerns. Do we want to do more, especially during the morning commuting hours, or let's say from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. when kids are getting out of school? Is there more we want to do as far as placing limitations around where passengers can and can't go?

Because right now we're... That's what I was going to ask, is is it possible to, you know, from 6.30 to 8.30, or whenever it is that those commuting hours are, to limit the destinations to bus stops. To bus stops or something. And then if you need to go or prioritize them. If you need to go grocery shopping, you just have to do it later in the day. I love that idea.

It's definitely something we can do. In the long run, I think we're going to get so much value out of driving towards the trunk, the raft, the trunk. As far as how we're reimbursed, as far as what the impact it has on the valley and the traffic. So yeah, I mean, and then when those guys, if they start charging too, then when they do go to the school area, you know, there'll be revenue out of that too.

Yeah, I think the biggest value we get is the traffic reduction, so figuring out how to prioritize what on Gelsat is a great idea. Do you have a, oh, you go.

I was just, do you have any other user demographics kind of information?

Most of what we collect is, we, We try not to collect too much invasive information. One thing we are more than happy to do is run surveys on a regular basis. So if you have demographic questions you'd like to ask, I know recently we did some surveys, and it was just some very broad questions we were asking. However, I'm happy to work with Gloria, and she can kind of work with you guys as far as exactly what type of information you're looking to gather, and then we can survey for that.

I was just curious. And then the other number, I was just curious about inactive accounts. For example, I've created an account. I've never used the service. I was really excited to use it last week, but I got stumped with the car seat. My child's just under two. So it was like, oh, this is going to be perfect. And I was like, well, the ones we should figure managing the car seat. So I haven't used it. I've talked to other folks and encouraged them to use it. I think it's a great service. I'd be curious to know how many people have signed up but just haven't used it yet.

It's a number I can pull for you. I don't have it off the top of my head, unfortunately. Yeah.

I know a big piece of this conversation is figuring out how to get more funding for the program and put some dollars on that side of the ledger, but what cost-saving mechanisms or strategies have other communities used? One thought on my mind is why we have 12 passenger vans when 82% of rides are one person. Could we get a smaller, cheaper car or a Leaf or an EV or something that might help save some money and add capacity?

One thing I'd like to clarify is just because that 82% is one passengers, it does not mean that 82% of our rides that we're providing have one passenger in the vehicle. There are times where we'll pull up to a parking ride and we'll pick up five groups of one. I have no major opposition to running a smaller vehicle. I don't like to talk about things unless I'm super educated on them. I'm happy to entertain the vehicle type conversation. However, I don't think it's going to create the savings we would want it to. But again, that's not necessarily my department. I would have to work with our fleet ops team and basically just do like a cost analysis as far as like, hey, how much money could we save if let's say we switched over to a Toyota Sienna? How regularly are we putting more than let's say five passengers into a vehicle together? This is a data analysis that we're happy to do. And I can come back to Gloria and say, you know what, looking at things, running these transit vans, they're bigger than we need. Maybe we want to switch to something like a Toyota Sienna hybrid. It's going to get better gas mileage. The transits do all right on maintenance, but I know the Toyota Siennas, they are more affordable from a maintenance standpoint, gas mileage standpoint. So I'm happy to kind of work with Gloria on that and see what sort of savings we can come up with. My only thing is I don't want to reduce the efficiency of the service. As that shared ride number, the 40%, that's a really solid number for a microtransit service. But again... all analysis we can do. And I can kind of chat with Gloria about that and come back to you guys with that. Yeah.

I mean, it'd be interesting to know if you could break that down by time again. I keep asking for time. But because I know that you have shift changes. So if the mornings tend to be where you see those larger groups a time then you know we could stick with the van for that morning shift and then if the evening shift is just the one or two people you know what I mean I think there's some options there or we have two vans on the road we're talking about possibly three vans on the road maybe two of those are EVs or hybrids which would be great for our climate emergency we've declared and it would be the optics of that would be good as well But then also, yeah, the maintenance, the gas, all of those expenses.

we're happy to have all those conversations.

We're going to make you work for it.

Glad to do so. And Councilor, what I was going to share to your point as well is, yeah, I think that the best way to drive efficiency for the service on the cost side of the equation, not as much on the revenue side, is definitely looking at the hours per day. I think in Basalt's case, some of those hours, like we may be able, like generally speaking, I think the service has run pretty well from a supply standpoint. If we were to allocate some more of those hours to the morning hours when there's a rush hour, that's not necessarily going to lead to a reduction. It could lead to some lessened wait times. So there might be some room to play with it a little bit in order to meet more of that demand in the morning and then potentially take some time away from when it's a little bit more dead. But then beyond that, it'll be an issue where ETAs will go up.

And do you ever use private vehicles? Like someone signs up to be a Lyft driver, they use their own car. Could something similar happen with Via, where in the mornings when we have that rush of people getting to school or work, like someone could sign up and bring someone with them to the bus stop or add to our fleet? Do you want to or do you want me?

Either way, I can have it. Yeah. I know that there are certain services in VIA's portfolio where they essentially have a bring your own vehicle program. Um, you know how that breaks down and obviously there's still a cost associated with it, but how that works and whether or not it'd be something that works in this valley. Um, that's kind of a different conversation. However, that is something that via does in certain markets and, you know, happy to kind of see if I can get some, it's, I think it's relatively new. Are you familiar with the BYOB?

Yeah, we see a little bit for like peaky type events. So like World Cup, we're supporting some of those events. And in those situations, we don't want to onboard a whole entire new fleet because that comes with a lot of capital costs. So in that situation, we'll do a BYOB type program. I think if Basalt is interested in that, that's something we could look at. I think... It comes with some sort of trade-offs in terms of control and variability, but if that is an important consideration for you all, to see if there's a way for us to cheaply get cars on the road during peak time, I think that that is a reasonable option.

Yeah. Part of the reason I ask, and sorry, this is probably a longer explanation than you want, is... There's been this transit coalition with about 20 elected officials, and one of the biggest things we've talked about is a carpooling app in the valley. There are 30,000 empty seats going into Aspen every day, and there was a lot of interest in trying to figure out how to get people to share rides places, and it seems like that would flow.

There could be an opportunity with school carpooling. I mean, I don't know. When I was in school, we didn't have bus. And so, I mean, that's how I made some money.

To Hannah's point, this is a nice segue into the conversation we're going to have in about an hour with the Transportation Coalition. and you know i read through that today and a couple things that jumped off the page for me is the funding piece from eotc i guess didn't want to fund this program because it wasn't connected to raftis spark and rides and that they will be approached in 2027 i think it is for funding i think the emphasis from basalt should be on the fact they were 275 000 invested in the funding that's from general fund and the rest of that money comes from partnerships and we you know the transportation coalition that hannah's on uh represented that they were going to do a valley-wide listening sessions with communities that would feed in you know to this plan the other thing up in aspen that happens is some of the affordable housing deed restricted housing has a fee included in their monthly hoa dues that goes to the dial ride program that serves mountain valley and burlingame and the teacher housing at moore in the high school area and that seems pretty painless to me is if you have a hoa that's managing a multi-family you know building it's hard to do with single-family hoas because most of them don't exist anymore But these new projects that are coming online to include something in their monthly fee that incentivizes them to use this service, and they barely feel the pain of, I think, the more property housing pays $10 a month. And I have friends that call, they go out to dinner at 7 o'clock, and they get a ride home at 9 o'clock. And it, you know... it's a great deal and they don't deal with trying to get into downtown aspen meadowood um some of the outliers are starting to explore that with the the city of aspen and meadowood is not served by the city of aspen but it is served by the free shuttle so there's there's a lot of seniors that live in meadowood that are pushing for that solution to be able to go to town have dinner and get home without struggling you know with the parking garage or on street parking or any of that stuff so i think there's other things out there that are kind of interesting that and the last thing in that report that I was reading through they talked a lot about the cost that would be passed on to the user and that they used some typical scenarios Joe the plumber and Amy the restaurant worker and a couple other categories that were kind of interesting that they would try to incorporate into a program like that but And also talking that the cost of having service people come to the upper end of the valley would be reduced because they wouldn't be charging to drive in their cars or pickups or whatever it is. The other thing I wanted to bring up was I spent a couple of years on the Growth Advisory Committee, and during that process to discuss land use, they identified five zones in Peking County that they would allow development to happen, and that wasn't really mentioned in the Transit Coalition's report that the coordination between the land use in Peking County would be connected to the transportation system. They talked a lot about urban growth boundary, adjacent to the urban growth boundary, the rural areas. And the data from those places, one place out in Old Snowmass has 22 people coming to it every day. So they were talking about housing being allowed on those parcels that would house four or five employees and making exceptions to the land use. And that's being adopted now, I think, by the by the staff as a co as code the 2050 plan and i didn't see that mentioned in this report on the transit coalition transportation coalition so there's seems to be a little bit of disconnect between land use and this transportation and you know a lot of focus on relieving congestion up valley and their report which if we can help relieve the congestion down valley that shows that we're ready to willing to step up and do that and i think we would expect some you know reciprocal uh dollars somewhere in a coordinated land use discussion the other thing that came out in an economic summit that gloria and i were at was that the people in parachute to rifle are really trying to stay home and that's maybe a future impact that we haven't looked at too much paul anderson did a series of writings on what's happening in the development of the I-70 corridor, which will, I think, eventually take trips off the highway and they'll be staying there. We're already seeing that in terms of contractor services and other people that just don't want to go up valley anymore. you're getting ahead of us rick that may be the transportation coalition presentations yeah but see everything's connected and that's my point so if i'm reading one report and i'm reading another report there there seems to be a pothole in the middle of it no pun intended but that and i know i'm getting ahead of it but this is our work session so i get to talk about that stuff i'm going to present the same information to them i'm going to ask them the same questions The idea though of funding for me is really the root cause, the root thing that we need to be able to talk about with our partners and Gloria's presentation focused on that. I think that's what I'm focused on. We can be the solution or we can be struggling to provide the solution. I think those are our great points you make mr. Stevens I was not familiar with the with the land use code you discussed so that's definitely I'd like to kind of work with you guys more on you know it's expansion versus growth in the core resort that's creating a lot of the demand so check it out will do

think there is an opportunity you know we do want to reduce traffic I mean that's like the outcome we want people to get on mass transit for a few reasons one is to reduce traffic in general in the system so I think having a in the parking lot going forward something around carpooling is there an opportunity there or not you know I mean I know they're gonna something that's gonna need to be addressed somewhere and maybe there's an opportunity to use this, I would say service, but I'd say platform, probably a better word for it, to accommodate any carpooling demand that could be there when the school comes to mind. But there could be other opportunities. And if we look at it from that system perspective later on with the Transportation Coalition, because they're their remit is a lot broader, but there's microtransit all over the place and it might be carpool opportunity all over the place too, so I don't know. But I think that's something we should definitely put in the parking lot to explore as a potential opportunity for the service platform, whatever.

Gloria, what do you need from us?

So in summary, I have kind of taken some notes while we're going through here. And I just want to kind of go back to David's question on that if we're going to charge for our service, if it doesn't connect to, only if it connects, or only if it doesn't connect to a RAFTA stop. Is that correct? So we wouldn't charge for a RAF to stop connection. Is that something I just wanted to circle back to that one to make sure everyone was in the city market.

I also wonder about the part about having like a corporate entity paying for it. And it seems like maybe that's not going to be as much of a departure from your current kind of infrastructure than like carpooling. But I can see like if we have employers who can pay if I'm coming to work and my employer says, yeah, I want to support the system. And because a lot of employers are doing that, I can just charge them and it picks me up and then we don't have to necessarily grant it free to RAFTA because I'm going to take it to RAFTA and then get on the bus and go to work. And SCECOs can get the bill or whoever is going to get the bill. And so I think that could be part of the discussion before we commit to saying, here's what's free, here's what's not free. Let's talk to our partners in the community and say, hey, we all are in this together. Would you be willing to make this a benefit for your employees to help them get to work?

Yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense to ask Aspen One for money. A, because we have proof that a lot of the riders are coming from their housing. B, it supports their own sustainability goals to get cars off the road. And C, they already encourage rafter ridership. They give their employees discounted rafter punch passes because they don't have the parking. up there for all their employees. And so I think that there's a lot of reason to go to Aspen One, Aspen Skiing Company for funding for this. And then I think there's a lot of reason to go to Pitkin and Eagle Counties. As you laid out in your memo, now we meet more of their qualifications, but also the increased demand areas are all outside of our town boundaries and in unincorporated Pitkin, Holland Hills, Hoagland Ranch and Eagle Counties. So it would just be a benefit to their county citizens. So, I mean, I feel like we should have hit those three pretty hard. Okay.

I agree. I think, too, with the density that's being proposed in the Mid-Valley, that I think right now the bus stop at Two Rivers and Willits, or Highway 82 and Willits Lane, is a non-Velociraptor. It's not a stop-stop. It's not a rapid transit stop. And there's a lot of ridership there, and I think it's going to be more in the future. So I don't know how you'd make adjustments for that bus stop to be an express stop.

I know it's come up I mean I I don't know what staff would say but I I'm pretty sure they would talk about if we had another BRT stop then what does that do to the BRT service I don't know but I mean but the the ridership is pretty high not to get ahead of myself again but discussion in

report we're going to hear later on is about freeing up the bus so they can not get caught up in this stuff so there may be a trade-off if that becomes a prt and they're going to be able to move through the system quicker anyway is what i hope

And maybe. We'll see. Yeah. We'll see. I don't know. Just three more things and then there's the last thing. The other thing I just want, again, just like harping on having somebody else pay for it, sending them the bill, that also saves us a lot of processing fees. So if it's like a dollar, we're not spending 30% of that every time to a processing fee and we can just send one big bill. I'd be very much in favor of like a waiver process that's very generous for like seniors or for youth or like somebody else could just apply for it and say, I'm financially strapped, right? Like a dollar, we're saying we're gonna raise $27,000 or whatever it is, it's a drop in the bucket. And so I would be very like in favor of a generous waiver process. And then my last question, kind of not related to Basalt Connect, but in that FLMM grant, It talks about infrastructure. Could that be something like the Somerset bike path or improvements on few lane we could apply for?

I'll have to ask Mary on that one.

Yeah.

That could be Mid-Valley Trails money, too. I don't know. But yeah.

It just caught my attention when I saw it in there. And I was for infrastructure projects as well. So I just thought something to look at.

And it might be an either or. So I would ask her on that one. Because I know she just did a call out for that. So that's due in August. And I'll double check on that.

Is there a list? That is another actual question I had. Like, who else gets, do they publish who the recipients are?

uh i would i would probably defer to the look forward yeah i'd look in the packets and see if they just curious if that's they probably do i can't recall off the top of my head That's a good question. I'll take that to them and figure out.

I'll add, too, just for what it's worth. As far as charging the riders per ride, I think if we're going to waive, if you're going to a Rafta bus stop or waive senior citizens or waive students, that's a lot of people, and it diminishes the amount of revenue there. Yeah. becomes a question of, you know, is it worth charging at all if we can successfully get money from, you know, more money from some of these government partners and grants and whatnot? Because if, you know, to Rick's point, if people are using it to just come to dinner downtown or in Willits, it also helps us solve our perceived parking problem. Um, so we want to encourage that use as well. Um, and so charging for it is seems to be a bit counterintuitive to, to that too, to me.

I think that's right. Like, I think we want more, more usage. We're just trying to scrabble together enough money to figure out how to pay for it, but that it's a system we should be leaning into.

So anyways, that revenue source for me is kind of like the, on the one hand, it's kind of the lowest hanging fruit, but on the other, it would be like my least favorite option.

Yeah, I'm of two minds. One is that the $26,000 number is a drop in the bucket of the $649,000 that it costs to run the service.

Well, and that's not even, I don't think, taking into account if we start waiving all of these

Right, right. But at the same time, on the flip side, there's always that sort of like, if you put some skin in the game, then you might have more respect for the service. I don't know.

Yeah, and I kind of started off with that stance of, you know, the people that are, and I have a lot of friends that use it to get to and from dinner because of parking and because of, you know, they want to have some drinks and don't want to drive. And I appreciate that. We don't have Uber or Lyft or, you know, those other options. And I was like, you know, those people should be able to pay for the service. But then I was like, but then those are cars that are on the road for one reason or another that we don't want them on the road. Right. Yeah, either filling up valuable parking spots or having those drinks anyways.

I will say that I did ask Via, and I asked them what our ridership drop would be if we did start charging. And I think they said it was somewhere around 7%. So that was one kind of figure I wanted to throw out there, that maybe we wouldn't have a huge drop. Because my first model to them, I was like, it'll drop 30%. And they're like, no, Gloria, it'll only drop like 7%.

That feels right. I mean, I don't think people would walk it a couple dollars even to go avoid, you know, having to drive after a party or whatever, you know, cheaper than 30s, etc.

So we did get a lot of questions here that I think I need to come back to you all with, is looking at employers paying for the fare. There was some support with Aspen One for funding, support for Pitkin County and Eagle County, so going out to them. I'm not sure if I could get like an employer's list on who's writing. So that might be a little bit more difficult. You can start with the big employers. Yeah, I'll probably start with that. And if we're servicing their employees' homes, like if they have, I think, establishments like Aspen One, you can find this is their, this is the hub, basically, and we can charge from there. And then limits we can look at limiting priority or prioritizing stops during commuting hours is another thing that we look at and Looking into that if we got smaller cheaper cars maybe to run the service and do a data analysis on the cost savings Recognizing that EV would be encouraged. I

And maybe the Aspen Chamber can reach out to their businesses because some businesses give their employees like parking passes and say, hey, rather than buying your employee a parking pass, pay for them to get picked up and take her after.

Or I was going to say similarly that, for example, like Roaring Fork Apartments has bus passes that they make available to their tenants. So they potentially similarly could have the account.

Which you guys would have to have the infrastructure to have like in a voucher and account some sort of system that my my ride can get tracked to my employer. But when I go out to dinner, maybe that's a different conversation. Yeah, like that. would have to be some part of your infrastructure so we could have these conversations with these partners. So they're also not saying like, well, I don't wanna pay for me to go get my groceries.

But just in general, I was thinking Rafta might have the information of the employers that offer some kind of a transportation offset and they might be the ones to approach about having an account. That might be a way to get to that information. Awesome.

Gloria, do you have what you need at this point?

I do, yes. And it sounds like general support to keep figuring out the sustainability of this program moving forward.

And this is a really minor detail, but can we get new posters with the new app? Like, I live in the hub. I work for Ski Co. I also generally get thwarted by the wait time, but try and take the connect. But the, like when you walk in the door, it's like, here's your free bus pass to Rafta. Here's the Basalt Connect, but the QR code is old.

Okay. I'll get you guys new QR codes.

Thank you. We'll go ahead and take our break here before we get back at six. But, yeah, appreciate all the information. And, yeah, this is a great conversation. It's very timely. So we can feed it into budget, right, Beth?

Yeah. Thank you for coming.

Thank you. Appreciate it.

Thank you, everyone. And thank you for having all of that data so that we can ask you all of these questions.

Of course, yeah, a lot of great points.

I have to say, these guys are awesome to work with.

All right, so like I said, we'll be back at 6. Tune in then. Thanks. Good evening and welcome back to our regular Basalt Town Council meeting. Today's Tuesday, June 23rd, 2026. And I'll call the meeting to order in a moment. Before I do, just a quick reminder, you can go on to basalt.net. And this is for if you'd like to attend the meeting virtually and be able to make comments, et cetera, or public comment. On the agenda and minutes tab, you just need to get to this meeting for June 23rd. You'll see a Zoom link in there, and you can join that way if you'd like. So I will go ahead and call the meeting to order, and Pam, will you please call the roll?

Absolutely. Let us begin with Elise Hoddle. Angela Anderson?

I was present with drinking my mouth.

It was like, harumph. Yeah.

I was like, drinking my mouth.

Thank you, Angela. Rick Stevens.

Here.

Hannah Berman.

Here.

Angel Dupre-Bouchard. Here. Greg Schaffran.

Here.

And David Knight.

Here.

The A team is present. Thank you.

Thank you, Pam. Next up, we have our consent agenda. Got a few things on it. Item 2A is the minutes from June 9, 2026. Item 2B is resolution number 27, series of 2026, resolution of the Town Council of Basalt, Colorado, approving change order numbers one and two for construction of phase one of the Confluence Park Safe Routes to School project. Item 2C is letter of support for Pitkin Broadband. Item 2D is continued to July 14, 2026, public hearing 555 Basalt Avenue development application for special review PUD amendments and associated development review actions for 54 commercial storage units and 47 residential units. And then finally, item 2E, which is our minutes from May 26, 2026, If anybody would like to pull anything off to discuss we can do so otherwise it entertain a motion to approve the consent agenda.

I am just presented a question Just on to be Gloria. Are we about 95% complete over there? You think 90 it looks great So all that's left is landscaping. Is there any more exposure to any other change orders coming or you think we're a Percent complete where we're good to finish it up. I

You might have to ask Catherine on that one and unfortunately she's not here tonight.

Yeah, I don't have a problem with change orders. I'm just curious to see where we are.

I'll give you an update on the Friday update for that one.

All right, great. Thank you. I'd move to approve the consent agenda.

Second.

It's been moved and seconded. All those in favor, please signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Thank you very much. Next up, we have our call to the public. So just the ground rules. Limit your comments to three minutes and address your comments directly to me. Make sure you give us your name and address when making comments. And there's also a sign-in sheet in the back of the room for that. And then your comments, you know, be courteous, civil, and constructive, which everybody is usually, so that's great. And then town council will make no decision or take action except to direct the town manager. So the floor is open for public comments. Peter. Yeah, you can sit or podium either way.

Good evening. My name is Peter Mueller, and I work for Pitkin and Garfield County Public Health. Let me first start by saying I live in 767 Cleveland Avenue in Carbondale, Colorado. My name is Peter. I work for Pitkin and Garfield County Public Health as their tobacco prevention and policy advocate. I also had the privilege of leading Basalt High School for eight years as their principal. I love Basalt and care deeply for this community. I'm here to thank the council members that my colleague from Eagle County, Chelsea Carnoli, and I have been able to meet with to discuss basalt and tobacco. While Pitkin County and the town of Eagle are making progress by curtailing the sale of flavored tobacco products, we are hoping to extend policy solutions to the town of basalt. Current actions by the federal government are slowing this progress by opening more opportunities to sell flavored products and framing vapes as an important public health benefit through harm reduction. The truth is different. Flavored vapes in our region are preferred by youth 92% of the time. 10% of our youth, our Basalt youth, Aspen youth, Carbondale youth, Glenwood youth, currently vape. 5% have picked up the habit of nicotine pouches like Zyn. And when a teenager tries a vape, they get an appealing flavor and a short nicotine buzz. Weeks later, they are addicted. We can do better. And I appreciate the thought and care David Knight and Hannah Berman, among others, have given to this public health concern. Chelsea and I will continue to reach out to all of you in an effort to discuss the opportunities and challenges of this important public health matter. Thanks for your attention, and I appreciate your support and engagement. Best. Thanks, Peter.

Anyone else? Seeing no one, we can go ahead and move on to mayor and council reports and comments. Floor is open.

Just briefly on the tobacco tax most other municipalities and counties in our region have a $4 per pack tax were at $2 a pack and I would be very open to going to 4 but it would take a public vote is my understanding and someone to run that campaign if if that's what you know the if Peter his team are interested in that it's something I certainly endorse.

That's something I'd be interested in looking into as well.

Yeah. And he talked about how cost and flavor are the two biggest factors for youth consumption. And to me, cost seems to be the easy button for that.

Good comments. Anyone else? My screen, I don't think I have anything. I think we're good, so I think we can move on to manager's report, item five.

So I'd like to start off my manager's report by recognizing one of our fearless leaders in safety. We're so fortunate to have this individual on our team. And recently, he just received the 2025 Safety Champion Award. And I'd like to present that to him. He doesn't know who he is yet. But Justin, would you please come up and get your 2025 SIRSA Safety Champion Award? And thank you.

Thank you. Don't break it. I knew nothing about this. Thank you very much.

Your teammates nominated you, so you were kind of our leader in safety. Thank you very much. That's great. culture of safety is important it is very important and justin has brought that to us so we really appreciate um i wanted to announce that pickett and eagle are going into stage two fire restrictions um this week um so we will be putting out uh information on that I also wanted to report out we had a chamber, we held our first business listening session this morning at Willits. We only had four attendees, but we hope that on Thursday we'll get more attendees at the library at 8 a.m. for our business listening session. And we'll be doing more in the fall, so this is just the beginning, basically. And Town Hall will be closed next Friday the 4th. And Bike to Work Day is tomorrow. So stop by on your bike commuting to either River Park or Triangle Park for a free breakfast. And then we have some options for closing on our six units on Midland. And I'd like Doug to just kind of hit on that real quick if he could.

Yeah, so we have, to remind everybody, we have six units that are going to be delivered are ready for occupancy sometime in July. And the purchase price was $2,380,000. We have 25% of it's already been deposited vis-a-vis escrows. So we would need to come up with the closing amount of the difference. I'm going to, I know we've talked about initial construct was that we would just use the funds from various that we had collected over the years, whether it be Roaring Fork Club, or the Basalt River Park, or even, there's even a reader for the Midland. But after thinking it through and looking at other financial commitments coming down the track, and was talking with Gloria, I'm gonna suggest an alternative would be that we would actually borrow money and issue a COP for the full amount of the purchase price, the $2,380,000. and that we would secure that with basically it would take a loan and it would be like a if you're familiar with a HELOC a HELOC is just interest only so we would have a very low payment to service the debt and we'd have the debt payment be somewhat the target would be what the rent We're collecting would be so we're not upside down on any sort of cash flow on on the note itself and that what we would do the plan then would be to have a shorter duration or of of the note maybe a fiery year term and with a prepayment option and as the readers came through on the Midlands specifically we could take those funds and just pay off the the note whether it be 3 years from now 5 years from now whatever The reason I'm suggesting that is that there's, just to keep our cash powder dry, and that what I would be asking, just for your blessings, on going to Ehlers, Ehlers has handled our COP's in the past, we've issued three, so I was gonna suggest we go to them with this construct, be a relatively low amount of a COP that we're issuing, And I would actually be issuing more than we actually need to close, because what we really need to do is replenish the general fund by the entire purchase price, which was $2,380,000. And we don't want to have the loan over collateralized. So we want to have some risk in the loan from the underwriting standpoint. So with your OK and not, that's all I'm looking for, is that we would then proceed with the process. OF GETTING A COP, IT WOULD BE POST-CLOSE, SO WE WOULD HAVE TO HAVE A REIMBURSEMENT PROVISION IN THE RESOLUTION THAT WE WOULD COME BACK TO YOU WITH, OR MAYBE AN ORDINANCE, I'M NOT SURE, AT SOME POINT WE'RE GOING TO GET THIS MEMORIALIZED WITH COUNCIL, AND THAT WE'D HAVE THE REIMBURSEMENT PROVISION, SO WHEN WE GET THE FUNDS, WE COULD JUST PROPERLY REIMBURSE THE GENERAL FUND. So I'm asking for permission to actually initiate the process. And you're not bound by anything other than evaluating what the terms of the arrangement would be.

Midland is, is that Basalt Center Circle? Midland is BCC, right across the street. Okay. What other COPs do we currently have out and when do they expire?

We have the final year of the Albany Park which is this year. The debt on that is like $420,000 and then the remaining only one remaining will be the Tabor refund which is annual payment of like $219,000 and it runs out in 2028.

What's the collateral for that one?

All of the town's properties.

Okay.

That was a 10-year COP we issued back in, was it 2018? Yeah. We had collateralized all of the town's properties.

And this would just be collateralized with the actual property?

I want to collateralize it with the rent payments. That's what I want to be able to do. Okay.

Have we started the process of finding tenants on this?

No, not yet.

We have one potential.

Yeah. We definitely have interest, but we haven't started the call or anything or the waterfall or anything like that.

It's great at the terms and the rates and all that. Right.

Well, you know, I was originally thinking we'd do like a 30-year note, but that doesn't really, I mean, the banks are going to reset the rate after 10 years anyway. So I don't think we want to carry that much debt because we're going to have some other obligations we're going to be looking at down. So I don't want to over-lever the balance sheet. So that's why I want to keep it short and keep the actual payment analogous or pretty close to what we're collecting in rent.

But you said interest only?

Well, we could do an interest only, but we could also just amortize it. We can amortize the loan over 30 years and actually pay it off in eight. So we can lower our payment by just having a longer amortization period with a prepayment requirement.

And what's the alternative?

Not to borrow money and pay for it in cash and use our REIA funds, one of the restricted funds.

And then as we're collecting rent, we're just replenishing it back into the coffers. I'm just trying to understand what the advantage is of paying interest to somebody else.

Well, we're earning money. It's one or the other. I mean, if you have money in the bank that you're earning as much or close to what you're paying, it's a push.

So what's the interest rate?

I don't know that. But that's what I'm going to be coming back with.

Got it.

Yeah, I mean, I think coming back with that info so we can evaluate it, I'd be OK with that. Got it.

My guess is it's going to be pretty close. But there's got to be an arbitrage where banks want to lend money. So there'll be a cost.

Well, I'm happy that you're putting this much effort into trying to figure out how we're going to do everything we've got on the books. And I think that protecting our cash and using our assets appropriately to secure other properties is a good idea because those are going to increase in value at some level. So I have no problem with it. What's our bond rating these days?

Triple A.

Triple A. There you go. i don't know if there's a nomination for finance director but i'll make it thank you

You know, he did just receive the GFOA award, so yeah. Thanks. For the second year.

So I'm good to go to come back? Yeah.

Thank you, and that's all I had on my manager's report.

All right. Yeah, well, I think, Doug, you're still up. So next up, we have our presentations, item 6A, 2025 year-end audit.

We're joined by Jenny and Paul. So we do this every year. We're required by the state to have an audit, which I'm glad we do. And this is, I guess, like the fourth year we're doing this now. So I don't know. I feel like it was pretty uneventful. I'll let Paul speak to it. Paul's been our engagement partner since I've been here and before that as well. And he'll go through what their processes were and what their findings were and any other comments he has, a required communication that the auditors have to have with counsel. I would just say that the financial reports you see, these quarterly reports, the unjuiced up version or the unjazzy version that Gloria mentioned, and I've been working on the Excel sheets, right, are pretty much what you're going to see on the audit report. So it wasn't, there's a few minor differences. But so I think the headline is what you're seeing quarterly, at least this year and past, have been consistent with what the audited report has shown. So with that, do you want to say anything?

No.

I mean, Jenny's really kind of the brains of the bunch here.

It's a big team effort to get this all together.

So Paul, you want to take it away?

All right. Thank you. Can you guys hear me OK? Yes. All right. Well, I know you guys hear from me regularly, but we do staff your engagement with always one new CPA and one existing CPA. And as Doug mentioned, I would describe the audit as uneventful, which is generally a good thing. I'm going to share my screen, just briefly walk you through the process. So this is kind of your audit work papers, and you'll get a quick feel for what we do. So we schedule four CPAs on your engagement. Basically the planning stage involves reading all your minutes and probably the most important part of that is going through all your departments. So you can see each of these as your departments and basically we're meeting with them and trying to understand how do dollars come in, how do dollars go out, how does it get recorded in your books. And do we have good internal controls? So each of these is a work paper. You can see this was done by Caleb and reviewed by Tasha. And Caleb would have been CPAs on the engagement this year. And so this is, you know, planning and building, cash disbursements, cash receipts, IT, journal entries, police, payroll, public works, rec, sales tax, water fund. And then we take your databases and do some analytics on this thing called team analytics. And that to me is really key is understanding the internal controls and looking for concerns in that area. The second part of the audit is field work and that's really verifying numbers. So this is your cash and investment section and you can see in here Like, as an example, this would be, you know, a bank statement on your Riverside account, and then you could see somebody reviewed it and wrote notes in here. In this case, it was Jordan did the notes and Tasha reviewed it. But we're going through all the... Cash and bank statements, making sure that, you know, if your financial statements say you have X dollars in the bank, they're invested according to state statute, invested according to your investment policy, reasonable prudent investment. But the money that your financial statements show is in the bank. We send confirms and all your cash investment institutions to make sure that's there. Same thing with receivables. We want to make sure dollars that come in get deposited timely, coded correctly, and that makes sure your revenue is correct on your financial statements. We go through various other prepaid assets, whether it's deposits or prepaid expenses, capital assets. You know, you guys have a lot of infrastructure at work, and... And so any time you have new assets, whether it's affordable housing units or anything else, we want to make sure it gets added to the listing, depreciated appropriately, insured, kind of all those things. Go through accounts payable. Make sure we have stuff in the correct year. Is stuff being paid timely? We're not paying anything late. We're paying interest. And then when it's paid, is it getting coded to the correct account? So we know that payroll expenses, payroll, and utilities are utilities. We go through all your payroll policies and your expenses. We want to make sure what was paid out followed your policies and it was reported correctly to all the taxing authorities. We go through some other liabilities, debt. You asked about your bond rating. One of the things when you issue debt is there's a lot of promises that go with that, so we go through kind of each of your debt obligations, make sure we've complied with that, go through leases, IT agreements, expenses one more time, and then ballot questions, various ballot questions and IGAs you have, and then state statutes and federal grants. I guess what I want you to get out of this is it's a comprehensive process and there were 431 different work papers that a lot of which your team scanned up and provided us and a lot which we would have sent confirmations and got from outside sources, whoever it is. The big users of the financial statements, well, that whole process, those 431 work papers are geared towards providing audited financial statements that are correct. So you guys do, there's kind of two sets of financial statements. One is called an ACFR, annual comprehensive financial report. And that's because it includes a lot of additional information in here. If you went through the back sections, there's information on population, major employers, things like that. So it's more than just kind of the basic numbers. And then there is general purpose financial statements. One of the things I love about Basalt is you do a full ACFR, which is more comprehensive. That report then gets submitted to a group called GFOA, and GFOA has awarded you a Certificate of Financial Achievement now for a couple of years. The report is covered by an independent auditor's report where we've looked at those 431 workpapers and And we know the numbers are correct. And so we've attached an opinion to your financial statements that would be referred to as a clean or an unmodified opinion. Overall, the numbers are going to look very similar. In fact, very similar to what you get regularly. Kind of when you drill down, there's a little more pomp and circumstance. The users of this report are not just you, council, or electorate. It's going to go to all your bond rating agencies, to all your bond holders, to the SEC, to your banking relationships, to the federal government for federal grants, to the state government for state grants, insurance companies, banking companies. And I'll just briefly kind of jump to one page because I don't think it's going to tell a different story than what you're getting regularly from your staff. You have, and this is on page C5, and it just shows money coming in, kind of like deposits in the bank, and money going out. We actually audit pretty much all of CAST, and you have a pretty similar setup.

Paul, can you make sure everybody knows what CAST is?

Oh, sorry, Colorado Association of Ski Towns. So I think we audit every, today I did the Pickett County BOCC meeting. I was at Carbondale Auditing and later tonight at Avon. So, you know, we had a lot of municipalities. And your setup of fund structure is pretty similar to most, with the exception of Basalt has a lot of restricted funds compared to maybe a lot of municipalities. But essentially you had $22 million that came in as deposits, $22 million that went out This is pretty much everything but the water fund. And you ended the year increasing your fund balances $291,000. So, you know, out of $22 million, that's pretty much a break-even year. Now, we drew down our fund balances, you know, in the capital fund, but that's all anticipated for various capital projects. Overall, I think, you know, you guys are kind of right where you would have anticipated, right where you budgeted. And it's an extremely clean process. And so there also is in your packet a board letter that goes to here. And we have to communicate to you new accounting standards that occur. This year there really wasn't any. Next year the state auditor sent out a letter that there's kind of a pretty significant new standard coming that we have a plan for helping you guys get through that. It's just going to add a little more information on budget actual variances. And then the second is what are the biggest estimates you do have some pension funds through FPPA That's probably the biggest estimate in there. The rest of them are pretty standard estimates. There's nothing that That would strike me as unusual the FPPA stuff We take their numbers from their actuaries and apply them to you guys along with everyone else in the pool, but nothing necessarily unusual there No difficulties encounter performing the audit. As Doug mentioned, it's uneventful, and that's really where we like our clients to be. And I'm an auditor. I really don't say anything nice about anyone, but I'm going to break that rule tonight, and I'm going to tell you that you guys have great staff. They, you know, providing 500 work papers to, you know, a bunch of different auditors requesting stuff is no small task. Um, this is, I think the most critical thing and kind of why I'm not going to go into more detail in the report unless you guys would want me to, um, is because we, this is, did we have a bunch of corrected misstatements or some that maybe we didn't fix? And another way to put that is, did we have a lot of journal entries? And, um, you know, a lot of times there'll be in this whole list of journal entries. We don't have material journal entries with you guys. And why that's critical is it tells me you don't have to wait for the audit to get good financial information. You're getting it regularly when you get your financial reports from your staff. And I just think that's really key. That's where you want your organization to be. No disagreements with management, and the only thing I bring to you tonight is that there is that new accounting standard that the state auditor is sending your finance team a letter on, and we'll be in contact with your finance team this summer to kind of make sure everything's dialed in and ready to go. The financial report ultimately will be provided to GFOA, and hopefully you will continue to have an award-winning finance team. So that's either a quick or a painfully long review, but I'd be happy to answer any questions.

Thanks, Paul. Anybody have any questions?

Just a quick comment, and I don't need an answer, but your comment on assets that the town owns, and I was wondering about parkland and open space, and maybe we've looked at the value of that properties lately. I think, Justin may weigh in, but I think we had about 70 acres. The last time we added it all up. And what the value would be attached to that if we're using a security going forward. I just wonder, I'm just curious.

Yeah, no, you know, what is that?

That report.

What is it?

That we did with planning.

No, the reconciliation between them. If you go to page C4 in your report, Talks about that. There's all the capital assets generated from the town from inception to where it is now. Total, like, almost $100 million. And what the difference in what you're looking at is really just our method of accounting. Full accrual, when you're a business, if you buy a building, you don't write the whole thing off the first year.

Right.

But if you're a government, you do. So our balance sheet doesn't accumulate. The only thing in our balance sheet is assets or financial assets, predominantly. Fixed assets are just shown on a longer form. So to your point, all of our property, adding that up is probably close to looking at this over years, $100 million, and you're depreciating it. So that's partly an answer to your question, but then all the way in the back, in that statistical section, I think it's the last page, talks about, it is the last page, talks about all the acreage, developed, undeveloped, what's parks and open space, So that data is here.

Okay, thanks. Take a look. I think that's a pretty important piece.

It's actually great trivia. You know, holidays coming up, so you want to just talk about trivia? There would be a lot of trivia.

Well, we're talking about how to preserve and protect.

One thing I'd mention, too, is keep in mind that the numbers in the financial report are at cost. You know, the market value on... on a lot of that would be significantly higher. That's a good point.

And when you depreciate, because a lot of it's the dirt that's expensive. It's not necessarily what's appreciated. But we've depreciated kind of the physical asset.

18 million of depreciation. That would be shown in the equity. Actually, I met with somebody when Gloria was gone, had gone to AI. And so what's the fund, what's the talent worth? And they had some, like, I don't know whether I was getting this conversation but I hear so and it's like okay I don't know where they actually got that number from but it had to be it had to contemplate all the fixed assets that the town had accumulated over the years because I know our fund balance is collectively across the board it's around 30 million so I mean that's the number I'm working with so she had a much higher number so anyway

Any other questions or comments?

Thank you.

Otherwise, we need a, yeah, it's great work. We do need a motion, though, it looks like, to accept the 2025 audit. So if someone wants to make that.

Mayor, I move that the town council accept the 2025 audit. Second.

It's been moved and seconded. Pam, will you please call the roll?

Absolutely. Let's begin with David Knight.

Yes.

Elise Hoddle. Yes. Hannah Berman. Yes. Angela Anderson. Yes. Thank you. Rick Stevens. Yes. Angel Dupre-Bouchard. Yes. And Greg Schaffran. Yes. Motion carries unanimously. Thank you.

Thank you all. I appreciate it. Not just you guys, but everybody behind the scenes who I know helped with this. It's a big effort.

It's a big lift. We brought Vanessa in this time, so she got hands-on experience of scanning and knowing how to organize herself better. That's great. It was good.

Super.

Thank you, Paul.

All right. Thank you, guys. Thanks, Paul. Have a good night. Next up, we have item 6B, which is our Youth Zone presentation. We have Gloria and Jamie Hayes. Have a seat. Welcome.

Hi, my name is Jamie Hayes. I'm the executive director at USO and I've been there for going on six years. We just celebrated our 50th year in operation, which is pretty significant. We celebrated through our big gala this year. We had a great turnout, so 50 years in operation has really allowed us to change and transform to the needs of the community. How many on the Council are very familiar with you some? I won't go super, super deep then. But if you would like to know more, please reach out after, and I'd be happy to meet with any of you. We operate in the Ninth Judicial District. If you could please go to the next slide. I'm not sure who I am.

Is that you, Pam, driving the slides?

OK. We work all across the Ninth Judicial District. So as you can see, we span all the way up into the far reaches of Rio Blanco County, Rangeley, Meeker, all the way down into Parachute, up to Glenwood Springs, and then all the way up into Aspen. So it is quite a large region. Our boundaries are defined by the 9th Judicial District because our contracts are held with the 9th Judicial District Court for diversion. We have contracts with our municipalities and our counties in order to provide diversion services at the municipal and county court levels in order to be able to swim upstream and catch kids in a more prevention space. And we also provide our schools and our law enforcement officers and communities opportunities to refer kids even before they receive a ticket. And we call those referrals deflection referrals. We are a very unique organization. There are not a lot of organizations like ours that span from deflection all the way into diversion and re-entry from detention. We find this space to be very powerful because as kids engage in entering and exiting different parts of the judicial system, whether it's prevention or intervention way upstream, as we know, things can happen and they reenter again and then we can reengage without having to start all over again. So it's a very powerful place to be. Go ahead and go to the next slide. Our job is to intervene with kids and their families who are exhibiting risky behaviors that put them at risk of involvement in the justice system. So our job is to really interrupt involvement in the justice system by diverting or deflecting completely, keeping them out of court altogether, which is obviously much more preferred, I think, for all of us and a lot less expensive at the end of the day. Our job is to reduce risk. We serve kids for about three to six months. A lot of kids stay with us for up to 12 months, and sometimes if they come back, it just means They need a little more work. They need some more touch points. They need some more mental health, some more substance treatment. And I'll talk a little bit about that in a bit. We've really expanded our treatment services. I'll show you in just a little bit where that came from for us. And you'll see it in your data as well in the referrals that are coming from Basalt and the surrounding areas.

Go ahead.

Every youth that comes in through an intake goes through a screening process. And that screening process involves a very extensive assessment where we're able to identify risk and we're able to identify asset. And through that assessment plan, we discover those risk areas that might need further investigation and diagnostics, mental health, more mental health assessments, more substance use assessments in order for us to generate a high quality treatment plan. We also use those areas of asset in order to develop relationship with kids, get them more engaged in their communities through their strengths and build a plan around using those strengths in order to reintegrate into the community through a restorative action plan or an individualized action plan.

Go ahead.

Our services remain the same. If you're really familiar with USONE, we provide case management first. And that first entry point is that intake. And the intake watersheds into everything else that kids and families present that they need. our biggest growing programs that we are that are most substantial and our most expensive part of our work is treatment so mental health and substance treatment about six years ago we only had one mental health provider and we had one substance person who was intervening across the whole ninth judicial district nationally when kids are involved in the judicial system 60 to 65 percent of all youth screen with a mental health and substance use disorder need And as you know, those resources are very, very, very slim and hard to access in the communities unless you are justice involved and you have a program that can support. In the 9th Judicial District, over 80% of our youth screen for mental health and substance use disorder needs. We are significantly higher than the national average. So it's really important for our councils to understand what's happening with kids in our communities and when people come to talk about substance policy. I'm behind those discussions.

Go ahead. Why do we think that is?

That our valley is, well,

I mean, there's my theories, but I mean, yeah.

Yeah, Colorado, rural areas in Colorado tend to be much higher substance use disorder issues in adults and youth. As we know, the opioid crisis, the accessibility of marijuana and other drugs are available. We're right on the interstate corridor, so... The traffic space is really high. It is really easy for kids to get access to drugs and guns. They tell us that it's easier for them to get access to drugs and guns than it is for them to get a job. That's an important thing to hear. That's what our kids report.

Specific to vapes, just because we heard about tobacco earlier, how are kids getting vapes? Is it fake IDs? Is it all their students buying? All of it. All of it.

Adults, they can order it off the internet. They get it off the internet from different sources. They use fake IDs on the internet. They'll go outside of the judicial district to some not very well maintained County store Right that doesn't have as much surveillance and thought about serving youth and diligence about checking IDs They know how to do it and they know what to do if you wanted to actually know We could bring kids in the room and they would give I mean they they would not give you everything But they would tell you a lot Thanks since we've asked that question chicken or egg Like are they getting the vapes or the other drugs because of the mental health issues or the mental health issues stemming from drug abuse both I Think it depends on the kiddo if if the biggest presenting issue is mental health and there is a history of Family needs and trauma and suicidality or depression Sometimes we see the secondary coping mechanism is substance. For a lot of our kids, we see substance first because it's available and they're curious and it's a way to fit into the peer population. And then as we see that use more and addiction more, then we see mental health decline, as we know. So when we're intervening with kids and we're talking about life skills and building resiliency and boundaries and refusal skills, we're addressing all of it all at the same time. So we sometimes aren't even addressing substance directly, even though substance is the issue, because we just have to meet kids where they are. in a conversation that feels relevant to them. So that's a hard question to answer directly.

I've got a question, might be easier.

Yeah.

I don't know, maybe not. But you were answering his question about access, how kids here just have access to these. I'd be curious to know, how does our community compare to other communities as far as the resources available to kids? Are we under-investing? Where do we match up to other communities?

Well, I would want to ask more questions about what you want to know about investment and what communities are investing in.

What support is available to kids who are looking for help?

In Basalt specifically or in Pitkin County, Eagle County, Garfield County, because you're a combination of all of it, there are a lot of resources, particularly in this area. And the municipalities in Upper Garfield County and Pitkin County, especially Eagle, I was just over with Eagle about a month ago, really dedicate and focus revenue, tax revenue, back into the community. for mental health and for substance and for prevention work. It is a very well supported community and for that, that's why I show up every year in front of Basalt and Carbondale and everywhere else and just say thank you for supporting Stepping Stones and for supporting the school district and prevention work in the school district and for supporting Hope Center. These are all agencies that we rely on heavily and they rely on us. And so just know that we are uniquely poised to collaborate with community partners and we could not do it without them. The networking and the funding of prevention and intervention work in this part of the valley is very strong. How that compares to other parts of the ninth judicial district really depends on how much revenue is available in those municipalities. Many other municipalities have much less tax revenue available because there's less tourism, there's less travel industry, there's less volume of people living, working, and playing right in their communities. So their solutions are different solutions. We're able to bring to the table a network of braided funding that is federal funding, state funding, local government funding, contributions in order to provide the resources that are needed all up and down the ninth judicial district regardless of what the municipality is able to do or what the county is able to do because kids still have needs everywhere. Our support just looks different wherever we are. Go ahead. Oh, wait. This is an important one. So our kids, speaking of access and cost, our kids and families start with a $200 intake fee. No family is turned away for an inability to pay. We have a sliding scale. Most of our families pay less than half or nothing. We are now Medicaid credentialed, so we're able to bill Medicaid for services and provide access. Once they're in the door, three to six months of services or more than that, families don't pay a dime. So they can get hundreds of hours of life coaching and substance treatment by certified and licensed staff, supervised by a highly effective clinical team, licensed addiction counselor, and an LPC. they don't pay a dime and so when we talk about those client fees it's less than 3% of our overall operating budget we have to figure out where to find that funding otherwise because our job is to decrease barriers to access to essential mental health services and substance treatment services specifically and positive mentorship through life coaching with our youth advocates who actually show up in in court I'm just looking around to see if Jeff is Jeff's usually. Ah, OK. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. I was just going to comment too that Jeff and I do the prosecution for the town. So we work really closely with Youth Zone and we really appreciate all the work that Youth Zone does. It's a tremendous resource, and it really helps the court out. I think it helps other kids to see how things work and that the process can work for them instead of ending up in a system that might otherwise not go so well for them. So it's been a really great working relationship, and we've really appreciated it.

Good. We've appreciated it as well. The town of Basalt has been a consistent and stable partner for a long time. And so I just want to share my gratitude for that as well. Average cost of detaining a youth, $66,000. As we know, $66,000 for six months. As we know, sometimes those dollars hit some people when they hear that. The cost of not doing what we do is way bigger than a dollar amount, right? Once kids actually have penetrated that far into the system, their likelihood of continuing to be involved as an adult is three times, the national research right now says it's three times more likely that they will be tried and adjudicated as an adult. So when we're investing in our kids, we're not just investing because we're saving money in judicial processes that are expensive. We're investing in the quality of their life and the trajectories of their life, which I know you all get behind. Go ahead. We leverage community partners, like I said, decreasing barriers to access, like I said, mental health. Once they go to court, that's only one way that we get them. We get them all kinds of other ways. Court referrals, I'll show you a little bit about what Basalt's numbers look like. then our job is to improve our capacity and increase our capacity to serve more youth and that's my job really is to make sure that I'm networking at the state and federal level and creating very clear partnerships at those levels so that we can open those doors of funding and make sure that we're bringing as much federal and state funding as possible into municipalities who are right now challenged with the same thing we're all challenged with and that's budget cuts and and and all kinds of things. So just know that we're fighting in order to keep these services very strong regardless of where the town of Basalt is and how you might be feeling challenged by the current financial landscape.

Go ahead.

About 56% of our referrals come from court, about 30% come from schools, so when we talk about court, that's that diversion we're diverting from when they're already engaged. When we receive referrals that are from schools and law enforcement before they get a ticket, Basalt's very good at that, that's deflection. So those are those two models. Either way, we're getting them out as fast as we can, giving them what they need, and our non-reoffense rate is pretty strong. Usually it's between 80 and 94 percent. It depends on the community. It depends on the level of risk and it depends on the year. You'll hear this from school administrators as well. That 10th grade class man that's a tough class right. I don't know if any of you have ever been educators before. That was my world before I came. So we'll see things fluctuate over time and you'll see a fluctuation in Basalt and some years it's just that. It's not that the town of Basalt is doing anything different or badly in any way. It's just that we're pouring more of our services here at this time in order to intervene and get kids back on track.

Go ahead.

all right so the top reasons for referral on the left that's our as an organization so it's the entire ninth judicial district about 500 kids on the right that's how the salt compares so this probably looks really familiar the top two reasons for referrals is substance on over across all referral sources so that school community parents kids themselves will come back and say i need some more help with substance my use is increasing followed by disorderly contact petty theft and possession of paraphernalia top referral sources for us basalt municipal court so when we receive that court docket if we haven't yet heard from law enforcement or schools if they have not referred yet that they did get a ticket we grab them off of the court docket so we catch them catch them either way Basalt High School is a high referral source for us. We work very closely with the high school and we meet with them monthly to do staffing so that we're making sure we're sharing what we're doing and how we're working across our systems in order to make sure that we're utilizing our resources to the best of all of our abilities and not duplicating services. the basalt police department garfield county court um so your kids uh in basalt um travel into garfield county unincorporated and they get into some a little bit of trouble there that's what that looks like you probably know where all those spaces are too i won't name them for you but go ahead to the next slide last fiscal year we're not quite done this was these numbers were pulled about a month and a half ago so we've got we've got more to add to this for this year we served 25 total cases 22 unique kids so that means three of those kids needed another round of more intensive support You had no CYDC cases in the town of Basalt. That's our law enforcement officers are always grateful when we're not detaining kids and screening them for detention. So this year was a good year for Basalt. The non recidivism rate that 81% of basalt kids did not reoffend compared to our 84% at this time. So we're serving some more intensive kids right now who need a couple more rounds of intervention. Not necessarily a bad thing, it's just what's happening right now.

It's just our job to respond to it. On gender, is that reflective of male compared to female crime or mischief rates? Or is that just who then gets caught for those things and connected with Youth Zone?

These are all demographics that we serve that are basalt clients, regardless of where they're referred from. So these aren't all court-involved kids. A lot of these kids are referred because they might be tickling the edges of the justice system. The very curious thing that we're pulling right now that we can have a discussion later if you'd like, towns will be interested in the census, right? How do our numbers of youth who are at risk of or already involved in the justice system, how do those numbers compare to the actual census? And we could ask all kinds of questions about that, right? But we wanna do that in a way that is thoughtful and productive and helpful to municipalities. Some municipalities are asking us to come and compare it to the census and sit with our law enforcement agencies and just ask some questions. right what does this look like does it match the the the rates of suspension and expulsion that we see in schools are those similar and why are we seeing over representation of certain gender or certain demographics so i don't want to just throw that in without further thoughtful discussion about what we might ask for for something like that but if it's a work session at some point that basalt would like we can certainly pull some pull some more numbers together go ahead

This is our staff.

That's our team, our leadership team. And then you can go to the last slide, because this is the most important one. Well, there's one more slide. This is our treatment team and our intervention team. So you probably recognize a lot of this, led by Erin Goodman, our program director, and our clinical director, Zyra, who just joined us this last month. And go ahead and go one more slide. These are our partnerships that make what we do possible in Basalt. I've also added the Department of Division of Criminal Justice. We receive funds that we bring into Basalt to serve Basalt kids, Colorado Department of Human Services, CDPHS, and then the Office of Gun Violence and Prevention, and obviously the CYDC, those are our detention kids who we screen for detention or reentry into the community. So we've received consistent support from the town of Basalt and we are very grateful for that. And I want you to understand what other funding is coming into the town of Basalt in order to make sure that our services are as robust as they can be. And at that, that's our update.

You know, excuse me, but I had the great opportunity to work with Lori Mueller many, many years ago on this issue of developmental assets and the search institute stuff. And we took that to heart because the Roaring Fork Valley of the 40 assets, the young men were scoring at about 18 and the young women were scoring at about 21. Yeah. And the data point that we needed to get to was like 30 out of 40. So the news spread and that started to get incorporated into especially some of the children's programs at the Aspen ski schools. And since then, those things have been added to every coach's certification process that there is. you know they used to just talk about a few things now they're talking about social mental or you know condition all that kind of stuff and I can tell you from my experience with this that I have seen kids from 13 to 14 years old 10 or 15 years ago that are now good, young, right-thinking, leadership-oriented people that benefited a huge amount in their life from that stuff. And reflecting back is what we've asked our coaches to do and our other people that we come in contact with is talk about who made a difference in your life. That's right. And they come up with, you name it, priest, minister, parent, neighbor, teacher, whatever it is. So we all have this opportunity to engage, and some people are attracted to a certain behavior, and other people are attracted to maybe somebody that needs to just be comfortable in the surrounding. The other thing with the Aspen Institute report on Project Play that Evans-Isla did, the extremely disturbing data point in that was that middle schoolers especially rifle newcastle down there only 28 of those kids are participating in any extracurricular after school weekend programs and uh that to me leaves a big gap and you know we've talked about this in the context of crown mountain places like that where these kids can come the biggest issue for them is generally transportation because their parents are working so i and i also think that basalt has always been kind of unfortunately in the position of being in one of the top referral communities to the system And I just have to say that this is probably the greatest work that we do. So thank you.

I appreciate that.

We look forward to hearing from you every year. I mean, it is so important. And keeping the kids out of the justice system and doing something that's going to be helpful for them, helpful for the community, their family, the work you do with the families has. I echo Rick's comments for sure. But thank you.

Good. We'll just keep showing up and doing the good work. And you let us know if we can do anything else.

Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Right. Well, next up, we have one more presentation. Item 6C is our Transportation Coalition presentation with Hannah and George Newman. And Susan, if you want to come up too, you're welcome.

I'll introduce them briefly. This is part of the transportation coalition that was about 24 elected officials, RAFTA, Snowmass Transit, and others that sat together in very long meetings about traffic for 10 months. And by the end, we had unanimous consensus on things that we would like to explore in a findings document and what what the group really tried to do was prod into traffic we all know there's traffic but really analyze the data to see that there are 34,000 empty seats going into Aspen and then do a deep dive on case studies all over the world and to see what works and what didn't. I think the thing I was most bummed to learn is typically carrots don't work or they are very limited in how much a carrot will work to reduce traffic and really sticks are what you need to curb congestion. So George Newman and Susan Ruhl are gonna take it away from here, but thank you both for being here.

Thanks for letting us be here. Our pleasure. Good to talk with you.

Thank you for putting this on the agenda. Hopefully you've had a chance to at least browse through our findings document. I know it's very lengthy. What we're going to try to do here tonight is just hit the high points with about 18 slides. It shouldn't take us maybe 15 minutes to go through, and hopefully we'll have time for some discussions and some questions afterwards. I'm George Newman. Again, I'm a founding member of the coalition and currently on the steering committee. I'm a former Pickett County Commissioner as well as a former board chair of RAFTA.

And I'm Susan Merold, and I'm currently co-chair of the steering committee for the coalition with Hannah and also serve on the Snowmass Village Town Council. And prior to that, I was on the Aspen School Board. So happy to be here to talk with you.

So who are we? As Hannah mentioned, the coalition was put together with 28 participants, elected officials like Susan and Hannah, former elected officials. This is up and down the valley from Aspen to Glenwood. It also included community leaders, CEOs of major corporations in the valley, executive directors of nonprofits, commuters, employers. So it really was a broad spectrum of the coalition that we brought together. Why do we bring it together? Several years ago, a few of us saw an opportunity that was not being addressed by either any governmental entities in the Valley, public sector, or the nonprofit sector. And there was a lot, in the last two years, there's been a lot going on, as you know. The Upper Valley, you've got the CDOT doing a reevaluation of the entrance to Aspen. You also had the city move forward with their lumberyard employee housing unit. Pickett County is doing a new airport, a terminal. In the Mid Valley, we've seen tremendous growth. In the Mid Valley as well, some large projects being thought about, discussed in the Down Valley. And so each of these entities, the governmental entities, everyone seemed to be just working on their own silos. And we felt it was an opportunity for a different group, a nonprofit group, to come together, look at the issue much more holistically, and how everything is impacting the traffic coming up and down throughout the valley. So that's why we got started. Our main four tenets are to make travel through the valley quicker, easier, safer, and more affordable. We all know how great a job the Raptor does. And they continue to try to find other ways to improve their service. But we also know that RAFTA can't do this by themselves. Not only do they have the budget or the resources, but so much of the, certainly in the Upper Valley, the traffic that is going to different places are not on the main artery. They're going to construction sites, large homes that it just isn't possible for those people to utilize RAFTA. So we have to find some other methods and some other incentives as well as some disincentives to try to curb what we all know is a growing and challenging issue. So the opportunity, along with our coalition members, we also had about 8 to 10 resource people who were our traffic planners, traffic engineers. RAFTA CEO Kurt Reverschlag was on it. Pickett County Sheriff was on it. And so Fear and Peers was our main consultant. They are a nationally known firm that focuses on transportation solutions for communities as well as engineering. And they hired a contractor to come in last summer in August during peak times in the morning. to not count the number of vehicles coming across the Castle Creek Bridge, which has been done many, many times over the years. But the first time, their chore was to actually count the number of passengers in those vehicles, because that's where we see the opportunity. And what came out of that study was, as an average of 34,000 empty seats for coming into Aspen every morning, 34,000. So that's a tremendous opportunity to try to capture just a small percentage of them and to sort of decrease our vehicular traffic going in and out, up and down the valley. We figured with our consultants that we can just reduce those number of vehicles up and down, up the valley by only 2,500 vehicles, we would have our congestion problem under control. So it's a small number of people and there's a great opportunity. So this was an important study. It was really an eye opener for us and I think for the community. So what's the urgency? City of Aspen did a survey a year ago asking their citizens what are the most pressing issues. And transportation congestion, as you see, was 86%. It scored higher than affordable housing. Part of our goal, one of our goals, is also not only to reduce the cars by 2,500 vehicles coming into Aspen, but also to reduce the tremendous amount of carbon emissions that they generate, 25,000 tons. So they're ambitious goals, but we think that they're all doable. I'll let you roll.

So when we were just getting together at the beginning, we came up with just our North Star, meaning what we felt we wanted to find at the end and what the goals were. And so faster for all all commuters up and down the valley hoping to save 30 minutes each way or a full hour of the day which you know can be used for additional work more leisure time more time with you know your friends and family um cleaner uh cut the co2 emissions by 15 to 25 and reduce the particulate matter, um, and equitable. And we really were focused that it's a valley wide solution. And I mean, back when we, in the last slide, when we mentioned that 86% of Aspen voters, think congestion's a problem, they're already there. They're not the people that are coming up and down the valley. So I feel like there's probably a higher percentage of people who care about congestion even than those people. And then just safer, lower crash rates and improved evacuation times. So we came up with six goals. Those that I just mentioned, and then prioritizing transit and bus service, eliminating neighborhood traffic, so cut-throughs in all communities, really, and then improve safety and evacuation times. So the reduction of 2,500 cars is just a percentage of those 34,000 empty seats, that if we could fill some of those and reduce the cars by 2,500, that would be a solution. And so the... Our consultants believe that during peak commuter season, if these ideas are implemented, people could save 30 to 60 minutes a day, and that's a big chunk of time, and it really could make things much more pleasant all around. So they gave us a whole slew of, options. We went through, we had a sheet this wide of all of the different solutions that could contribute to congestion reduction and we kind of boiled it down to these four strategies. A key strategy is ride sharing systems and that's so that out of those 34,000 empty seats, we fill some of those and then those people are no longer driving their own cars. Enhanced transit service, faster routes, dedicated lanes, mixed traffic in general lanes would reduce. And then roadway improvements so that the traffic can flow more easily. And then finally, after you've kind of implemented some of these strategies, you need actually a disincentive to drive. Because there's a phenomenon called induced demand, which says that As soon as we reduce traffic, then people decide, oh, well, there's not much traffic, so I can drive today. So you never get to the point where it's actually consistently reduced, I guess I would say. So to do that, you need some sort of disincentive, like a hot lane or a congestion reduction fee system. So we'll go through just a couple of these in a minute. detail, the ride sharing, um, the ride sharing could be achieved through enhanced bus service, through van pools and carpool, casual carpools, like through employers or through a carpool app, which there's a lot of, um, new developments in carpool apps and they're used in Europe and, um, they create these connections so that it's more like an Uber where you can get on the app and if you're going somewhere then you'll see who else is going somewhere and you can get in the car with them. And I think that could be a really good solution in our valley because everything kind of flows in the same direction most of the time. And so filling just 7% of the existing empty seats could solve the congestion issues. And then always to support RAFTA. We want to make sure that RAFTA has the right of way to keep their buses going at an effective speed and that they have frequent and there's capacity on all of their buses. And so just supporting all that they do is really important. And then expanding microtransit so that it can go out from the central corridor like we have in various towns. And then reducing the fare or just making there be more frequent bus service in most areas.

I think one of our main, again, one of our main north stars that we've always said is do no harm to RAFTA, and that's critical. So all of our solutions and recommendations that we're looking at, we want to make sure that they will work and that they won't harm RAFTA.

Definitely. And then roadway improvements, because there's places – all throughout up and down the valley where we could improve bus lanes and the traffic signals and grade separation areas so that cars and buses can move more easily throughout the valley. And so then we get to the incentive pricing. And there are two different choices there. Um, coalition studied these and kind of worked on a, uh, our findings. We kind of felt like the hot lane was a phase one and the, the congestion reduction fee could be phase two. And the, um, we'll just go into what the hot lane does. It basically operates like the, um, high occupancy vehicle lane on I-70 or other places where you've seen them, but the pricing is dynamic. So it changes so that all of the cars in that lane or all of the buses or high occupancy vehicles in that lane keep a steady stream so that they don't slow down and the price will go up if traffic starts to slow down and go down if there's no traffic. That way people have a choice. They can just continue to be in the general vehicle lane or they can choose to go in the hot lane and make their commuting. They'll pay the fee, but then they'll be able to get through faster. And that should actually reduce the traffic in the general lane so that that will be the same or faster. And it also generates revenue, which can be then put back into rafta or roadway improvements or carpool apps or any of the other solutions and then uh... if you go to the congestion reduction strategy has also dynamic pricing and a guaranteed speed but it is a cordon so it would be determined where it is but once you enter that cordon then that's when you would be charged the fee it's not just a lane so anyone entering the cordon that is um you know coming in would be charged the fee unless it's a bus or a high occupancy vehicle with three plus riders so um those potentially could generate 15 to 30 million dollars annually through those fees and then those fees would be reinvested in any of the other raft particularly carpool apps any of the other transit and roadway improvements and so What we're doing in this phase after we went through all the findings is basically just going all through the valley and talking with people. We want to get feedback. This is just a conversation to find out how everyone feels about the findings and get other ideas. And then we feel like the next step incorporate that feedback then the next step would be to do some modeling so then we know more specifically how these solutions would work in our valley and what what the outcomes could be

So, you know, at first glance, it seems like this is an Upper Valley, it's an Aspen initiative that's sort of driving this. And we've seen that in letters to the editors over the last six months or so. But in reality, We feel that if we're able to gain community support, encourage local officials and stakeholders to buy into these ideas, that it's not only going to address the problem from the Aspen Airport into downtown Aspen, but it's going to be a tremendous benefit from Glenwood all the way up. If we could take more cars off coming off the I-70 corridor west coming into Glenwood. Glenwood right now has 27,000 vehicles going through downtown Glenwood. 27,000. The Castle Creek Bridge right now, not allowed. take it into account the sneak of the McLean Flats and Power Plant Road is 23,000. So Glenwood has a tremendous problem going through town. And so if we could capture 7% of the traffic going up the valley, either via carpooling or some sort of fee, it's going to help everybody during those high time commute periods. And will also help RAFTA. Certainly going through Glenwood, if there's less vehicles going through Glenwood, that's going to help RAFTA move along quicker as well. So it's sort of a misnomer that it's an Aspen problem and Aspen's trying to punish everybody. It's a valley-wide problem. We have to look at it from the valley-wide solutions, and all the communities will benefit from it.

We'd love to hear your comments or questions.

Thank you. What questions or comments do we have? I'm sure there's a lot.

I'm going to start with a silly one, increasing the HOV lane to three people. I'm assuming there is some consideration if a vehicle does not actually sit three people.

We didn't have that question come up that I recall, but that's kind of the feeling is you don't want that high occupancy lane to become too congested. congested so I think they would say probably that you needed to have three people in that vehicle for it to qualify to go into that hotline well I'm thinking when I gardened and it was a just a regular single cab truck there was just two seats oh true yeah so I don't know actually how they would Look at that.

One of the things we're looking at doing, in fact, we just sent this report with some other data over to the project management team for the reevaluation to Aspen, which includes the city of Aspen, includes CDOT, includes the Federal Highway Administration. And what we're asking them is, Jacob's engineering who's hired by the city to look at the re-evaluation of the entrance to Aspen they're already going to include some modeling we've come up with some other suggestions for modeling specifically if we were to institute a hot lane or congested reduction fee would that affect RAFTA's ability to maintain their service. So we want to try to get some modeling in place so we certainly have a better idea as well as the community whether it's going to be beneficial or it's not going to be beneficial certainly as it relates to RAFTA. So that's really an important key for one of our next steps.

Can you elaborate on the hot lanes a little bit? I know that's been kind of an evolving conversation. Kurt's been involved, but there's that memo that he shared, I know, with us and with you all about kind of how that how that lane is entitled up by the airport. But also, I think what you guys are talking about is a broader hot lane that probably would go all the way to Glenwood. There's another conversation that's happened about shoulders and what are CDOT standards for shoulders. You mentioned Europe. They kind of have a barrier, and then every mile or so, they have a pullout for wrecks. So there's a lot of... A lot to unpack with a hot lane and how you would use our existing alignment of the road to do that. I think you could.

Yeah, so again, the modeling is going to tell us, one of the things we're looking at is where should a hot lane begin? And really, the only real opportunity congestion point is from the Aspen Airport into town where there actually is an extra lane currently dedicated to RAFTA. And so that may be the obvious place to experiment with the idea of a hot lane and see how that works, depending on what the modeling comes out to. You know, Glenwood's got four lanes going through town. They really don't have any other room in terms of even thinking about a hot lane. at this point. However, if we were to institute a hot lane, if we were to institute rideshare apps, again, fewer cars coming up the valley is going to be beneficial for all the communities up and down.

And before you guys got here, we were talking about carpooling around here. Because we have times with, just not to have the whole conversation again, but with Salt Connect where it gets very crowded and the wait times get longer and people are probably not taking it because school and whatnot is taking up a lot of the space. And it made us wonder, could we do some carpooling even within communities for sure get to use space and cars to go to school right and it's hard to find bus drivers

Well, and we've talked about that it would be nice to kind of pilot the carpooling in either, like, the school community or, you know, the hospital or, you know, some large employer. And because then those people, they know each other, they're all going the same place, that feels a little more friendly anyway. Yeah. And then expand from there when people kind of get more used to it.

Raptor is already, as you know, or some of you don't know, is already looking at expanding the use of their dedicated lane, certainly from the Aspen Airport in the town, for company vehicles, vans, so whether it be the hospital, the school district, the county, the city, anyone who is being able to carpool coming up the valley in a van, Raptor's already looking at allowing them. That in itself will help. So these are all little incremental steps, but we think that you've got to have, you can't have just one piece of the puzzle. It's got to be an integrated system to really address that. the whole problem. So there's little bites of the puzzle, but it's how we put it together, how the modeling looks, what sort of support the community feels that we could get. It's going to take time. The plan we put together, we look at this from a 30,000 foot view and we know there's a lot more work to be done a lot more details that be hammered out and that's why we're going out up and down the valley making presentations not only to elected officials but other community organizations as well to try to answer questions get your feedback what do you think works what do you think may be a problem for your community or what would be an advantage for your community

It seems like the as I say it seems like the the hot lane where it has the pricing that fluctuates Depending on what the traffic's doing is going to require a lot of infrastructure And if I guess it doesn't I mean it's not as much in the structure as say a road separation, you know, like big construction on a highway where you have a How is it communicated to the driver that like, oh, it was $6 when you got in the lane, but now it's $9.

Right, right. I mean, that's a detail. And you see that if you're traveling on like an E-470 or going down through the canyon. I mean, they've got signages and say, you know, right now the fee is $13. And an hour later, right now the fee is $6. So everything...

They're able to have traffic counters, and it's computer. But that's what I'm talking about. That seems like a lot of upfront infrastructure. I mean, I know how much our couple of cameras on 82 are going to cost.

They also mentioned that it could be an app that you could look at or a transit site so that before you got in your car, you would know. what the traffic looks like and what the price looks like.

I mean, I'm not against it. I'm just curious.

These are all, I mean, we're, we were asking the same question and that's why we want to get some modeling done to try to get a better grip on the reality of it. But we know Aspen for many years, I think, has really been a leader in terms of trying to just reduce, keeping the cars coming, vehicles coming into Aspen at the same level as it was in 1998. It's gone up a little bit because of the sneak lane going through Power Plant Road. What fear and peers have told us, and they've worked in this Valley for many, many years, so they're very familiar with our problem, is they they recognize Aspen has been a leader in addressing these issues. However, all the carrots are done. They've used up all the cares. There's no more carrots that could that the city of Aspen could probably come up with that would substantially change that. So what does that mean? It means now you've got to put some sticks in there, some disincentives.

How do we keep the.

people that want to avoid these hot lanes just from all turning right there at uh mclean flats and then and then mclean flats turns into a parking lot yeah that would that was also a question that came up and hopefully the model would catch that but yeah i mean the cordon fee you could put all the way around there so then if you came in any direction you would be subject to the fee but the hotline's a good point like how would you

You know, right now, there's 3,000 to 4,000 vehicles coming over McLean Flats. Would that increase with a hot lane? Probably not, because some of those people may take advantage. If you're a contractor, would you rather sit in that traffic from the Aspen Airport to town for a half hour, or would you rather pay 15, 20 bucks to get in there and make some money?

That's a good trigger, George.

Thank you. I read this probably more thoroughly than I read most agenda packets because it's one of my favorite topics and it has been for many, many years. And having been involved in the construction trades for almost 50 years now and having employees coming as far away as Grand Junction, we put three or four multi-passenger vans on the road 15 or 18 years ago. Stutesman's following that same model now. Our company's been out of business for a while. But the point is that the workforce now, in my experience, is showing up later on the job sites because they're leaving later in the morning to avoid that initial congestion. And they're leaving earlier in the afternoon to get home at a decent hour. The construction impacts are drawn out further. The schedules have gone from building a house in 18 months to taking three years. The trades that are affected by that always get a shadow cast over them. The other feedback I wanted to share with you was earlier we talked about charging a fee for the Basalt Connect system that now is not funded by EOTC and we'd like them to participate. But they estimated, our consultants said we would experience a 7% drop, which is kind of interesting that your 7% would drop based on these fees. But our 7% drop would occur in the business of our local commuter. And my thought was, well, if we can structure a methodology where the 7% minus turns into a 7% plus, that's a 14% net gain. right and i think the other things that i noticed in here um and george you made this comment one time quite a while ago that all of our solutions are in the land use code and what i just spent a few years on the growth advisory committee and what was interesting about that is the approach to the affordable housing issue in the upper valley and that's being defined now as community housing which is targeted for not necessarily teachers and joe the plumber but the next level of professional people and they've broken it in we talked about this earlier the five areas in picking county with rural remote rural urban growth boundary adjacent etc And it was really interesting that reading through this, I didn't see any connection to the stuff that's being codified right now. And you also mentioned the lumber yard and the airport expansion. Kinsley did a great paper many, many years ago on growth versus expansion. and i think what we're seeing in the mid valley is a result of expansion and a demand that is created by the industry that is up there on the four mountains that's just basically and the other recreational opportunities so i'm all in on working on this uh and giving you more feedback if that's appropriate but i think the other thing that we stumbled into was during that growth advisory committee group meeting was we didn't share all the same values. We definitely had to get rid of that conversation and refocus on the solution as opposed to what we shared. And I think what you'll find, and this has been reported before, that the difference in the shared value expectations to the south and the expectations to the north are completely different. And that became a bit of a struggle. The other thing that Glenwood's doing now is there was an article today about the South Bridge. So if they construct that, that's gonna take their issues potentially downtown away, but put more cars on the road. And that was highlighted, the Glenwood Bridge and the airport were the two bookends of what was gonna contain land use in between Glenwood and Aspen. So geographically, we have the urban growth boundary. I don't know that anybody else does, but that has its tricky consequences too. So I really think this, and one of the things we're looking at to resolve this is a better facility for our public works and our police so that we can do a better job of managing this infrastructure in the future and that's where i think we need to really go when we're having these conversations most of our housing applications right now have a significant amount of deed restricted and that's what we're trying to do is house a local workforce so um anyway i was having like those moments of deja vu for a couple hours today and i think that you know i like the work you're doing i appreciate the involvement and you know bennett used to refer to our community as the neighbors to the north so i'd like to get rid of that down valley up valley deal because i think specifically goal two reference congestion in the upper valley so maybe get take that out of the whole conversation

Yeah, I think that's and that's what I mean. We realized sort of during the course of all those meetings that we needed to have the conversation all up and down the Valley and we need input from folks will be very appreciated.

Guarantee it.

Yeah, we really appreciate the work you guys are doing.

I think everybody else have any other comments or I got a couple yeah, a couple.

Traffic is a huge deal, right? Totally recognize that. I appreciate all the work you put into it. You said here the details of the plan are less important than the balance, benefits, and options. So kind of getting away from details, big picture. You're looking for buy-in and ideas. I want to be very clear, I do not buy in to these ideas. I have some major problems with a lot of these findings. I think it's way too much of an up-valley focus. Even your comments saying the only congested areas from the airport in, you talk people commute, it's getting out of Aspen. It's just as big of a problem. I think carpooling is unrealistic and like the reliance on carpooling app and kind of using disincentives to push people into carpooling is that's where we get into details and see a lot of challenges there. I think carpooling is happening. If it's convenient, it works. If it works, it's already happening. I think the other big thing that got me is you're not addressing what you call these distributed commercial activity centers. These large homes function as distributed commercial activity centers, creating traffic patterns that bypass public transit investments and strain railroad infrastructure. And you go on to show us that 20% of trips, of residential trips, come from these large homes, and 43% of the traffic through the Aspen roundabout in the morning was from Aspen residents. That's not addressed in here. I think that the other part of it, and the key goals of this, as a representative of Basalt, I would want to know why would a resident of Basalt be supporting these plans that are to cut through Aspen neighborhood traffic? I understand how frustrating that is. I used to live in the West End. I totally get what that's like. But why would somebody in Basalt have to bear that burden? And so just like ideas, so I just had a lot of problems with a lot of the suggestions. Just some ideas that maybe to throw in there with your dynamic pricing, these hot lanes, this idea of if you're an Aspen registered vehicle and you're going through the roundabout in the morning, coming in or going out in the afternoon, you should be charged so much more than a down Valley commuter. And so like maybe your phase 0.5 is says, we're gonna start charging Aspen residents. And it's gonna be something like, you know, a hundred times we're gonna charge these down Valley commuters because you live in Aspen, you can bike. You have a lot of other options that are much more convenient than somebody coming down from Glenwood. So let's start there. And then the other thing is Rafta. Rafta works great. And there's like this new Rafta flyer program that starts next week that's going to take people from Brush Creek basically up to the airport, Castle Creek, Maroon Creek, and back. And so a lot of people I know, we all drive to Brush Creek and hop on the bus there. My problem currently with Raft, the reason I'm doing that, I don't even want to, I would rather take the bus here from Basalt, but going in the morning, I can never get a seat. By the time the bus gets here, it's already full. And so if I got ski gear and I got things to carry, it's full, right? So what a lot of people are doing is they're driving to Brush Creek or they're getting someplace else where they can leave a car and e-biking in. So those are a couple ideas. I just want to be clear, I do not have buy-ins.

Yeah, let me just respond to at least a couple of them because you have a lot in there, which are all concerns and all great questions. ride your apps have been shown extremely extremely successful in europe france has one that it's called the blah blah system blah blah means you can sort of pick who you want to ride with if you want to ride with someone who you like to talk to you can if you don't want to talk to anybody you could chose that person they have millions millions of people are utilizing that app We've looked at a couple of apps.

And there's financial incentives.

No, I read those, but we're just so different. You're comparing a whole country to our unique valley that has this unique demand generating where it's like, it's not going to carpool. Because I can carpool and say, hey, I'm going to the hospital. And I'm going to pick somebody up who's got a job up on Red Mountain. How does that work? Do I just drop them off at the roundabout and say, make your way from here? That's what the app does.

It matches you with somebody who's going to where you're going.

I think that already happens. Again, we're not trying to capture everybody. We're just trying to reduce by 7%. We know we're not going to capture everybody. In terms of the roundabout, the study that shows that in the morning, it's really tied to the school district, the Aspen school district. So in the morning, you see parents who are driving their kids from inside the roundabout to the Aspen school district. And what that does is as they're coming into the roundabout, they have the right of way. And so that backs up traffic on 82 coming in. So we are working with the Aspen School District to look at how they can address that problem. And so that's one idea. There are challenges in all these things, but unless you try it, what's the solution? When I served on RAFTA and and they were putting together the Grand Avenue Bridge, which was going to be a major, major problem. We came up with some great incentives for people, for carpooling work, RACA had increased service, and they were able to address that problem. The issue was that once that bridge was done, as Susan was talking about induced demand, everybody went back to their old habits. So it requires a change in habits, it requires a change in thinking, because it's not just an Aspen problem. People in Aspen are not commuting on 82 coming into Aspen from 7 in the morning to 9 in the morning. They're coming from Rifle, from Newcastle, from Sill, from Glenbury, from Carbondale, from Basalt.

I would love to see a model of what you just touched on, George, of if we can just get Aspen, post-roundabout Aspen school-destined people to carpool with each other.

instead of each Range Rover for sure to the school independently I mean that like you said I mean that slows down absolutely traffic a ton like I think it was 11 minutes the data said and you guys are gonna correct me if I'm making up numbers here but it was about 300 school trips causes 11 minutes of delay for the thousands of folks coming down Valley and we did have Reagan who runs the Aspen School District transportation efforts in there and she came out with a lot of ideas I think several of which that she's going to be implementing to try to reduce transportation committee within the school district to address that I don't that's a kind of it's a tough battle because there's a lot of parents that think that's their time with their kids and they value it and

So, you know, there's going to be some work to be done there.

Well, similarly to, you know, the argument is now it's time to use sticks, right? We've tried to use carrots for so long. Now is the time for sticks. I mean, there's a lot of... NIMBY system you know that is well yeah it all sounds well and good to reduce traffic until you tell me that I can't you know in to Aspen for my doctor's appointment because it is way more convenient than taking the bus unless there's some sticks involved so I'd be interested to know if the school district is or willing to use some sticks as well.

Yeah.

And I would respectfully disagree with my fellow counselor about carpooling. I worked in San Francisco and lived in the East Bay in my 20s. And so I'm very familiar with organic carpooling and people would just literally line up outside of a BART station and a car would pull up and you did not get to say yay or nay to the car. The first three people in line got in that car. That car took off, went over the bridge. Nobody paid for anything. And there was like a designated drop off spot at the other side. And then you jump on public transportation to get wherever you need to go within San Francisco. And it worked great. I know this is a different valley, but I think that there's opportunities for that to work here. My other comment though is like a very minor thing to start with. would maybe just be some education around our existing hov lane because on the rare occasions that i drive up valley during commute hours i'm always like okay i'm a single person so i shouldn't be in the hov lane but then technically in colorado you're not supposed to drive in the left lane so like am i going to get pulled over if i'm speeding because people behind me want to go faster i'm going to get pulled over because i'm in the hov lane and i'm a single per like that literally that conversation is happening in my head so like even just to have some clarity around how that

Yeah, same, because I move over to let people that are riding me, right, in the left lane pass, but then I'm like, well, I'm just one person, am I going to get a ticket? I know. And then I have the intention of going back in, so I need education.

It's a very unusual valley because of RAFTA. I'm not blaming Raft, but I'm just saying because they've got to make the stops, they have to be in the right lane, which is not normally the HOV lane. So we have a new challenge with that.

I think that's a detail that you talk about reducing safety risks. If I'm in this phase one where only one, we have the hot lane, right, where people can choose to pay. So I'm in the left lane. I have to get to my exit. We're dynamic pricing it because we wanted to go 40 to 45 miles per hour, you're saying. I'm in stop-go traffic. Now I'm moving into a lane that's going 45 miles per hour. That seems really dangerous for that driver going 45 miles per hour. So I think there's like, I didn't get into the details because I think there's a lot of details that are challenging here.

Absolutely.

But I just think big picture, this approach is, I understand there's disincentives, but to me it's like the total absence of addressing the appendix that talks about these large homes, these distributed activity centers, having, that's more than your 7% that you're looking to reduce. And so to me it seems like that's a good place to start.

That's a very key point in the Growth Advisory Committee's codification process was the number of employees that are required when nobody's living there. Exactly. It's saying this has happened year-round. All day. But anyway, back to your notion of collaboration, the RAFRA, Roaring Fork Railroad Holding Authority, that Tom Mullen and Chris Lane led, got eight governments to throw in to buy the Rio Grande Corridor. And that was probably one of the bigger collaborations this valley has ever seen in terms of that, that we had the alignment C that goes through basalt here. But maybe that could serve as a model for how that worked with the governments, because Newland's still around, so is Lane.

Newland's still involved with it.

Does he? Yeah. And that became, you know, and there's an interesting relationship there with Pitkin County on that corridor as well because the lower valley is in Garfield and Eagle and then it transitions to Pitkin and the rule books are a little bit different for each of those sections of trail. So it was cool when we were talking about that initially because we thought we'd be the first place to have with a train start from but unfortunately bennett can tell you the rest of that yeah but i think that was a real great that was a really good example of how everybody shared proportionally to their budget the cost of this process and we were initially in the pool as a one-eighth and we said we aren't one-eighth we're like 132nd the funding mechanism so that's the other thing we I mean, we're not here because we want you to help pay for Aspen, you know, improvements. But that's the level of participation that was modeled.

But I would say the things that, because I live in Snowmass Village, so I have the same issue of, you know, coming into Aspen and When I look at the hot lane, I think, okay, well that gives me a choice. If I'm really in a hurry, I'm willing to pay, I can get in the hot lane. The other lane actually will go faster than general traffic does now because more cars will be in the hot lane. So it's actually, the idea is that it's better for everyone. You have a choice. It's not any worse than it is now. It's helping everyone all the way up Valley, regardless of where the hotline is installed, I guess.

And again, modeling is going to tell us a lot. We need to do modeling. But the beauty of all these ideas are they're flexible, they're experimental, they could be changed, they could be adapted relatively without a lot of cost compared to the millions and millions of dollars that's going to cost to add more lanes, more concrete, right?

Or more buses, for that matter.

Yeah.

So anyway, that's the challenge. Again, we're up and down a valley just trying to address and answer some of these questions. And hopefully the next year we'll have some more information nailed down in terms of rideshare applications, who might actually oversee it, how the school district is looking, the Aspen School District, in terms of trying to encourage a different way to have kids go to school. We're certainly working with CDOT as well as with the city of Aspen with some of these ideas. And when we made a presentation to Glenwood a few weeks ago, they were really hot on the idea of ride share because they see the backup coming into Glenwood off the I-70 corridor. The queue is way back. It's really becoming a dangerous situation. And so they're looking at the ideas of how they can reduce traffic coming through their town, they've reduced traffic coming through their town, it means you've got traffic, less traffic coming up and down the mid valley into Aspen. So, you know, it's a regional problem, it needs to be addressed as Rick said, it needs to be a collaborative solution.

So we appreciate your time.

Yeah, thank you for coming tonight. I know we've got Hannah with you guys. We can feed stuff through here, reach out to you both directly or all three of you. But I appreciate this. And I know this is going to be an ongoing conversation and a little involved.

Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, guys.

All right. We are going to move on to council actions. Item 7A is interviews and motion to appoint member to Parks Open Space Trails Post Committee. We have interviews and appointment of prospective post members, Alan Liu and Sam Daniels. Carlton, I'll let you two for two other people.

Good evening, guys. Carlton Henry, Planner 2 with the Town of Basalt. And I'm here to introduce interviews and appointments for one remaining parks open space and trails space. Staff recommends this evening that town council review the two applications for the two applicants. interview them consider questions and comments and again make an appointment to that single open seat on the post committee at the end of 2025 two of the post committee members that we had on stepped down and since then we have replaced one of those post members with George Trantau who joined after the disbanding of Mid-Valley Trails Committee. And this evening, as mentioned, we have two applicants for your review. And staff recommends that following the interview that counsel make a motion to appoint one of those applicants to a three year term, which is typical to end on June 23rd, 2029, just in order of. How the applications have appeared we have Alan Liu here as well as Sam Daniels So I guess we'll just begin with Alan and I'll let you guys Take it from here.

Great. Well, we have I know Gloria you put together some questions So if you guys don't mind I'm just gonna ask the three questions of each candidate and then if there's any follow-up We can do that. So Alan, what's your familiarity with the post committee? This is kind of an open-ended question.

So, um I think the joke is playgrounds and parks, but no, my familiarity is because I was actually on the Mid-Valley Trails Committee, so we worked with them closely to provide some of the Mid-Valley Trail funds towards post-projects, but focusing on our basalt open spaces, trails, and parks, but just providing, supporting the open space that we all love.

Great. And what opportunities do you see for town council in relation to post in 2027? Can you repeat that again? What opportunities do you see for town council in relation to post in 2027?

I think the opportunity is to, I think, from the perspective of being on Mid-Valley Trails, expanding the scope a little bit into more of our dirt trails and not just the local parks. I feel like there's been amazing investments in our local parks and paths that there's an opportunity to maximize and connect all the different areas of Basalt with different trails, but also expand on going into our surrounding areas that we should also maintain and steward.

Great. And then finally, how would you balance the needs and priorities of different user groups as you recommend post projects?

It's always about being equitable. So depending on the specific project, seeing its purpose and making sure it serves all users and what the intended purpose is. So obviously making, evaluating, improving a park to a more remote trail that might be more towards hikers and bikers would require different evaluation, but to understand its purpose to be able to allow all the user groups to access the trail.

Any follow-up questions for Alan?

I had a question. Good to see you, Alan. Good to see you, Greg. Alan and I went to elementary through high school together. Known you a long time, but unfortunately haven't seen you since. Glad to see you here and showing up. And thank you for your willingness to be a part of local government. So my question would be, it's kind of a two-part question. So the first part, in just a few words, how do you use parks, open spaces, and trails?

I'm an avid mountain biker and road rider, so I use all of our paved trails to get to the mountain biking trails. I have a dog, so I enjoy all the parks here. I do use Crown Mountain a little bit more, so I know that's a little bit out of the reach here. You know, I think growing up in this valley, yeah, I think it's just our open spaces are what we use all that makes us so special. And yeah, the Salt River Park, I love soaking in there to kind of recover.

So I know you're a big biker. And so really the real question, though, I'm curious, and that's kind of what I'm learning new to this whole thing, is to think about another user group whose needs are different than yours. And how would you summarize what's important to them? Because one thing that I've been learning in this place is having to really advocate and represent for people that you don't share the same needs with, right? And it might be something that you don't, because POST is a really important committee. It's got a lot of money. And so how would you support or summarize a different user group's needs?

Um, I think like, you know, uh, being on mid valley trails, we, we looked at how we had to provide safety, uh, signage for equestrian usage. So we supported, um, the groups there on evaluating their needs and, uh, projects on, uh, they had an initiative of trying to educate, um, all users of the groups on the safety of how to interact with equestrians on trail. Um, So being on a committee like this exposes me to all the different users groups and seeing them through that lens and always taking the opportunity to stand in their shoes to learn how they interact and use these spaces and do the best to kind of accommodate to their desires and needs.

Thanks, Greg. Any other questions for Alan? All right. Sam, do you want to come up? So I'll start with the same question. So the open-ended one first. What is your familiarity with the post committee?

Yes, happy to answer. I am a licensed landscape architect. I work here in town at Design Workshop. Maybe it was three years ago, our firm has an annual MLK Day of Service where we volunteer in our communities. It's January, it's snowy, so I had the idea of offering our services to the town of Basalt. We engaged with Michelle and town staff and were able to get the ball rolling on some of the community engagement and design ideas for the safe routes to school, the pedestrian bridge. So I got to lead the engagement with the Girl Scouts and get their ideas and feedback on the pedestrian bridge and its future. We then presented to the Parks, Open Space, and Trails Committee. So that was my first experience with them. I've also had the opportunity to shadow their last two meetings, which I found really insightful and inspiring. ready to get plugged in if that's the direction you guys move thank you and next question is what opportunities do you see for Town Council in relation to post in 2027 absolutely so I think basalt has a wonderful parks open space and trails system to me I see the post committee as and the town council as the shepherds of something that is already great. You'll have wonderful staff working out in the parks and in your open space and I see it as a collaboration and a way to continue like how much I've seen our town and how vibrant some of these old town has become since the construction has moved on and then as well as the construction of the park. I love the Wednesday night concert series. I also work over there, so I'm walking the trail all the time, but just to summarize, I think it's continuing to shepherd something that's already world-class.

Thank you. And final question, the regular ones, the prepared ones. How would you balance the needs and priorities of different user groups as you recommend post-projects?

Absolutely. As a landscape architect, community engagement and different user groups are always at the front of my mind. I'm doing some work in Aspen right now on John Denver Sanctuary in the Rio Grande Park. And a lot of my work is observation, being out there and spending time and just seeing how people use these spaces. And in that instance, You have a park that was built before the Americans with Disabilities Act and you see someone push a stroller and then stop and then look and turn around because they can't experience the rest of the park. You start to see people who start to stumble around the boulders. Really observing is a core value of mine and understanding to see how people use spaces and how we as a community can help them get better access.

Thank you. Any further follow-up questions?

I'd like to ask mine. It kind of ties in. I'll try to word it maybe better. But just like a couple words, how do you use parks, open spaces, and trails? What do you like to do? And then thinking of another user group whose needs are different than yours, how would you summarize what's important to them?

Absolutely. I am a passive park user. I'm sitting out at the Wednesday night concert series on a blanket and listening to music. I'm getting some shade, getting some time away from the office and the screens out in our riverfront trail. I also... We'll be biking to work tomorrow. I live on the south side, so it's bike-to-work day, so I'm super excited about that. And so I'm really someone who uses it from a commuter and just sort of general passive space lens. I think there are others on the committee who... maybe have that more recreational lens of how people are coming to Basalt to use our open spaces, which is very valuable. So say, for instance, it's a fisherman. When we got to sit into the parks open space, when I got to sit in the post committee, there was discussions about the little pull-off parking onto Rivers Road and how fishermen use it. So that's the other lens I would give is Basalt's a town that's so proud of its mountains and its rivers, and people come here to experience that. So a tourist is another person who I think we ought to plan for.

Can I ask one more question? Sure. I had two, and I just thought I would ask you the first one the first time, because it's sometimes easier to think about it a little bit. So I was going to ask you, and then if I could have Alan answer the same question.

I'm good with that.

So access is really important, but so is also protection of our natural resources and habitat. So just talk me through how you think about that balance of access versus preservation.

Absolutely. My very first job where I started my career after grad school was in rural East Tennessee working for the Tennessee River Line Partnership. It was a regional planning initiative that offered design and planning assistance to rural communities along the Tennessee River. And specifically, I grew up on a cattle farm in Tennessee. So we partnered with the university who had an agricultural research facility at the trailhead of the Tennessee River. And we wanted to, multiple sort of benefits, but expose people to agriculture as well as the start of the Tennessee River. And so I've done research in graduate level schooling about the line between preservation as well as education and access. And so I could probably talk to you all night. However, I'll stop.

We'll have you come back with your TED talk. It's here.

Ask me about native plants.

Are we going to have Alan?

Alan, do you want to answer that one too?

Is this a debate? We have amazing organizations and Our cities and governments here that really support all of our preservation and opportunities to have open space, but in my eyes. Having something like we all we are very, very good at preserving, but I think without providing access, I think it's harder to. Kind of promote. additional preservation, because you have to be in the open space, in a user. And I think with the committees that we have together, with POST, with all the organizations, we have a lot of knowledge power that allows very smart access to preservation. Thank you.

Do you have one?

Just a question on, we talked earlier about the assets that the town holds in the open space and trails, river riparian access, parks, concert venues, turf fields, active recreation, passive recreation. And Doug commented that it's $100 million. point I guess is that preservation and protection of those open spaces falls to a separate entity in the sense that the town supports them with our police and Public Works and I'd like to know what your feelings are about the level of caretaking that exists now is there Do you think there's a, I mean you mentioned the anxiety and stress that you go through every day on your job and then going out there and sitting there. So there is some pent up stress and so on and trying to really take care of this place that we created. So I wonder how you feel about supporting the people that really do take care of these spaces on a daily basis, 365 days a year.

Absolutely. That goes back to my answer about a stewardship role. work over in the River Park. So I see Chris, the town arborist, out there doing manual labor all day, every day. And so I'm very cognizant and want to recognize the labor of the people who maintain our open spaces. And so I see that, and I want to join the committee as... a voice and a fellow steward, not so much as a critic.

Thanks.

Do you want Alan to take a swing at that one too? Sure.

I didn't know it was Rob Robin, but yeah, go for it. It would be a question. The support that the open spaces, trails, recreation, active, passive, river, riparian, etc., sidewalks, 7-11 bridge, all those things that are on the list that don't have, you know, mountain biking and trails. And my kid's been riding that stuff before. It was legit. So we have that in front of us to see if we're up staffing appropriately, funding appropriately, maintaining appropriately to a level that maintains where we are today. And like I said, the asset is in land value alone significant. So how do you feel about taking a look at that as we go forward?

I think it's super important. One of the drivers of why I'm here tonight is what we were doing. I don't want to keep bringing up mid-valley trails, but the reason I'm here is that in our tiny little percentage of what now is part of the post-budget, we were very effective in those dollars of supporting our FMBA to build all the trails on the Crown. and supporting all the volunteers and all the paid workers actually did that, supporting all the different projects. So investment in people to create and maintain is very, very important. And I think why I'm here today is that I don't want to get too much on the tangent here, but because of how Mid Valley Trails got disbanded, I feel like My volunteerism of stewarding those funds and maintaining trails that we've started to build, my voice has potentially disappeared into a very, very big bucket now. And that's where one of the reasons I'm standing here is to advocate for maintenance and supporting and protecting everything that we've built. So not just the ones that we started, but everything that POST has done to today. Thanks. Yeah.

Can I ask Carlton a question? Yeah. Just a generic question. What's the balance of folks who live in Old Town compared to Willits on the post board?

Since we have parks and trails strewn all over the place. I can give you.

And while you're looking at that, I have a similar question. Who else from Mid-Valley Trails is currently on the post committee?

We have a couple people from Mid-Valley Trails on our committees in general. They're an involved bunch. But on post, it's just George Trantau right now, who was previously a post member and then a long-serving member of Mid-Valley Trails Commission. Thanks. I will pull up the applications here. I can tell you Jason lives in Old Town. Paul lives in Old Town. Mercedes lives in Old Town. Julie actually lives just outside of town limits but is a long-serving and if I'm correct original member original member of post Charlie is in Willits and George Trantow George getting there I think George isn't well it's already balanced it's pretty balanced okay And correct me if I'm wrong, Alan, you were on your Willett side? And then Sam Southside. You know, small town. It's a pretty good balance.

It's not an easy decision. Do either of you have an interest in a different board, whether that's art, planning and zoning, green team, anything like that? You're both amazing, and we'd love to plug you in somehow.

I haven't looked into them enough to confidently answer that.

Yes, but at another time. I'm currently the board president of Roaring Fork Cycling, and that's been a bigger initiative. I think, again, this is just me trying to honor my commitment to the Mid-Valley Trails.

Are there any other board openings right now that you know of?

You're saying outside of post? Yeah. i would have to look to answer what they are but i believe there are still openings pnz has an alternate available has one opening too yeah so we got some we got some openings for sure hey both of you guys it seems like parks is in your we in is in your wheelhouse

so it's not it's not an easy decision for this group um we have an open discussion here it's an open meeting so thoughts or comments um from well i um so usually we have to make this decision

I think that there's the winds of change are kind of blowing in here around us as far as post and how it's funded and what we're trying to do looking forward with our support people. I think it's very important that we have a lot of voices on post right now that support the mountain biking trails. That's a universal thing. From here to Newcastle, it's becoming a hot spot now. you know so i i think there's always going to continuing to be a lot of enthusiasm for getting into our outdoor spaces that are only accessible by a mountain bike or dirt bike or whatever equestrian but there's there seems to be a growing energy for the spaces that we've activated for concerts and riverfront parks and pedestrian ways safe fast to school things like that and i think personally um the background that sam has uh is well suited to that um i'm glad you showed up i have no problem with what you want to do at all my like i said you know my son started building his own bikes when he was like nine and unfortunately ended up upside down too many times but I think that that's that's kind of trending in the messaging that I'm getting from the community is we've got the out we've got contact with the outdoors let's focus on the confluence of the two rivers in that general area which is why we did what we did over there that's our brand so I'm gonna stick with that idea

I'll jump in here too, and I'll keep it pretty simple. I just think that Sam's professional background and day-to-day work really suits post. Again, kind of like we got all the rest of the members in their resumes, and I think that it backfills really nicely. So that would be my vote as well.

So I'm going to have a contrary point of view. I think it's good. And I'd be thrilled to have either of you join this board or really any board. But I'm cognizant of the fact that we did absorb the mid valley trails committee and i think that the work that alan and team were doing i from a continuity perspective i'd like for alan to you know if there was a majority to continue that but like i said i'm thrilled let's be very clear i'd be thrilled with either one of you guys joining the board it's just If I have to do a tiebreaker which we do my tiebreaker is the fact that you are on the valleys trails and I'd like to see you see some of the work that you were doing through.

I'll just chime in I go as well I think you're both great I really appreciate both coming up. If not selected I hope you consider one of the other committees and opportunities to be engaged in our community. Um, but I would, I would end up voting for Sam. I think that your, your, your career that lends you well for what you're doing. I liked how you're already familiar with some of these ADA concepts and you're talking about going through the John Denver sanctuary. Um, I like how you already been engaged, you know, you know, the town Arborist name. Like I, I appreciate that. Um, so I would vote for Sam.

All right. Angela, I know you're out there, so make sure you're ready to unmute without letting you off the hook.

I think we need seven tonight.

I'm appreciating that.

I agree with the sentiment in the room that both of these gentlemen are very well qualified. And I've I really can't say I would like to be able to continue his his commitment to this trail. I'm super impressed Alan with your commitment to continue that work. But then Sam had me at noticing a mother not being able to push her stroller because that's me in so many parts. So I think both of them are looking at all the right things and would be great great stewards of our parks so. I will defer to you guys.

Thanks, Angela. All right.

Yeah, I mean, I'm going to echo what everybody else has said.

Angela, you weighed in on Alan, is that right? Did I interpret that correctly? Just for the benefit of the folks in the room.

I could vote for either Alan or Sam. Okay, so you're not.

I heard something about the continuity, but I just want to make sure we're all on the same page.

I like Sam's perspective of noticing how other people who are different from him interact with parks and open spaces. His comment about the stroller was meaningful to me. I've been in that situation many times. okay um and so he seems like a candidate that would look at parks from other people's lenses and i like that all right i'm just gonna go simple here and sam okay so that's i think that's four four

Are you off the hook?

So I don't have to make a decision. Well, that's not fair. No, I think you both are excellent. The fact that we have two remarkably qualified candidates, one who's already proven that they're committed to this town and willing to keep serving, another that has kind of done so much in open space professionally and has demonstrated an ability to really look out for how other people are using these public spaces we use so much is such a joy. one thing on my mind is the cost of maintaining all of our assets I feel like we keep hearing from Doug you know we want to do all of these things and and we need to make sure that we can pay for their upkeep and maintenance and our staff and and I think your job professionally might give you a better sense of those financials but I I don't know what term limits look like but I'm generally a favor of getting people in the door like this is civic engagement at its best in democracy at its best and if if there are members who have been on post for for a long time and and might want to let some fresh new faces who would do excellent work on the board i'd certainly encourage that maintenance is going to be critical um rethinking how we

do some of that I think in the next couple this year and probably next year too as far as you know how we allocate finite resources.

In looking at the applications today as we were pulling those for you guys there are going to be some people coming up in the next you know there are only three year terms so um if that's something that council wants to consider uh to discuss and to direct staff to you know try to bring in some new blood we can have those conversations but um there will definitely be some folks next year who will be up yeah if there's open I mean I'd love yeah please come back yeah please come back and like well I can't I guess we can't say you're a shoe in but

I will be at the post meetings.

Yeah, I mean, if there's an opportunity, somebody said alternate, you know, I don't know what the bylaws allow, but if we don't have a post alternate, maybe that is an opportunity.

think that's some good direction and I will just state for the record and for anybody who's online here all of our citizen board committees are open and we love to have people come in you know if you're not presenting if you're not on the board and they're relatively casual so you get the opportunity to make your voice heard even if you're not voting on on the items and I think it's a great way to get plugged in so Yeah, please come.

The bylaws don't currently allow for an alternate, but there are staggered terms and there are three years, so there should be somebody coming up every year.

And are there term limits?

Not that I know of.

It does not appear so.

There's a founding member. I know.

That's what's in my mind.

And we set the number. We set the length of the term, but yeah, they can re-up as much as we'll have them and they want to do it.

Which I think is probably necessary to protect in the years that we're not so lucky to have. Yeah. Qualified. If someone does want to continue to serve, they can do so out of default and necessity.

You wouldn't want to kick somebody off and have an empty seat. Exactly. Totally. Totally.

Yeah. This is a unique situation. Yeah. Yeah.

I wish we had to make this decision every time.

Well, if someone want to make a motion for Sam.

Mayor, I move that Town Council appoint Sam Daniels to post for a three-year term to end June 23, 2029.

Second.

It's been moved and seconded. We have to do roll call because Angela's online. Pam, will you please call the roll? Sure. Absolutely.

Let's begin with Hannah Berman. Yes. Angela Anderson. Yes. Rick Stevens. Yes. Angel Dupre-Bouchard. Yes. Greg Schaffran. Yes. David Knight. Yes. Annalise Hoddle. Yes. Motion carries unanimously. Thank you.

And thank you both sincerely for your service. And I hope you stay involved. And I hope we can find a formal home for you too. But I just appreciate what both of you have done and are wanting to do. But thank you. Thanks, Carlton.

Come back in six months.

All right. We have one more item left. Item 7B, first reading ordinance number 14, series of 2026. In ordinance of the Town Council, the Town of Basalt, Colorado, vacating a waterline easement. approving a license agreement for property located at 142 Swinging Bridge Lane, Basalt, Colorado. Sarah.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I want to introduce online, we have the applicant's representative, Scott Broughton, who is the architect as well as the representative. Scott, I hope you are still here with us tonight. Oh, awesome. Thank you. So as you mentioned, this is first reading of ordinance number 14, series of 2026. Council is being asked to consider two requests from the owners of the subject parcel, and they include granting an easement for improvements within the right-of-way and vacating an easement for an abandoned water line at 142 Swinging Bridge Lane. And staff has included a draft ordinance, number 14, in your packet for consideration. Go to the next slide, please. Just wanted a quick orientation. I'm sure you're all familiar with Swinging Bridge Lane, have starred the property that's in question. This contains a single family residence and it backs up to the Frying Pan River. Next slide, please. The first item is to address the request for a license agreement to permit the driveway and landscape improvements within the right-of-way. The request has been supported by Planning as well as Public Works staff through a 2025 Technical Review Committee TRC approval for the improvements within the right-of-way, subject to receiving Council approval for a license agreement prior to the issuance of the final letter of completion for the improvements on the site. The drafted license agreement is revocable. The improvements will better define the driveway into the site as well as complement the existing neighborhood context. And the improvements will not impact the roadway probably most importantly. The applicant has done some initial trenching but has not yet completed any intended work in this area. Next slide please. I'm sorry and then of course the The area that was for the license agreement was highlighted in yellow, just to be clear. Next slide, please. The second item is a request to remove a water line easement that crosses the property. And this is the water line is actually defined by the yellow line. The easement is 20 feet off of each of the the midpoint there. So the blue lines are defining the easement area. The water line was abandoned in 2021 when swinging bridge lane had a water main that was relocated and replaced and the service lines for the property were also adjusted at that time. So that same aforementioned TRC certificate created a condition of approval for the applicant to receive approval to vacate the abandoned water line easement prior to receiving the letter, the final letter of completion for improvements to the site. So those are the two situations that are being covered by the ordinance. The applicant's representative again is here today joining remotely and is able to answer any questions that you may have or ask of staff. Also, if you have any May ask any additional questions or if any information is needed for second reading. Staff recommends that the Town Council approve ordinance number 14 series of 2026 on first reading and schedule the second reading of the ordinance for July 14th, 2026. So happy to have any questions you might have me.

Thank you. Any questions or comments on this one?

Could you just put up the site plan one more time?

Sure.

And I would add that this is a similar request to one that council saw

in the last year or so on 124 Swinging Bridge. There was a vacation of a water line on that one as well because that whole water line was vacated. And then there were some improvements in the right of way for that one as well to kind of better organize drainage and access on the road.

Yeah, so this did sound familiar. I was like, I feel like we've seen her. Yeah.

I feel like that was when I was here.

Yeah, it might have been.

It may have been a little longer than I remember.

Three years ago. So yeah, maybe.

But I don't have any questions on this one.

Mayor. I move that the town council approve ordinance number 14 series of 2026 and sent the public hearing and second reading for July 14th, 2026. Second.

Pam, did you get that?

I did.

It's been moved and seconded.

Will you please call the roll? Roll call?

Please.

Let's begin with Rick Stevens.

Yes.

Angel Dupree-Bouchard. Yes. Greg Schaffran. Yes. David Knight. Yes. Elise Hoddle. Yes. Hannah Berman. Yes. And Angela Anderson. Yes. Thank you, Angela. Motion carries. Thank you very much.

Thank you, everyone. And this concludes our meeting, so I will adjourn.