City Council - Special Meeting

Good evening or afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the Thursday, August 13th, 2021. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the Thursday, August 13th, 2026 special meeting of the Boulder City Council. I will go ahead and call us to order. We have a roll call, please, Alicia.

Yes, sir. Good evening, everyone, and thank you for joining us. We'll start tonight's roll call, as usual, with Council Member Adams.

Present.

Benjamin. Present. Mayor Brockett. Present. Councilmember Kaplan. Present. Marquis.

Present.

Shewhart.

Here.

Speer. Present. And Mayor Pro Tem Wyman. Present.

Mayor, we have our quorum. Thanks so much. We have one item on the agenda for the special meeting. If you can take us to that, please, Alicia.

Yes, sir. Our second item on tonight's agenda is our executive session. It is item 2A, the consideration of a motion to call an executive session of the City Council pursuant to 24-6402-4A of the Colorado Revised Statute and City of Boulder Charter Section 21A, Two, to receive confidential legal advice regarding potential new litigation.

Thanks so much. And I will just go ahead and get us started with a motion if people don't mind. So I am going to go ahead and move that we call an executive session of the City Council pursuant to 246424ACRS and City of Boulder Charter Section 21AA2 to receive confidential legal advice regarding potential new litigation.

Second. Second.

We've got a motion and a second issue. Can we have a roll call, please?

Can I ask a quick question?

Yeah, please.

Yep. Can we just confirm that this was properly noticed and adequately noticed? Thanks. Yes. In terms of the description.

Good evening. This description provides as much legal information as can be contained without disclosing the content of the confidential legal advice. And so it is properly noticed under Colorado law and our charter.

Thank you.

Right. A roll call, please. Alicia.

Yes, sir. Thank you. We'll start the roll call for item two, a, the motion to call an executive session with you. Mayor bracket.

Yes.

Council member Kaplan. Yes. Marquis. Yes.

Yes.

Spear. Yes. Mayor Pro Tem Weiner? Yes. Council Member Adams? Yes. And Benjamin?

Yes.

The motion to convene into an executive session is hereby approved unanimously.

Very good. So I have some text to read here. The council calls a special meeting so that it may meet in executive session of the City Council on Thursday, August 13, 2026 at 5 p.m. as authorized by Section 2464024B CRS and City of Boulder Charter Section 21AA2, so the Council may receive confidential legal advice regarding potential new litigation. The following provisions of the Colorado Open Meetings Act authorize an executive session to discuss this matter, and that is conferences with an attorney for the City to receive legal advice on specific legal questions, CRS 2464024B. This topic announcement provides as much detail as possible without compromising the purpose for which the executive session is authorized. So I will now entertain a motion to convene an executive session pursuant to CRS section 246424 for a conference with the city manager and attorney for the city for the purpose previously stated. Second. Actually, I need a motion. Oh.

Can I say so moved?

Yes, you may.

So moved.

Second.

Second.

There we go. We've got a motion and a second. Alicia, can I do a show of hands for this one? Yes, sir, you can. All right. All in favor, please raise your physical hand. Okay. I got nine votes there, I believe. Well, eight, sorry. Everyone present. So the motion for executive session has passed by at least two-thirds of the quorum of the council present. So the motion has passed by a vote of eight to zero. So the council will now recess and reconvene immediately in executive session to discuss the matter previously stated for the purposes previously stated. And council members, you have an appointment on your calendar with the team's link. So log off of this meeting and then please log into that one. We'll go ahead and recess us. has been concluded. The participants in the executive session were Nury Rivera-Vandermeide, Taisha Adams. I'm going to start over again because we weren't recording. So the time is now 6 p.m. and the executive session has been concluded. The participants in the executive session were Nury Rivera-Vandermeide, Taisha Adams, Matthew Benjamin, Aaron Brockett, Rob Kaplan, Tina Marquis, Chris Meschuk, Roberto Ramirez, Ryan Shewhard, Nicole Speer, Heather Stauffer, Teresa Taylor Tate, Luis Toro, and Tara Weiner. For the record, if any person who participated in the executive session believes that any substantial discussion of any matter is not included in the motion to go into executive session occurred during the executive session, or that any improper action occurred during the executive session in violation of the meetings law, I ask that you state your concerns for the record. Seeing none, I will now continue the August 13, 2026 special meeting. I'm going to reconvene that special meeting. And then I will immediately bring the special meeting to a close. So I close that out at 6.01 PM. Thanks, everybody, for joining this special meeting and now closing it out. Nicole, I will hand the reins over to you for the study session.

Great. Thank you so much. Good evening and welcome to tonight's study session of the Boulder City Council. I am Council Member Nicole Speer. Thank you so much for joining us. We have three items on tonight's agenda and I will thank all of my colleagues in advance for adhering to the timeframes we have so that we can get through them all. Our first item will be the strategic planning check in our second item is the discussion regarding the civic area East book and development partnership request for proposals and our last item is the 2026 state and county ballot measures. Before we go into our first work item, I just want to outline how the meeting will be conducted. For each item, we will review the staff's presentation and then we will have some time for questions. After the questions to staff, we'll address the questions from staff. If you have questions during the presentation, please wait for staff to complete their presentation and we get to the questions for staff time. Given that we have a lot to get through, I will be firm about staying on time tonight. We'll now turn it over to our city manager, Nuria Rivera-Vandermeij, to introduce our first item.

Thanks. Thank you so much, Councilmember. And tonight, I'm super excited to talk about the strategic plan. I won't give a lot of preamble before passing it on to the team, but we'll say that last time we had a strategic plan, the first in our city, we did that by gathering a lot of the previous information we had heard from community and shared that with you. This time around, we're doing it right, and we're looking to get you involved, get community involved, and really think about what is our north, our vision for the future. And so with that, staff have been doing a whole lot of work, thinking about and gathering inputs and preparing for a more fulsome discussion with community and with you in the future. But we wanted to sort of get your input early and let you know what we were planning and get some feedback. So with that, I will let the team take it from there. I forget, Pam, if you were taking it or if it's going straight to Matt.

I am. Matt is going to be pulling up the slides. Good evening, council. My name is Pam Davis. I serve as assistant city manager. And tonight my main role is backup singer to Matt Chesanski from the city manager's office who is serving as our strategic planning project manager for this upcoming cycle. As Nuri mentioned, tonight is the first touch point with you all about the development of our 2027 through 2030 citywide strategic plan. We're excited to be bringing you the results of the early stages of our strategic planning process. While the city has benefited greatly from the first iteration of our citywide strategic plan over the last three years, we are eager to share with you some significant process enhancements to develop the city's next one. These enhancements are a result of tremendous staff efforts since the beginning of 2026 to develop a strategic plan process that meets the challenges of our current moment and reflects community perspectives while balancing predictability, transparency, and adaptability. This is our first touch point of several over the next five months. You and our community will have different opportunities to interact with the ongoing plan throughout the remainder of this process. And please keep in mind that this document will be a living compass for the organization for the following four-year timeframe. Tonight, we will describe that process that we have envisioned, share the content that will shape our upcoming strategy development, and seek your feedback on both. Next slide, please. I have just 2 more introductory slides before I turn it over to Matt. I want to ground you all in the years of organizational improvements that have proceeded are currently intertwined with and will follow this strategic planning process. The city has been on a consistent and iterative journey to improve how the city works as an aligned organization. This journey was largely inspired several years ago by our commitment to budgeting for resilience and improvements to how we plan and communicate a unified city work plan. We've then transitioned to recognizing that the city needed stronger central prioritization of our work and commenced the previous strategic plan and then the long-term financial strategy work. We have sought to support our own staff and community along the way with a focus on developing more adaptive leaders at all levels of our organization and to enhance a more consistent approach to customer and community facing services. The moment we are in now is calling for bringing these components together into an organizational strategy and performance management system that is supported by well-coordinated internal services. And all of this work together, we believe, will have profound benefit as we look to the future consolidation of city facilities in the Western City Campus and how we all work together more efficiently there. Next slide, please. My last slide here is a bit of a zoom in on our ongoing work to develop our repeatable process for strategy and performance management in the organization. And we wanted to just share this high level graphic with you to help you see how we envision as staff the role of the strategic plan and its interdependent relationship with both measurement and data analysis to inform both what goes in the strategic plan, as well as to ensure that we are meeting community expectations by what we do with the guidance in that plan, as well as our annual work planning process, which ensures that we have the adequate resources to support the things that we commit that we will do as a city organization. With that, I will now turn you over into Matt Chazansky's capable hands to walk you through our plan.

Great. Thank you so much, Pam, and thank you, members of council, for this invitation to talk about the strategic plan. My name is Matt Chazansky. I'm with the city manager's office. And we're going to be talking about the process for the plan, followed by the early steps, and invite you in. to this conversation that staff has been having about the the conditions, the issues, the considerations we need to understand in order to start the process of designing strategies. And I want to just point out for a second how great an opportunity this is that often our conversations with city council are around decisions and the information you need for decisions. And this is a little bit different. this is a chance for you to engage in the conversation and help us to make this great. And it's a privilege to be able to do that with you. But to start it off and make sure that we're all thinking about this in the same way, we wanted to ground you on the strategic plan, what it is and isn't first. And so the strategic plan and our strategies are going to be the ways we prioritize capacities, resources, the way we focus and report to provide transparency on how we're doing on the work that we have ahead of us. And it is part of a system. The Sustainability, Equity, and Resilience framework, the SARE framework, is our generational vision, our goals over the very long term. And we use the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan policies to describe that in terms of 20 years but the strategic plan is that four-year bite out of that to make it understandable and translate that through budget cycles and work planning and all of the regular work that we have but it's not all about planning it's all about it's also about meeting the needs of the moment to react to opportunities and to be prepared for threats and meet those challenges in a nimble way This is also a way for us to empower all of our staff to be more efficient, effective, and enterprising in the work that we do. And to that end, it connects dots for the annual work planning, the day-to-day work that we do, and even bridging over council terms to make sure that if projects take more than two years that we have a way to plan for that and look ahead. What it is not is a tactical document. You will not find operations, projects, actions. You will not find a map of work plans. The work planning process, the budget process are the ways that we do that. And to that end, it is not gonna be a long list of what's in the staff work plan, or is it gonna be extra work on top of it? It needs to integrate and inform. And then it is not separate from our organizational system. All of these things need to work together. So we are going to be referencing everything up and down through the SARE framework and the comprehensive plan policies through department level planning and our annual activities. So, We do recognize that we can make some improvements over the last plan, and Nuria mentioned this a little bit, and I'm very excited to take on some of these. I won't read everything that's on that list. It was in your packet, but I do want to point out a couple of things that I'm personally very excited about. The second bullet there about acknowledging the services that are critical to the system, we can't really understand how we prioritize strategies and the work that we'll do without acknowledging the fact that our ongoing critical services are the way that the city continues to function and we protect people's safety and well-being. And we need to acknowledge that before we can really talk about prioritizing other strategies. So that will be a part of what we describe in the strategic plan. And we also wanted to beef up our muscles with engagement, both within the staff, all of the staff across departments and in the community. And we have a lot of great resources for that already. And we're leaning heavily on the comprehensive plan and other ways that we've engaged with the community. I'll describe that a little bit in a second. But finally, what I wanted to mention is accountability and transparency has to be a good part of what we do with this strategic plan. And so we're going to be working on the data systems, the reporting, so that the entire time horizon of the plan, we know where we need to go and if we're successful when we get there. So I want to talk you through our project plan so that you can ask your questions and give good advice about how we're going to do this work. And in order to do that, I'm going to first talk about where we've been so far before we talk about where we need to go next. So this project started up in April, and that's when we put together our teams and tools. And I want to acknowledge that we have a staff advisory team, 12 people from across many departments who are helping us with designing the process, reviewing content, helping to assess next steps and make sure that everything is on track. And they're a group of wonderful people that I've been working with. I think we've had about four meetings and so far it's been a fantastic experience and I'm looking forward to continuing to work with them. But I will zoom in a bit to talk about each of these phases, because I think that's important for your understanding. The process where we just came from to gather and collate inputs was a staff process to begin to talk about the conditions in the community we need to consider when we're designing strategies. And so in order to do that, we first categorize what we mean by those conditions. And then we've came up with these four categories of conditions that we could talk about. Services, our planned commitments, emerging opportunities, threats, and organizational improvements. And we built different tools in order to understand each of those. And I'm particularly proud of the work that was done on the environmental scans, which leadership in every department got to participate in as well as special targeted staff workshops in order to develop some drafts of what these inputs could become. So the point we're at right now is that we've collected those staff inputs, considered them carefully, and put together this world of possibility document to be the foundation of conversation moving forward. And maybe this map is a little bit misleading. They're sort of parallel that we're working on this world of possibilities document and inviting you in to comment on it before we finish that up. But we're about at that point now where we're moving from a full understanding of what we need to understand in the community into writing strategies and coming up with likely strategies. This list of what we think is the most credible to have a conversation about and mobilize on. One thing I will say as we continue to go through some of these steps is that we designed it very specifically to get more and more specific and tighter to a finished strategy as we go along. It's an iterative process of narrowing and prioritizing and refining. And we thought that that was important. And there will be some things that we develop through the process that see themselves all the way through to the final document. Some things won't. And a lot of the work that we're doing is about admitting that there's some important things that we need to proceed on. Other things may still need to be addressed. There may be department priorities. There may be um ways that we address the community in other ways in other methods but the strategies themselves will be um at the finish line will be uh what the most important things we need to tackle as an entire city organization and will provide all those benefits that i talked about before so by the time um we get into the end of August, early September, we'd like to have ideas about those likely strategies in a broad sense before we go into some deeper research, some deeper understanding, engaging all staff through several different ways in order to to fully understand how these likely strategies are likely to impact, taking advantage of the expertise on the front lines of the services we provide, the people who are doing the work and connecting with the community most directly. With that great intelligence, we will narrow those strategies down and provide the research, the backing, the sources that are needed before we go into community engagement. And I'll talk in more detail just a second about what we have planned for that. The idea then being that by the end of November, we have a pretty good idea of what these strategies are and can really refine them and get the language just right to serve our needs. so we have a community engagement plan this is just some high level um topics that um we can continue to talk about the um city council touch points is certainly starting today and we'll be updating you regularly but the goal is that uh by your january pre-retreat study session that we have something that is ready for you to uh to to look at and the final draft um can be in your hands We also, during the month of November, will do community online engagement, inviting anyone in the community to give their input about where the document is at and what is missing, what is needing refinement, what is a good idea that needs to continue. And in a similar way, we're going to put together a workshop on November 14th. that you will all be invited to and we'll have joining you the representatives from boards and commissions, the community connectors, some partners in the community, and making sure that we have a detailed conversation to identify all those important refinements that need to happen to the strategies and also do some prioritizing so we can understand, knowing that we can't do everything, that we are doing the things that are most critical. So here's that final point is that that pre-retreat study session will get us to the final citywide strategic plan and the implementation of it. And we're gonna put some effort into describing implementation really well and giving us a little playbook for how to make sure the strategic plan is successful over the coming four years. And I won't read through everything that we have planned and everything isn't even on this slide, but I do want to point out some things that are going to be interesting, including I mentioned that transparency piece. We need to make sure that our data projects or performance management is connected to the plan really strongly and that we continue to monitor success. Also, we want to do continued learning and networking to take advantage of shared leadership across the organization. That'll help us keep things on track as well. And of course, we'll have regular progress updates and ways to improve and refine on the strategies and the actions associated with them every year as we go through the implementation of the plan. So that was the process, both where we've been and where we'd like to go. And we'll be asking you a second for your input about that. But I wanted to back up to where we're at and start to talk about this world of possibilities list that we provided. Just some notes about what we found in the engagement with staff in the beginning of this conversation. That the first of all the inputs that you read that some of them have strategic language, some of them are quite visionary others of them are more prosaic but the point right now is that they are. not the strategies themselves. Those inputs that you read in the World of Possibilities document are the beginnings of formal answers to the question what we will do in the next four years, but they are the observations. They're not the finished language. But when we think about that question of what we will do, that's the definition of a strategy, right? These are also not tactics, initiatives, projects. They don't answer the question of how we're going to get those done. The answers to those questions come when we define actions, when we talk about city council priorities, and when we go through the work planning and budgeting process. Also, as we talk about the inputs, think of them foundational, their ideas and observations, and we want to get those right. They also did have a lot of support built into them. Our engagement with staff included making sure that the sources were right, that these aren't just ideas that we have personally, that they're backed up. with the last community survey or with industry studies, academic work. So we're trying to make sure that everything we say, that we're showing our math, that we understand that this is really important to the community. I also want to give you an example because where we're getting to and what the strategies will become, let's keep our eye on that. The example I wanted to give is from the previous strategic plan. We had strategy number eight. The way we articulated the high-level title of that was to improve accessibility to city meetings, information, and programs through equitable engagement. um that is something that is specific and direct and has a language embedded in it that's measurable and that's where we want to get with this versus you know what you might have seen in one of the inputs which is a welcoming experience with government it describes facts motivations and opportunities not necessarily strategies so we also i want to just um thanks uh the staff who participated in this process to collect the inputs we had over 170 of these proposals We were able to use a couple of tools and have a couple of conversations to digest that into about 40 inputs that you saw in the world of possibilities document in those categories. One of the remarkable things that happened is that there were people from across many departments who. didn't talk, but probably didn't talk, I don't know, maybe they talked to each other, but they came up with some of the same ideas or really aligned ideas from across many departments. And that was great to see that people are really on the same page in our organization and our professionals in the leadership of departments are thinking in a lot of the same ways. Another great indicator was that though we asked people to consider opportunities and threats and to be very open about what these issues are, almost all of them, I think all of them except for two, were directly tied to a policy that's in the current update of the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan that's being considered right now. And so the position, the mental state of our staff is very aligned with where the community brought the comprehensive plan. And that was a really heartening thing to see. I also want to point out that there seems to be an uneven spread with responsibly governed category of the SARE framework getting a lot of attention. That's not really what you're seeing here. All of the other SARE framework goals, the other six goals, tend to be more lofty and visionary and collect more ideas from across the organization. Responsibly governed, it's a bit tighter, a bit finer grained. That's not surprising. This is the way that we're addressing how we can improve ourselves. And so there was naturally at the heart of it, and we're responding to our responsibility to help govern and to provide the systems that are needed for that. So that's something on... the level of continuous improvement how we can do better and i'm very proud of that um but there is a lot of difference right as as we go into building strategies some of these things are going to need to be refined and maybe split and made more specific some of them are going to be combined to make those strategies at the right level So I want to sort of bring this back just for a moment to what we were talking about before, that the criteria for what goes into the treaty plan, what it is and isn't, is important. With a constrained budget, we have that condition pre-existing, but we also have smart, capable, passionate staff who have done so much already, have a lot on their plate, and we all need to make choices. continued work to write and define and draft and research and understand the details of the strategies as they emerge. But we'll also be studying how they affect work plans, capacity, budget implications, all of that will be coming up. And that all leads to the choices that the engagement step will help sort out. If things drop off, it's not that we're forgetting about an issue or it's not important. It may be brought up in department work. There may be other ways that this gets addressed. But what we're heading for with this is the, as I said, important critical work that we have going forward. So before I hand it back for the questions you have for us, I did want to address Councilmember Adams sent a couple questions into the hotline. I just wanted to take the advantage to address those now. On the questions of budget that were raised, staff will be carefully considering the budget and the capacity needs for the strategies in a future step in the planning process. At this point, the world of possibilities documents doesn't contain any commitments. It is an overview of the issues and trends staff believe the city should consider in addressing the in addressing the next four years based on all of the inputs we discussed in the presentation and in the memo. In the coming months of the process, resource constraints will be considered as strategies are drafted and prioritized. Specific budgets will be refined as the project services and other actions are identified to support advancement of the final strategies. Then it will be a part of the annual budget cycle work planning that determine the allocations for those efforts. So, to the next question that was in that hotline post about the community connector engagement, I do want to say that we have engaged with the community connectors just a week ago. We provided them with an introduction to the citywide strategic plan and answered their questions about it. And we decided to give them this. update earlier than any board or commission or community group to ensure that their questions are answered and we get the benefit of their thoughtful consideration at the outset. As we design the community engagement, go through the following steps. So at this meeting, we also offered to continue the conversation with them in future meetings or individually as they desired. So I'm very much looking forward to continuing the conversation with them and seeing their contributions to the workshop on November 14th.

I'm sorry, point of clarification, Matt. My question was actually when it sounded as if you'd said budget versus actuals. And I also was talking about outcomes and outputs from the existing plan. And it said that staff would be considering, will that information be made available to us and the other critical stakeholders of this plan?

Yes, yes. So in addition to the, thank you for that, in addition to the budget considerations that we're going to be coming forward, a report on the outcomes of the last plan will be in your future, and that will be important for considering how we finish up this plan.

And were they considered by staff before they made these world of possibilities? Were these world of possibilities grounded in budget versus actual outcomes and outputs from the existing plan?

So the existing plan was a consideration. The budget actuals is a little difficult for us to consider. And when we're considering issues in the community, that is for a future step. And we take that advice very seriously and we'll make that a consideration. Thank you. So I think the third question about the arts blueprint and the climate action plan, some of the inputs in the World of Possibilities document do have information from both of those plans. So they are represented in the overall content that you're discussing tonight. However, the strategic planning process, as mentioned, is not yet at the stage to align specifically to annual budget implications. and due to time limitations in the past day the staff needed to follow up separately on details for implementing those plans and so that is something that we're considering right now so um pam i just wanted to make sure that you didn't have anything else that you wanted to say to wrap that up before we uh answer questions no i'm happy to turn it over to council members here great thanks so much for the presentation um we've got about 15 minutes uh to answer um

or to ask staff some questions. So I will accept questions. We're going to go one at a time. And then if there's time for seconds, we will come back to that. Who has questions? I see Ryan's hand and let me just get my participant screen up so I can make sure. Tina, were you, wait, sorry.

uh okay tina it looks like maybe you were first but i had a point of order sorry okay yes go for it ryan thanks um matt thanks for all that i just wanted to check um i heard you respond to questions that taisha had in her hotline nicole had a hotline with questions to or a question too did you did you cover that i did respond by email to that one

Okay. By hotline.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It came out earlier this morning, afternoon, something like that. Okay.

I'll do that. Thanks.

I'm sorry. Can somebody, can we get a brief synopsis?

Yeah, I'm, I'm happy to, I can, I can use my question for that, but I do want to get to the folks who were in line ahead and then I will just ask that question again. And Matt, you can just briefly summarize.

Okay.

Cool. Thank you. Then I think I'm seeing Tina first.

Okay, so I have a lot of questions and thoughts, but I want to ask a question about, in general, when we have a lot of possibilities that include human services, which we have, the county can provide a lot of services and we provide some services. Did we think about how to identify the gaps of the county and then respond to them or Are we doing this in isolation of the county and at times the state?

Thank you for that. Yeah, those were considerations of the gaps, the county and state, and quite frankly, in terms of federal government and specifically grants. Those were embedded into some of those inputs. So I think... My friends at HHS could give a more detailed response about what those gaps might be and what their ideas were. But it is something that has been on the radar and showed up in the proposals that they gave that there would be a need. And so the question is, is the prioritization to address a citywide effort?

Okay, because it's not really clear because we, and I understand that we're all working with the same populations, but that's an area that would I'd love to see more information around. Thanks.

That's one staff to take the presentation down.

Oh, my apologies. Yes.

Great. Thank you. I didn't know if it was you, Matt, or somebody else. Thank you. Thank you. Aaron, looks like you're next.

Great. Matt, thanks so much for all this. Super helpful. And I'm looking forward to the next iteration here in the strategic plan. Can you just walk us through a little bit? So once the strategic plan has been finalized, And then staff is looking at like what to work on on a kind of month to month, week to week basis. Like how will prioritization occur of all the many items in the strategic plan and what's getting done first and addressed at any particular time?

Yeah, thank you for that. So the way that we're going to go through prioritization is to take it in a couple of steps. of first through the detail that we get back from the all staff engagement, there will be some proposals that staff with our staff advisory team and in the city manager's office consider different ways and scenarios to take a look at how to prioritize specific strategies as that emerges. But the community engagement is very important for that step. So we're going to be facilitating a process, particularly on that November 14th date, but also in general community engagement to help us get the information we need in order to make the final decisions on what are the priorities that we need to address.

Can I just add, Matt, I think you had a wonderful answer and just add right now, Mayor, as we use the strategic plan, and this is just concept, right, as we're thinking about it, and hopefully you all and community will help narrow as we collectively move forward with the next strategic plan. We use it currently to direct our work plan efforts, and then we also use it as part of the budget. There is prioritization as we think about what are we funding and is it tied to the strategic plan or not and continuing those conversations as we do. So we will be leveraging the strategic plan to really define where are where we get to put our efforts in the next four years. And hopefully we hopefully council will will similarly use the strategic plan as it did previously, as you're thinking about your own priorities.

Thanks so much.

Thank you. Rob, you're next.

Thank you. And thank you, Matt. I understand that this is facts, motivations, and opportunities, as you said, but you also pointed something out, services are critical to the system. So my question is, how does the prioritization tool actually work? It's referenced twice in the packet. page six under analysis step one, the creation of a prioritization tool, and then page eight and nine under equity analysis. But the methodology and the scoring and the weighing are never described in either place. It was used obviously to narrow 170 proposals into 41 inputs, all presumably being used to narrow the inputs into draft strategies. So I guess my question is given how much rides on these outputs, the actual mechanism really matters. Can staff walk us, walk council through the scoring approach?

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for that. So I will admit it's a bit of a pilot, so we're improving on it as we go along. But the way that the prioritization tool works, it's an internal conversation tool in order to compare things that are quite different in a way that makes them apples to apples and comparable. And it is score driven, which is numeric, but it is still subjective. So it's a conversation tool. and so the way that it works it's a simple rubric we created a set of criteria and uh provided scores for each of those criteria and then the uh individuals who are reviewing the uh proposals um they were able to provide scores for each of those those were then um averaged as a total individual score or totaled as an individual score and then averaged with all other scores in order to give a number so that when we have a conversation about which of the content is priority over others, we have the score to guide that conversation. It's ultimately the conversation and the final decision is made that way, but it is a way to guide that in and have some reliability.

If I may, Matt, I'd love to share with city council a little bit of some of those criteria specifically. So some of the things that we look at in that rubric, first and foremost is alignment to our existing sustainability, equity, and resilience framework. So we're looking at those very long-term goals for the community and how possible concepts may then support those goals. We're looking at overall complexity for an item to be as crucial as a citywide strategic plan item. We are hoping it intersects with the work of multiple departments and that it's heavily engaged with the community. We're looking at a sense of urgency or potential. So we took a look at concepts that would impact us more deeply in the next four years within that longer planning horizon. We look at regulatory impacts. So as alluded to in the HHS example, we looked at that across the board, what's happening on other layers of government that influence how the city can work. And then we took a look at those services and our continuing evolving understanding of which services meet kind of these top tier basic life safety needs of community all the way to services that we know enhance community members experience, but may or may not be crucial to day-to-day living in Boulder.

Could you share that with us maybe in the next session, just so that we can have that as a side note? Absolutely. Thank you.

Great. Thank you. And Matt, it looks like you're next.

Thanks, Nicole. Great job, Matt. So I think my question kind of builds on I think what we're hearing is a little theme about sort of how we're going to prioritize. And it comes from, I guess, where the strategic plan fits in our sort of temporal states of things from a comp plan for our regular work plan, a.k.a. just sort of annual budgeting. The comp plan did a good job of crosswalking a lot of things into a few and showing why they got either combined or merged or in some ways got removed or dropped. And in the budget process, we're clear that we're doing tier one, tier two, tier three sort of needs versus wants. Will the strategic plan combine those two so we have consistency among all three temporal documents that are clearly crosswalked the same way and clearly communicating those needs versus wants, those tier one, tier two, two, three? Because I think if there's consistency in the process and the nomenclature, then those documents themselves will read one to the next to the next.

Yeah, that's a great observation. And we are taking seriously the place that the strategic plan sits the way you described it, and we will be using it to connect the dots. We Definitely, we have an understanding that we're building on the past strategic plan and we're trying to iterate to move it forward. And so I can't describe exactly how that's going to happen. And we will be, because of that, we'll be trying things out and experimenting a little bit. But the way that we articulate how those crosswalks that you described in the comprehensive plan matter to the process, that is... something we're laser focused on. And so that'll be articulated in there for sure.

All right. And just as Rob recommended, it'd be great for us to see that because seeing how we go from 171 to 41, that's a compression of four to one. And so seeing how that, how that happens, I think will be important for us in community. So I appreciate that. Thank you.

Great. Thank you. And then Brian, do you have any first, a first round question? We're kind of nearing the end of where we need to move on.

No questions. I'll hold over comments.

Okay, cool. Then I will just lift up the question that I had asked in a hotline around just the sources of community input. What, if any, informed this? I think you spoke to that a little bit already, but if there's anything else to add there.

I'll just get a little bit deeper very briefly that we're leaning on engagement that has been done and resources that are available, partially because we don't want to ask the community the same questions over again. And there's a good efficiency and it's smart to lean on things that have been approved that are commonly accepted and that are not only functioning, but doing very well. So we wanted to point back to as much as that as possible. Now, that said, at this early point, that is still very broad. In fact, we have the connection to sources that I mentioned could be things all over the map from the community survey to media reports. We'll get tighter and tighter as the process goes along so that the justifications are really clear and the way that engagement does justify the decisions that are made will show that work. So I also want to say that this process doesn't end, right? That as we go forward and update and report on the plan, that we'll continue to make sure it connects to all the engagement that we're doing across the organization and make sure that everything connects to dots that way.

Great. One more question. If anybody has burning one, I will also just remind us that staff are always willing to talk to us one on one as well. Tina.

Yeah, I think in this case, like one of the possibilities is to spend budget wisely. And I would have thought that was just a given, but I'm kind of wondering, what would we do if we didn't choose that? I'd have a very hard time not choosing that, but what was the idea that this should be a choice?

I guess now I'm regretting the way we titled that. We'll improve that title because yes, you're right, that in isolation, yes, we will always make the wise decisions on how we spend budget. It's great to hear. Yeah.

Do you mind if I hear a little bit on the, Tina, your question is sending off a light bulb in my head. I want to be very clear first that the world of possibilities is our environmental scan for the development of the strategic plan. And so when you're seeing those 41 inputs, that's our initial scan to say, what are the things that are most important for us to keep doing? What are the new problems in the world that we need to solve as a city organization? What are the trends that we see coming that maybe we haven't engaged with as fully? And so I do wanna, I think there's probably other examples in addition to spend budget wisely, where you think, well, that's not necessarily groundbreaking, But it is core to what we need to do as a city to propel our vision forward for the next four years. And so you will see in those inputs some things that seem more obvious. You will also see things that we've never talked about in a public setting as a city before. That's the nature of this high-level starting place. The strategies themselves will start to look different. So the strategy around... financial stewardship, for example, may get hyper specific of in the next four years, we need to, you know, solidify a sustainable financial strategy for the organization in a more specific way. So we're truly at this cloud level, we will get down to the level that starts to be at a degree that will truly direct staff work in a more targeted way.

So you're doing all 41 of these and then we'll do strategies or?

The 41, the world of possibilities is the universe of problems to solve. Through our upcoming engagements, we will decide on the most pressing and prioritized problems to solve with the strategies that are developed. Okay.

Yeah, I just, yeah, I think maybe spending money wisely, I just can't imagine that being a choice, but perhaps the semantics are important here.

I think so. Oh, I'm sorry.

I was just, we have so much left to go through. And so what I was going to say, Tina, is maybe just, you know, you can use some other time in your comments on the next one or something to speak to this. And certainly staff are there for follow-up conversations since this is just the very first conversation. Ryan, you passed on your question before, but I will let you have first dibs on going first for this next section and just encourage you to reach out to staff with any like super critical questions. Where we're headed next is to get to answering staff's question. And this first one is around which ideas in the world of possibilities documents are most important to individual council members for continued conversation and analysis? And here we've got 20 minutes to get through this section. I will time everybody. You got two and a half minutes. At two minutes, I'm putting my hand up. And at two and a half minutes, I'm going to ask you to move on or can give theirs as well. So sorry for the heavy handed kind of iron fist tonight.

Can you stop to a timer, Nicole?

Oh, that's a really good question. Yeah.

Zoom does that and it would be really helpful for us.

Is that possible to do that here?

this i'll ask the team i don't know if they were set up to have a timer set up for ourselves zoom has an apps you can just use the app in zoom if it's possible that would be awesome um if not i will uh i can i mean i can do it right now something i think emily can pull up the timer that we use um for open comment and public hearing and she can correct me if i'm wrong but i'm pretty sure she can pull up the timer okay thank you so much

Yeah, so basically, you know, you got two and a half minutes, note up to five ideas that were presented in the attachment in the world of possibilities that resonate for you and why. The next one will get to what things might be missing. So that's where you can kind of fill in gaps. But if there are any that speak really strongly to you, please mention them here. And I will wait just a moment for the timer to come up, unless it's already up and I can't see it.

So yeah, I believe I can do a timer, but it would only be two minutes, three minutes or five minutes.

Okay. Let's do two minutes. And then when the timer, when you see the timer go, you got just, you know, take a couple sentences to finish up your thoughts about that.

Okay, and let me go ahead and grab that just one moment.

Thank you. Thanks, Emily. Sorry for not thinking about that beforehand. And thanks, Taisha, for the suggestion. It will be a lot easier. If folks want to queue up for comments on answering this first question, which ideas are most important to you for continued conversation and analysis? And Emily, does it just show up on? Oh, there it is. Okay. Yep. It is ready to go. So I'll start it on the first person. Two minutes. Thank you. All right. Taisha, go for it. Thank you.

So I've been doing strategic planning since 1995. I've been leading strategic planning processes for large organizations and corporations for 15 years. I have never started that process off without a landscape analysis with data on the current plans and outcomes and outputs and budgetary information. I have significant concerns about this process being initiated without council and boards and commissions being at the table from the beginning, even in the development of the prioritization tool. This is a prime example of why the community feels that the staff is wagging the dog as it relates to the council. Without having that information, I'm just throwing what I think without it being grounded in the best available data. And so therefore, I don't really have any at this time without having that preliminary information. And I just want to express my general concerns around us starting this process in this way. The staff had the access to that information before they identified theirs, but we don't have that. And so, again, our opinions are not really rooted in a collective understanding of our starting point. And so... Let me see if there's anything else. Oh, I thought this was going to be a process of shared power. But power is the strongest amount of power tends to be in who gets to shape the conversation and who gets to shape the process and the tools that are being used. And without counsel at the table, you know, typically I have a planning team that is inclusive of all the key stakeholders, including the board, the staff, you know, key organizational partners. weighing in so everybody feels a collective sense of ownership right out of the gate. That didn't happen here. I'm not suggesting that, you know, it's all, you know, we're in trouble, we might as well forget it now, but I am suggesting, or rather I am expressing a concern about the way this process, the fidelity of this process without having information. And then lastly, my last 48 seconds, I would like to just speak to, you know, I didn't see, you know, as far as prioritization, I just had a meeting with the Consortium of Cities with our state climatologist, Russ, over at CSU. And, you know, his presentation on temperature And precipitation was absolutely critical. And the idea that we're making these kinds of conversations and decisions without having a shared understanding of what is happening to our climate and the impacts that is going to have on every single thing we're doing in the next four years is very troubling. So as I said, at this time, without that preliminary data, I don't have any preferences. And I look forward to doing so when I have the correct data. Thank you.

Well, thank you. And we've got a three minute timer on this one. So we'll do three minutes here, two minutes on the next one. So just so you've got that, that, that awareness. Matt, it looks like you're next.

But I would say I'll start off by saying that there's some things that Taisha mentioned that I would agree with. I'm not sure whose strategic plan this is. So I think that I'm still waiting to sort of see that. It's hard for me to pick five important ones because at the end of the day, many of them are going to just be merged. And so I see this merger already sort of naturally synthesizing. So I'm not sure where to go with that. And so I guess I'll just fold a few things. Wildfire is I'm going to go with the needs versus the wants. I think that's core to a strategic plan. The wants have to come after we've addressed the needs. So the wildfire infrastructure, I think many a lot of livable stuff, certainly as it then folds into having to redo and rewrite Title IX. In fact, that's how you combined all of the livable in terms of the implementation section of the BBCP. The economy is vital. All of those need to be in there. And then something that I think was mentioned here in a little ways is that the budget itself is essential in all of this. So those are the pieces that I think are great. I have more to say on what to add in the next one, but I am a little concerned about who really ultimately owns the strategic plan. I feel like we're getting inserted as council members. well underway versus being the shaper and if at the end of the day city council has its name on this document i want to feel like i owned it from start to beginning and i'm not sure i've gotten that feeling yet so maybe there's time to change but i i i'm i think maybe the part where we ran afoul was the previous strategic plan was done for the sake of doing it not done the right way which is starting with council and really getting a sense of us driving that all the way to the end and figuring out where everybody's inputs belong in the process so i i i'm concerned i'm not going to throw the baby out the bath water but i i think that there's something to be learned here going forward um on a number of fronts so thanks

um aaron you're next good okay well thanks for bringing this forward there are so many good items in the world of possibilities so i i don't know that i'm going to just pick out five to focus on because um to to matt's point there are of course key things and tina pointed out like spend the city budget wisely of course is going to be a cornerstone of of how the city approaches its finances right and So there's a lot of things in here that are fundamental. You also mentioned wildfire preparedness and risks. Those are critically important. I like that we've got a focus on one of these on a city culture of continuous improvement, but I'm not gonna pick the top five. I think you all are doing good work in terms of narrowing things down. I really appreciated hearing about your rubric about how you did make database decisions on how to narrow an earlier larger list down. So I think there's a lot of great work to be done based on what you've got here. And I look forward to seeing next steps as you get to the final project or product rather.

Thank you. Thank you, Aaron. Rob, I think you're next.

Thanks, Nicole. I'm kind of in the same boat. This is somewhat nebulous and very high level right now. But of course, wildfire safety, customer service was mentioned in there, which goes into Title IX. Prioritizing core needs, I think, really needs to stand out in prioritizing core needs and What are some things that we may need to put on hold? What do we need to stop so that we can direct the funds into our core needs like our streets, our police, all of that? One thing that I just want to, I just have to finally say it, we're building a Western City complex, $140 million, beautiful building. I think one of the things that I would like to be addressed in here and maybe taken a look at is bringing staff back into the office so that the customer service that is spoken to in this document is raised to a higher higher level it maybe it's not five days a week but I I just think that would be key and it would also help um the neighborhood around there as far as foot traffic and things like that but I just think there's some things that we can you know really shut some daylight on here and I would I would love to see staff do that thank you and thanks Rob Gina you're up

Yeah, thank you for the presentation. And also, I think I've also done a lot of strategic planning in different roles. And this is definitely a different approach. And I appreciate that trying new things can be good. So it's just, it's very, very different from how I would have started it. And I think one of the issues I'm having is just understanding where the gaps are and appreciating what the problem statement is on some of these items. And so as we move along, understanding that would probably be better so we can lead with vision and aspiration as well as problem statements that might be helpful. So the places where I obviously have some focus are some of the basic needs like spending city budget wisely, taking care of our infrastructure and maintaining buildings, And then something in the wildfire area, for sure, sort of depending on our conversations in August, which, you know, are we looking more at the disaster and recovery piece? Are we looking more at the mitigation or we want to do both? Something about the cost of livability in Boulder and the piece that I think was the strengths, opportunities and challenges of got to some of the difficulties that we're seeing in economic vitality, and it seems like they're going to be rolled under that title as well. And then when I'm thinking about the items related to transportation, housing, the safety net, health and well-being, and the root causes of harm, we have partners that we can work with those, and I'm not clear what our role is in their role. So as we try to prioritize those, understanding where the opportunity is and You know, we have a countywide mental health tax, a countywide housing tax, and possibly a countywide early childhood tax. So it may be that we don't want to lead all of those, but that we need to incorporate it in a secondary role. And I don't know what that relationship looks like with those particular initiatives. So that would be helpful. So that's what I've got. Thanks.

Thanks, Tina. Ryan, on my checklist, you haven't gone yet? Are you ready? Otherwise, I'm happy to jump in. Okay. I will just jump in with my comments and apologies. I usually wait as facilitator till the end. Oh, did you want to go first, Ryan, or I'm happy to just keep going?

Yeah, I was about to, and I had a computer issue. Can you?

Okay, cool. All right, go for it.

Okay, great. Okay, so yeah, there's just a lot in here that's great, and it's really hard to... it's really hard to think about narrowing and consolidating. A lot of the items listed are about substance of things that will come from the BBCP and about housing and transportation and, gosh, I mean, there's just so much in here to want to lift up. So I guess I'm trying to think about this exercise as where we should have an enhanced level of relative focus sort of like philosophically than we've had before. So getting our head into sort of new places. If I think about it that way, I can think of a few kind of categories when I look at the list of 41. So the first one philosophically is, I think maybe upstream the most, maybe I shouldn't say the most, but just one of the things that feels very upstream of everything is what we can do to maximize and preserve our resources as a city. If we can do that well, then we can do everything else. So the long-term financial strategy implementations, that's number 111. Spending budget wisely, that's number 190. Those are high for me. Related maintained public buildings 209, that's a pretty specific one, but given that we're bringing a ballot measure forward on this topic, I think we have to be out with this right now. So that's category one. Category two is enhanced focus on customer service and service standards. So I think the welcoming experience with government probably captured that one. Others did too. That's 228. I think philosophically we should really look for ways to move into that space more. And then third is wildfire readiness. That's number 213. That feels to me like there's just a – there's a community level existential protection that we've got to get focused on. So if I have to prioritize, I'd do those. I don't see the timer, sorry. 48 seconds, okay. Then just to close, go back to Nicole's hotline. kind of heard and answered, but not fully. What I saw in Nicole, what I read from her perspective was, I'll put it in my terms, I would like us to move towards greater use of statistically representative expressions of the community-wide view of things and to really reach to do that and to do as much as we can to bring science to what we understand the community wants. I believe in our most recent survey polling, some of the items that I mentioned were in there towards the top, including wildfire. So I just encourage that as we go forward with this process, that we do as much as we can to bring forward more of that statistically representative view.

Awesome. Thanks, Ryan. And can I get the timer reset for myself, please? I will hold myself to the same standard.

Thank you.

So I just want to start by saying I really disagree with the idea that this is staff choosing priorities because everything that I see in here comes from our existing plans, the comprehensive plan, departmental plans, cross-cutting frameworks like Sarah and the equity plan. Staff implements what we and prior councils have asked them to do with public input, input that's ever improving, but that's literally their job. So there's nothing in the world of possibilities that I see that isn't part of pre-existing council approved community driven work. That's true for, again, everything that our staff does. What I see this as is an operational component of the plans that we have in place, connecting them, recognizing the interdependencies across the city, And I appreciate staff. Thank you for bringing this conversation to us at this very early stage. Looking across the ideas that I was drawn to, it's really the work that strengthens our adaptive capacity, the things that are making us more resilient, the increased well-being, and they generally help us have more capacity to absorb the stressors that seem to be ever growing, wherever they're coming from. So that's kind of what my feedback on this theme is really on this theme of adaptive capacity more than individual ideas, because there are so many ways to enhance our adaptive capacity within each of these ideas. And I see that across all our all our city-wide departmental plans and everything too. I'm really drawn to ideas that build structural resilience and help us prevent crises before they start. These are our backbone systems, things like water reliability, nature as infrastructure, circular economy, long-term financial strategy. They're the things that give the city, in my view, the best chance of continuing to function no matter what is thrown at us. I'm also drawn to ideas that build social resilience, love seeing the word social infrastructure in there. That is awesome. Health and well-being, safety net services, food systems, accessible transit. These are the things that are going to reduce the impact of stressors on residents, students, workers, businesses, visitors by just helping people stay connected and healthy and able to participate fully in community life. And then I also really like the ideas that are building internal institutional resilience. So staff recruitment, retention, equitable government services, new technology. the things that are strengthening the internal capacity that we have so that we can deliver on all of our commitments to the community. My general sense is that we're really focused on helping the city adapt to demographic shifts, economic change, cultural change. Then we're going to be strengthening a lot of the systems that our community relies on. So adaptation, kind of my cross-cutting theme there. Thank you. So now we can... Sorry, I accidentally, I'm so used to muting myself afterwards. The, we'll now kind of go into, some of you touched on this already, but like things that we could add to this world of possibilities up to a couple of ideas. If you have any more that have come up as you've been sitting here, you're welcome to do that. But can we get the timer set to two minutes on this one? Just so we stay on track and. Yes, I will send it to two. Thank you. All right, awesome. Who would like to kick off and just the additional things you would like to see there? And there is a specific question I can read that is in the chat. Are there any concepts that are not in the world of possibilities list that should be considered as staff moves on to developing strategies? Yeah, Matt, go for it. You're first.

I'm waiting for others to go, but we're not going to dally time with silence. So two things. And they're sort of thematically compressed. So I'll just start with the first. At our council retreat, we kind of had a half priority that if staff time allowed following the comp plan, they would begin the process of scoping, reforming and rewriting Title IX. In that conversation, it was made clear that that is a two to four year project and likely needing to land as a strategic plan item because of its length and because of how much it encompasses a few departments. I didn't see that show up here at all, given the conversation that this council had just a mere few months ago. So I think that that's critical. And then as we finished the comp plan, we realized redoing Title IX is in fact the main implementation tool to actually achieve the comp plan. So there's talks of like, you know, some changes. I think the rewriting and reforming Title IX has to be signature in this going forward because it is all encompassing. It is the implementation vehicle, the comp plan, And we've already indicated that this is a core priority for council if time allows and the time frame that it takes. The next one has to be reforming our budget process. So much of this is long-term financial strategy, using our budget wisely. All of those are predicated on having an actually good budget process, and we're not there yet. Part of that is we're doing an annual budget, not a two-year budget. And so I think moving to a two-year budget allows us to do a multi-year process of reforming our entire budget process to cover so much of that economic good governance stuff that we're discussing here. And because it's a long-term process, it belongs in the strategic plan. Thinking about community engagement in our budget, thinking about where we fit in in that process, and thinking of just the long runway to be able to discuss a two-year budget is a long-term process I want to think about. So those are the two big themes I would see need to carry over as part of a compression of a number of those things. But those are things I've heard a lot from the community regarding is the Title IX and certainly how we think about reforming our budget process to be a budget for us by all of us.

Thank you, Matt.

Tina, you're next. Thanks. The two things that I think they are addressed, but I'll just call it out differently, is just how the the local government and other governments affect the cost of living that particularly impact middle and low income families and people, individuals working in the city and how they impact the cost of doing business. So I don't know how to frame that as a priority, but continuing a thread that when we do things, you know, because we get excited about a train and that's great, but it does increase sales tax or And how do we better make those decisions, understanding specifically and data-driven what impact does it have on how people live here and how does it then affect their behavior? Do they need to do their shopping outside of the city of Boulder? What impact does that have? And then the second thing is, and I've talked about it too much, but is this idea of having more community involvement in the long-term financial infrastructure and facilities plans. so that it's clear to the community how we finance things and what our approach is to financing. There's a lot of interest in the community and it probably is a good practice to make that as clear as possible, especially as we wanna pursue new ventures. So that's all I have.

Thank you, Tina. And Ryan.

Well, there's such a big list here, I hesitate to add to it. So I'll just say two things that are kind of augmenting. One, I'll sort of restate what I said in the previous module, which is as we move forward with developing this plan and future versions of it, I would like us to see a greater proportion of information we get that is about community engagement, a greater proportion of that coming from statistically valid community-wide surveys. That is information that is science-backed, that can really tell us what the community wants. I think the ratio that we've gotten of that in our community engagement is just too low. So that's kind of a cross-cutting theme, but that's one big opportunity for us. And I think the second one is maybe it's just augmenting in the welcoming government item. I would like to see us really focus in on service delivery standards. how the community experiences our local government as a service provider. Services are the reason we spend all of our money. Whether it's formally named a service in this or not, it is everything we do is providing service and we have taken some work forward to permitting, streamlining, I don't know if we did permitting so much, but I would really like to see us get focused on what do national standards look like for getting service delivery right in a local government, and taking a look at maybe 10 or 20 types of indicators. It could be response times for certain types of things, but it doesn't have to be that per se. But let's get really clear on what does good practice look like from a standards perspective, and then use that to discipline our work in this welcoming government area.

Thank you, Ryan. Tayshia.

Yeah, again, I wanted to clarify my previous comments were not a criticism of the staff's work. The challenge is, and again, as a professional who does strategic planning, it typically starts with everybody having the same set of information and then we come up with our priorities or what we think our priorities and then you crosswalk them. When one group starts and then ask the other groups, what do you think about what we think? We've already lost the collective ownership and there's an imbalance of power. That was what I meant, and hopefully you understand that. As far as what's missing, well, the data. I would love that. I think it's really critical, again, that we have as much of the data that you all use to make these decisions to determine what the next steps will be as soon as possible, especially since we're getting ready to move into budget season. So I'm hopeful that some of these project-level budget versus actuals will be available at that time, as we'll have to make some really challenging decisions But one thing that I would love to get more clarification on in regards to the conversations around transparency is what are the milestones making process? What is the reporting and monitoring process? These are the things that I asked about for the development of the Boulder Valley Comp Plan as well. Tina, I really appreciated you bringing up the role of the county and the state and how they will be impacted. participants or partners or collaborators in this work, considering that they have authorities, resources and responsibilities that significantly impact the workers, the business owners, the educators, the students in our community, as of course, CU Boulder as well, I would add to that list. And then I think the other piece that's really important to me is that I would love us to make sure is at the forefront is water literacy and just climate literacy in particular. I was very much struck by a presentation that we received yesterday at the consortium on the drought management plan that Netherlands is using and just a robust community education and also cross-pollination. We have some of the world's leading climate scientists, and yet, you know, they're not always tied in and their work is not always tied in to what's happening at the local level. So those are a couple of things. And then I would just encourage you that we had a time.

is there a timer is my time yeah yeah yeah it went off okay thank you yeah but yeah but i again just in general like i appreciate you trying to keep us to a time but if this is the only time that we have to talk about it and we're not going to talk about it again until november in a transparent way that's also concerning thank you thank you um and uh again you know we can all request time at cac and stuff like that too so if we don't feel like there's enough time um given in the presentation too. And I say that not just for to you, Taisha, but just for all of us in general, as a reminder. All right, Aaron. No comments?

No, I thought the world of possibilities was pretty comprehensive. So I thought it was in good shape.

Thank you. I feel like I missed somebody. Did I miss anybody? No.

good tara's not here but yeah okay thank you here oh you are there there you are tara i was uh you know listening in okay do you have anything you would like to add tara uh no i no i think this is really an interesting discussion but no okay i'll wait till the next one the next next section all right um rob

I'll be fast, I promise.

No, no, no, you're good. You got your timer. Two minutes.

Okay, given the packet itself opens up by naming an increasingly strange budget is one of the more challenging challenges driving this plan. I think the process needs to have an explicit mechanism for identifying programs or services that are no longer core to the city's mission. So we're not just building a list of things to add on top of things that we already do. I'd like to see that framed as its own category alongside services, planned commitments, engineering opportunities, threats, organizational improvements, um not left implicit in the prioritization school tool if that's if that would be possible i think that would be i think that would be helpful and it would it would balance the equation all right thank you um okay and then i will i just got a few comments as well um the timer good

Thank you. So I always forget the word for this, but like a future risk assessment, the issues that we don't even know about yet. Chris, Ms. Jack, Ryan, Shuhart, I've talked to both of you about this. I think you both know the word I'm looking for that I can't remember right now. But, you know, one of the just as kind of a concrete example, one of the risks that I never really would have expected is the way that some members of our community are coming after staff in some really personal and unprofessional ways, as if our staff have caused the global crises that we're facing that prior councils and city leaders couldn't have anticipated. Matt and Tina wrote a great op-ed about this a couple months ago. But the issue seems to be growing, especially the more that our staff are working on implementing our equity policies. goals, which makes me concerned that it's going to continue to grow as attacks on equity continue to be normalized by our federal government. And I think this just fits with a broader disdain, pattern of disdain for workers in general that seems to be growing in our community, which again wouldn't have predicted this a couple of years ago, but in my view, it poses a really huge threat not just to our ability to provide basic city services like emergency response, but also the other services that our community relies on through businesses and nonprofits like appliance repair or medical care or education, where workers are increasingly saying that they're being also treated with disdain and even contempt in our community. So just sort of is there a way to anticipate some of these unexpected threats? and develop a capacity to respond to them. Because I would have, all of this is dependent on workers, right? Everything that we're talking about, every plan we have. So I would put having workers who are willing to work in our city, both in the organization, as well as the businesses and nonprofits and governmental organizations within our city boundaries, on par with some of the risks like climate and economic crises, because workers are the foundation of everything. So those are my thoughts. Thank you. um okay uh we are a little bit ahead of schedule um because I didn't think about Tara not being here um does anybody have any any final comments last minute of comments to give before we move on to the next section okay um and just a reminder and staff you can back this up if uh if I'm saying anything out of turn um this is very initial conversation open for others. And I, you know, we can always put in requests if we would like to have more time to spend on things.

So I think all of that is right, Council Member Speer. And I'll just say just appreciate it, right? I know we are still at a very high level. And that sometimes causes all sorts of consternation because you want to get right to the what is the strategy? How are we moving? But rest assured that we are, as we think about this plan, this is a plan that While driven from previous environmental scans, driven by community input, driven by the council priorities you have asked of us in the past year, in the fall, we will be hearing directly from you on what is the strategic priority as we move forward. This is the moment of really sort of narrowing our focus. I know it's an interesting place of strategic plan being more some of the policies that Some of them will be implementation on what staff is moving for. But this is the precursor to that more than deeper dive conversation of when the rubber hits the road. And we really outline what is our collective strategic vision for the next four years, because based on that will be our work plan. So just appreciate the conversation.

Thank you. And thanks to Matt and Pam for the presentation as well as fielding some of our questions. So I think then we can move into the Civic Area East Bookend Development Partnership request for proposals. Nuria, are you kicking us off there again?

Mostly just to send it over. I want to thank staff for all the work that they have done to this, but I'm going to send it over to Assistant City Manager Mark Wolf to kick us off.

Good evening, Council. Mark Wolf, Assistant City Manager. I'm excited to introduce an update on the redevelopment of the East Bookend of the Civic Area. This is a unique opportunity within our downtown core with the potential to better connect Pearl Street to University Hill by realizing community goals around a permanent year-round farmers market, arts and culture, and uses and activities that support vibrancy across this whole area. Throughout the civic area project, we've heard loud and clear from the community about the importance of anchoring arts, culture and food uses on the site and building a strong connection with our upcoming investments in Boulder Creek Park. We've solicited input as well from the private sector to test the goals we've developed based on that community feedback. And the exciting news is their strong interest and enthusiasm for realizing our vision for this project. What we're about to embark on is the formal process to solicit partner or partners to help us bring that vision to life. This matters because this project is really about achieving several public objectives at once, and the city can't get there alone with our own resources. Part of our goals are to sell certain properties and reduce our long-term maintenance costs across our building portfolio, while also delivering the community's vision for a vibrant Boulder Creek Park area. This site gives us a chance to do that at the same time, but only by attracting the right partner. The city's job as a partner will be to create value and underutilized public assets by putting them to their best use, ensuring strong collaboration in the process ahead and providing clarity and flexibility in how we reach our goals. The right partner will be one who can help us do that in a way that meets our community values and objectives for the site. Last, I want to recognize the incredible team working on this project. A project like this one comes with complexity that crosses many departments, requires a heavy lift from legal, finance, our arts and culture facilities teams, and others. Tonight, I'm joined by part of our team supporting this project. First, David Driscoll, who is a familiar face for some of you. He's been gracious to come back to Boulder to help manage this project and navigate that complexity. And of course, Shihome Kuriagawa, our project manager for the civic area, who will present the goals for the redevelopment, what we've learned from the RFI process before turning it over to council for your feedback. Thank you and Shihome, you're up.

Great. Thank you so much, Mark. I appreciate it. And thank you for having us, Council. We're really excited to present on this opportunity. So let me go ahead and share my screen. Let me know if you can see that. And I think I just need to move a few things over, but let's get started. So as Mark mentioned, we're kicking off the Civic Area East Bookend Development Partnership. So here to talk to you tonight about a few things. We'd like to make aware, ensure that city council is aware of the purpose and the process for the Civic Area East Bookend Development Partnership. So we'll walk through together the partnership scope and the goals. The goals will also be written into the RFP. So let's review the purpose and the process together of that RFP. And that would be a request for proposal. Next steps and schedule we'll review together and that will incorporate how council involvement will be included in that process. So staff is looking for feedback tonight on the process and goals. No action is needed at this time. All right, so for the development opportunity, the project scope, I know we've been to council a couple times on the civic area in terms of design. What you see here in the yellow is the scope of this development opportunity, the bookends, so the east bookend as well as the west bookend. Main offering for the request for proposal would be the East Bookend. So we'll focus a little bit more on this bookend. What's optional as the opportunity that the development community will get to see and consider is the West Bookend for optional opportunity. Now the park at the core, I'll just give a brief update that we've had a renaming at the park and then we did that with community process. So the new name is Boulder Creek Park. We'll move forward with the work with the title civic area for both bookends on this effort. But that's just an update for what's going on at the park. So in terms of goals of development partnership, and again, these goals will be written into the RFP themselves, but really it's to first and foremost leverage the city investment asset and authority to achieve community vision through programming, activation, and other community benefit possibilities. And I'd like to say here that we would be working off the 2015 civic area plan and the 10 plus years that we've had planning this area of community engagement, of all the feedback that we've gotten from residents on what they would like to see and how they'd like the space activated. We also absolutely would like to look for revenue generation in this process. So To do that, this would support near-term and long-term goals of that revenue generation through property, sales, lease, and or expanded sales tax, property tax, thinking long-term about that revenue generation, not only the short-term. In terms of seeking partnership, it allows us to find expertise and innovation in attracting A partner with capital to bring in and help us realize some of these Community benefits and we recognize that we're on a tight budget, the city cannot do it alone, and so this is one of the the plus sides and the positives to this partnership. partnership can also bring innovation and expertise for delivering on highly complex project, including mixed use projects which we see could easily be these two bookends. Property management, we'd really like to reduce the city's facility operation and maintenance role in property management and thereby being more efficient and effective with costs. And we'd like to note here too that in the partnership, we're including a partnership with the Boulder County Farmers Market. So they're going to be a core anchor to this process and working with the city with the developer to find an interior space. And again, the city can't do this alone. We're on tight constraints. And so that's one way we can leverage a partnership. So generally that's a goal of overall partnership. I'll go over the goals of the East Bookend. And again, this is built off of the past planning work we've done, lots of community engagement, 2015 park plan, a recent market study that we shared actually with council last year, and then two years of community engagement recently that has been done with the phase two effort have really highlighted these three themes that you see on the screen. So including a food destination that really supports and incorporates the Boulder County farmers market, of course, recreation and integrating into the adjacent Boulder Creek Park and all of the opportunities and amenities that can be connected into, as well as weaving in community arts and culture opportunity into the East Bookend. So when we think about going out for seeking a development or private sector group to help us realize these themes, this is something that comes up as key themes, again, from that engagement from the past planning work and the 2015 Park Plan. I'll go a little bit into existing conditions of the east book and there's three landmark buildings existing the atrium storage and transfer and these. would be up for reprogramming sales and other opportunities that would be negotiated with the private sector or development partnership. i'd like to note that, while the tea houses in the boundary the tea house will remain under city ownership and will not be changing. But, you know, the private sector needs to think about and consider integration into the tea house for any kind of development taking place here. There are existing surface parking lots and so thinking about, you know, if there's a higher and best use there that's ample opportunity for vertical development of some kind of mixed use. And then I'd like to point out how the yellow boundary includes city owned property. You see that there is a smaller lot adjacent to Arapahoe. There are other properties that are outside of this scope, and those are all privately owned lots. So that could be up for a developer to come in and negotiate on their own to consolidate the lot. But for the time being, what's on the table for opportunity is what is city owned on the east bookend. Okay, so part of a partnership is city rules and how we're going to show up in the agreement as well. And so we think a big incentive is actually the investment that we're making into the park itself based off of community voting and putting more investment into the downtown spaces, including park amenities. So really excited to see that this is an opportunity right adjacent to The East Bookend, we think it's a fabulous incentive for developers to integrate into these new amenities, which include an outdoor food-oriented destination, a festival street that will support the Boulder County Farmers Market in an outdoor space, as well as many other venues and festivities that take place in the park currently today. So that really supports local businesses and others to succeed here long-term with some of these improvements. We're also activating the space with a lot of different play and park amenities, picnicking and splash pad. We're investing some smaller updates around landmark buildings and integrating our historic icons into the park and really strengthening a lot of existing connections through multimodal circulation, bike amenities that the community have been asking for. So really a lot of amenities to support what we've heard community wanting to see in this area as one of the oldest parks really needing an update. So again, the West Book Inn will be on the table for the opportunity as well. I will say while it's optional, let's review the goals for what could be expected in terms of what we'd like to seek from the partnership. So I would say that West Book Inn has been consolidated with two separate lots. The Agewell Center itself. So this is to be relocated and co-located with North Boulder Rec Center, as well as the city acquiring Arapahoe Court property. So this consolidates this block specifically for this potential opportunity. It could have its own opportunity as really there's an emphasis for sale for revenue specifically on this bookend. We see that revenue could be used elsewhere in some of the other needed projects across the city, and so it is top of mind for us through this process. Through this property, we'd also like to promote access to the creek for public use and operations needs. We obviously need to consider adjacencies to the library, and so we'd be asking private sector to integrate into that adjacency. So overall, those are the goals for West Book End. I will say some of them don't differ very much from the East Book End. It is a little bit different on this side with more residential surrounding it. So we could see opportunity for a different type of mixed use development, but certainly again, integrated into the 2015 Civic Area Park Plan vision. All right. In this process, I'd like to highlight where we've been. So we've done a touch point with Council on notifying about the RFI process, and that is a request for interest. This is an informal process that we posted earlier in the year of February, and this was really to gauge the market. This was not to seek a partnership yet. It was to really put out, here are some preliminary goals that we have and definitely the previous planning that we've done. What is possible? Who would be interested? Who would seek even a partnership of this kind? And so it was really great to have a myriad of responses back from this. So we've received nine responses, a mix of full development teams with designers, developers, and financial folks as well as individual organizations looking to reprogram individual buildings. So I note here that what we've learned in the RFI process will inform and have some input onto the request for proposals. And what we've learned from that process, I'll highlight here. So the mixed use of what has been proposed from the respondents of the RFI process included cultural venues, food and hospitality uses, residential and year-round activated gathering spaces inside and out and integrated into the park. So we're really excited to see that. It absolutely overlaps and dovetails with the goals that we had mentioned here tonight. We did absolutely receive enthusiasm and support for the partnership model. that we're talking about here tonight. So to leverage private investment to deliver public benefits and absolutely support for the farmers market as well. Specific responses highlighted connections to the park downtown to adaptive reuse historic buildings and to expand the arts program, expand events and create partnerships as well as that Boulder County farmers market I just mentioned. So that was also great to see that the private sectors thinking about this key location and how to tie into and integrate into all of the surrounding fabric of downtown. So respondents did encourage the city to continue to work with a clear outline of city vision goals and to outline the partnership roles clearly as well as the process. I would say while we got this feedback, we also got the feedback that they were happy to see that the vision goals were very clear We are working on partnership roles in the process now and continue to do so. So we have gotten some great feedback. I'll just mention here that we've talked a lot about coming along with the Boulder County farmers market hand in hand on this. We've created a memorandum of understanding and some of that language will probably see its way into the RFP, but we'll definitely want to show commitment there through this process. And then just a note that more information of what we learned in the RFI process as well as just the general project timeline and process can be found on the Civic Area East Bookend Development Partnership website. All right. So where we're headed, the request for proposal. Now, this step, we are doing a formal process. We are seeking the formal partnership with the development community. And we hope to release the RFP late summer of this year. So late summer is coming up pretty quickly for us. The selection of the partner for the East Bookend with optional West Bookend would take place early 2027. And in that way, after the selection, we hope to collaborate on concept planning through 2027. So everything that I've showed here on any of the diagrammatic illustrative plans that I've shown, those are placeholders and those are some of what Citi has studied. Absolutely, the development partner would come along with us to refine design and concept planning. They would bring their planning team, their design team, and walk through refining those bookends. Again, just to highlight that through the concept planning, the developer will be starting off with a lot of previous planning work and engagement and feedback that we heard. through the concept planning process, there will also be continued input from community boards, commissions, and council. And I'll get into that on where the milestones for council's input would occur. Generally, like Mark said, this is a multi-departmental effort. And so we have a lot of eyes on this. We know the importance of this and the excitement and wants and an opportunity that this type of effort comes along. So I will say this is a multi-year process, multi-multi-year. We've already spent 10 years plus planning. This will be a long process as well to get to final implementation. So in 2026, the RFP will go out. We will conduct interviews for a partner. We hope we find an adequate partner that aligns with those goals. That is very important to us. In 2027, a pre-development agreement will be reviewed and hopefully agreed upon as well as that concept planning phase will commence. So in 2028, hopefully we will move along through the design process and the development partner will take the plan through site plan review and we will finalize a partnership agreement at that point. 2029 and on, we could see that we start permitting. We could see that construction and implementation plans are starting to be underway, but There's sort of a lot at work here. The bookends could be phased themselves in terms of construction. It just depends on where the market is at at the time. So again, a multi-year process. Okay, so next steps and inclusive of city council, that release of RFP again, late summer of this year. Council will review the development partnership and pre-development agreement. So after final selection, we'll come back to Council to review next steps and that pre-development agreement with our selected partner. Collaborative planning process will begin, and then Council will also have review and input for the final concept plan late 2027. So that's the second Council touchpoint. The development review process could start tentatively 2028 and there could be more milestones in there. Permitting and construction, like I said, tentatively 2029. Again, pending project milestones. Hopefully we find a partner that aligns with those goals as well as where the market's at. So questions for council. We have two and on the second, if we need a reminder, I have the goals that I can pull up as well. But our two questions are, does council have questions or feedback on civic area development partnership RFP process? And does council have feedback on the goals of the partnership before staff move forward with the release of the RFP?

Thanks so much for the presentation, and thank you for pasting the questions in the chat. So we got about 20 minutes for questions. Looks like Tina, you are up first.

Yeah, I just have two quick questions. One is who will be on the selection committee? Will it be staff only before it goes to council?

That's a great question, and I think we're just embarking on the process to create the selection committee. And so I would say we're definitely still open and formulating that group.

Okay. And I'll just add to that if I could. Our Memorandum of Understanding with the Boulder County Farmers Market also includes them as a key partner in reviewing proposals that come in. And then, you know, obviously any kind of partnership that is selected, Council would review that before finalizing. There's also a chance that if they're or more than one that we've received feedback directly from council at that later stage. But it really depends on what comes in through that process.

Okay. And just, it might be worth having a voice from the downtown Boulder business community as we look at activating and enhancing all the businesses and make sure we're not cannibalizing. And my other question is just, do we think about ways that we can help this project be better in case, like, the thing that comes to mind always is do we need ground floor commercial? In this case, we probably do. But will you let us know if something like that pops up because we have this vacancy issue?

Yeah, absolutely. And the thing about having a developer come on board and having the partnership is walking through the process together to see you know, really what the market would take, what's feasible. And so there's definitely opportunity to figure out what kind of programming is included in the development.

Okay. I'm sorry. I had one more, just for the process to completion, we'd look at the developer's success and other developments and stuff like that.

Yes, absolutely. Experience on delivering similar projects and other projects. And so there'll be definitely a lot of different criteria that go into partnership selection. The goals are definitely one of them, but there will be relevant experience as well. Thanks.

And Rob, you're next.

Thank you. Thank you, Shelby. Mark, staff, this is one heck of a project and I'm very excited for it. One thing that I want to flag though, the packet lists the boards and commissions consulted on the project, Parks and Rec, Landmark, Transportation, Downtown Management, Uni Hill, but I didn't see engagement with police, park rangers, Or a specific safety conversation with downtown businesses or residents anywhere in the memo on this specific topic. And given it's a year round evening activated destination for arts, culture, gathering, the kind of high foot traffic public spaces where both real and perceived safety determines whether the vision actually succeeds. And the question is, what conversations or ideas through either the use of the priority tool or some other modality have taken place with police rangers and downtown stakeholders about safety? And will that be built into the RFP itself, or is that left for later?

Yeah, I can take the question, and I think it's a really good note, Rob. I really appreciate that. And Mark, you can add on. We have, through the full civic area engagement process in the last two years for phase two, had a lot of conversations with PD, Rangers, our SAMS team around safety and working within downtown. So knowing that activation is really important, knowing that activation helps some of that safety, but in turn, we have to provide safety for that activation as well. It's kind of a cyclical process. Um, I think it is a good note, uh, to consider it, uh, through the RFP process with, uh, the private sector as they come on and as we design together.

Yeah. And I, I think that's right. And, and also because we heard from community throughout that process, how important safety was both our civic area, both, both the Boulder Creek park, I gotta get used to the name, uh, both, both the Boulder Creek park investments directly and in in combination with east bookend the idea is is that creates a lot more activity a lot more positive use in in the space and and you know that's certainly been a part of the conversation with our safe and managed public spaces team is how do we continue to create those positive uh uses within the entire civic area and so it's something we're thinking about a lot especially with a lot of city staff moving out of the civic area in about a year and so that just certainly underlines the urgency and making sure that these investments come to fruition in the civic area as we plan for the next several decades.

So it will be above and beyond just the activation and more people down there. There will be some type of activation of safety, whatever that looks like, whatever Stan comes up with.

We will certainly have... David Wiltshire- activation of our safety apparatus, if you will, I think we're also thinking about. David Wiltshire- What his presence look like in general, especially in our park area it's something that the team presented on last time you all received an update on. David Wiltshire- boulder creek park investments is what is the future of park management look like in the downtown area will say that is something that is underfunded which will be a theme, I think of several weeks. But it is something we know is paramount once those investments are in place in the next couple of years.

I'll just add, too, that the type of public safety considerations will also just depend on what we receive from the RFP because different activations will require and motivate different types of actions. And so know that we will be thoughtful about bringing in the team to think about it as those considerations come up.

Thank you.

Aaron, you're up.

Great. Thanks, everybody, for the presentation. Show me. I appreciate that. And David Driscoll, when was the last time we were at a city council meeting together? Maybe 10 years ago? Nice to see you again. Good to see you. Great to have such an excellent team here. Just a couple of questions. You mentioned in the RFI that some of the responses were for people with ideas like for a particular building or maybe a sub area of specific area. So how would a proposal like that be incorporated into the RFP? Would they have to find a larger developer to partner with or how would that work if somebody had a smaller section of it they were interested in?

That's a great question. So with that, we've had a lot of community response on interest in the RFP process. On the website, we have launched a signup sheet on different community members, organizations, businesses who would be interested in programming or working with us on some of the East Bookend or West Bookend. And that would be then considered for the developer team to integrate or utilize in their proposals. And so really on the submissions, which we've already started to see in terms of the RFI, we've had a lot of developers working with some of the community on part of their submissions. So it's exciting to see, and we have that sign-up sheet too for anybody interested.

Great. And can you share that with us afterwards or through an email or something so that we could pass that along to interested developers? Absolutely. Great. Thanks so much. And then if you did have one of the development people come in with some creative ideas that aren't exactly bound by what you're envisioning in the RFP, Would we perhaps have the opportunity to explore that or are we pretty really confined to the boundaries of what we're talking about in the RFP right now?

Yeah, I mean, I would say that it could be a lot could be considered on the table. We did have some submittals, for instance, on the RFI that submitted on more than just the two boundaries that we showed. interesting ideas. And so I think those could absolutely be considered through this process.

And I'll add a bit on that. And I think, you know, we're explicitly including West Bookend as an option. And I think that is because of the interest that we heard through the RFI process. Other areas of the civic area are not considered at this moment. But I think in terms of what types of uses and how folks are imagining the sites that are available, I think that is flexible. And David, feel free to add to this. I think What we've tried to do is be very clear in our goals so that we're good partners in that way, but also we don't want that list to be so long that we're excluding creativity. And so we've tried to strike that balance and hopefully with that flexibility, we'll be able to see really interesting proposals and be able to weigh a whole bunch of different opportunities.

yeah I'll just chime in it's really important for there's a lot of examples of private uh public development partnerships that don't lead to success because the list of things that are expected from the public sector partner becomes so long that an owner has set the private sector partners like I I can't make that happen So we've been really working with the city team and then the discussions with partners, sort of really being really clear what are the absolute essential things that are important for the city to get out of this. And then there's other things that, yeah, we want to explore and see if there's a way to make them happen. That might require additional investment or alternative types of arrangements. There might be groups in the community that actually could fundraise to help make something happen, so we don't want to cut it off. But in terms of going out and seeking a development partner, being really clear, like these are the things that are actually essential and on us to manage sort of the process, not to let this become a list of 30 things that we expect them to deliver because nothing will happen then. Okay.

Thanks.

That's all.

I appreciate it.

Thanks, Aaron. Tara, you're next. Wow, David, I really appreciated that because you could just say public-private partnership and people feel like it's a magic thing. been, but it's not always successful. Like you said, I want to, um, take the app. First of all, thank you, Rob. I agreed with what you said. I'm a hundred percent sure that we need a plan for safety. I spent a lot of time down there on my bike and, um, we need to get back public trust in that whole area. And so I'm looking forward to our plan on that, but I want to actually segue to my very most important, one of my most important things that I want to to have some sort of want to see while I'm on city council. And that is something we haven't talked about today, but I'm going to bring it up because now's my chance. And that is the Arboretum Path. So first, thanks to the city, because the Arboretum Path, and also thanks to, there is a group that's been helping with that. There's actually flowers there, and it's looking much better, although I do look forward to the day when it looks more like an arboretum. But I feel like this is a very important path because it is the gateway or the way to get from the hill to the farmer's market. And if you don't want to walk down Broadway, which is not an awesome experience, and I'm not blaming the city because we just don't have money. I just want to say that I think the amount of the discussion we have on the Arboretum path is it's not a lot considering how important I think it is. First of all, if you bike down there, who's bike down there? Raise your hand.

Can I just, just, do you have a question? This is for like clarifying. This is just questions. I have a whole speech plan. Yeah. Can, can you save your speech for the next part? When staff's going to be like taking notes on. You bet, but I'm not going to repeat it. Don't worry. That's okay. Yeah. Well, you pick up right, right where you are.

So my only question is then. Is. Is there going to be any discussion on the Arboretum path or is that because. in a different phase completely, and nobody wants to talk about it right now.

Tara, I know I recognize the importance of the Arboretum Path. Thank you. And we are continuing to have discussions. Allie Rhodes here, if you wanted to add into this. But it is unfortunately outside of the phase two boundary. It is unfunded. But we are exploring other ways and opportunities to see what we can do for the Arboretum Path. In terms of any kind of improvements, currently, I would have to say at this time, it is out of this phase and underfunded.

I'm just going to talk later about public-private partnerships.

I'll just add one note, folks. I'm Allie Rhodes. I serve as Director of Parks and Recreation. I just want to build on what Shihomi said. We have active conversations with adjacent property owners and others in the community to try and identify opportunities to invest in the Arboretum. We know it's a key connection between downtown and the Hill.

Thank you. Matt, you're up.

Thank you. I appreciate the update on this. My question centers on sort of just more contextual information for community in this process. I think the RFP is going well, but I guess maybe centers on, piggybacks a little bit on maybe the public safety, but a little different. As we are dealing with going forward, we're carrying some of the mistakes and challenges of infrastructure management from the past and obviously wrestling with that going forward. How are we correcting that here? This will be one of the first big substantial public pieces of infrastructure we're investing in with our new mindset. And so I'm wondering, how are we communicating what the ongoing cost of operating this space will be, not just in terms of the sprinklers, the grass, the trimmings, but in terms of to implement the clutch report? That's an ongoing cost. Samps, perhaps some of these public safety measures, activation. So I'm wondering how we're going to be able to do that aspect so people really understand this isn't just 18 to 20 million people. wipe our hands of it, but what is the ongoing expectation so that as we budget, we kind of say, hey, we've got this new thing and here are the carrying costs going forward. How is that being folded in to this process early so people have a full breadth of what they know is in front of us besides just building a beautiful new space?

Yeah, that's a great, thoughtful question. Thank you, Matt. And I'm just going to clarify, I'm assuming this is around the conversation of the Boulder Creek Park improvements. And so with those improvements, we had been working on a park plan, a park management plan. The last several years, we have been working closely with our operations staff, our special events folks, and also through our community engagement and getting feedback on how the space is working, how it's not, some post-occupancy studies. So after the fact of building phase one, we went back and have done a survey on how the park is working today. We are looking at what the cost of ownership is. We are looking at the cost of ownership ownership for phase two improvements when those come online. We're looking for the cost of ownership of the full build out of the park. And we're absolutely writing in a management strategy for that. And we're hoping to finalize that plan soon here and then move into what that looks like in terms of managing this very big regional and one of the biggest downtown parks that we have. And so, Allie, I don't know if you have anything to add to that, but it would be our park management plan.

I want to add one piece is that the management plan has already identified a range of options from just taking care of what we have and what that cost is. And our commitment is that the year that that park opens, that operating budget will reflect that cost. And without additional funding, it would be reductions elsewhere, recognizing how important it is that this downtown park thrive and serve the downtown community. So that might mean trade-offs somewhere else, but it's that important that from the day we have a ribbon cutting, we support this park. Well, I think all of us have been students of great downtown parks for a while. They get a higher level of maintenance. Pearl street is such a phenomenal example of that. It is cleaned daily. We have folks on the mall seven days a week between ourselves, the ambassadors and folks with downtown Boulder partnership, the civic area, the Boulder Creek park should have the same level of support.

Okay. Is there just a timeline on when we might see those estimates? Because I'm thinking about instead of waiting for it to be built and then rely on that, it's easier for us to make small budget adjustments now before that time than a big one once it opens, so to speak. So I'm kind of wondering when we might know those things or community does. So we kind of have a more runway, so to speak, to build that costing edge should we want to start making trade-offs.

Are you, Matt, can you clarify your question? Are you wanting us to make adjustments in service levels now to increase?

I'm asking just simply, what are we looking at? Is it a million dollars a year? Is it $10 million a year? And so I think sooner we know that along with what the cost of this whole thing is, we can start thinking about those trade-offs sooner rather than later. And that means you can make a lot of small adjustments now to get to that number or you make a big one later. So it's just the opportunity cost that the sooner we know that the sooner our conversations might better reflect reality and we can make less major shifts in that timeframe. Sure.

We can get back to you on that. I don't have it in front of me because of the, we were talking about the bookend tonight. I'd love to follow you up on that. The number is not in the millions for the lower end. It was in the couple hundreds of thousands, I think.

Appreciate it. It's all connected. So I appreciate that.

Ms. Matt and Tayshia, you're next.

Just on the line of budgeting and really appreciate, you know, one of the hopes that I have, you know, recognizing not only the current fiscal, whatever, Nuria, do we have a new word for our fiscal constraint? We do not. We are still constrained. Okay. And, you know, again, I'm just going to keep going back to this water energy crisis that we have that are going to continue to escalate. So I was just curious if in the RFP, there's any, I didn't see any language. I think I put it in my questions too in the hotline around just staging of this so that it's, you know, what sections can be completed first, you know, almost like a phased approach.

Sure. And I could say, Just to touch on the adjacency of the park and thinking about water conservation, we are working really hard on the improvements for turf conversion, low water use landscapes, and we're working really hard on creating resilient landscapes for communities. So that is baked into our process and the SER framework we carry through the design of the park. Mark, did you want to add on to the RFI process specifically how that would manifest?

Sure. I'll actually punt to David to talk through a little of the mechanics of how we're thinking about potential phasing on the development.

Sure. So next year, the idea is that we would develop, well, the developer partner would develop a concept plan which we would be engaged in. We fully expect that their implementation plan would include some level of phasing. Some of that will just be driven by logistics of wanting to keep the farmers market operational during any construction activities. So that might require part of the site gets developed while another is being used and then switching that around. um so it's all tbd in terms of what that might look like but definitely there would be some phasing there might also just be phasing related to market constraints or opportunities moving something forward sooner rather than later so what we'll be looking for in the rfp is sort of their expression of the mix of uses that they think is economically viable here how that relates to and supports the city's goals And then the real partnership pieces around the sort of the public facing uses like the market hall and things that we would want to really have a say in sort of how those get implemented. And there's also going to be a lot of construction going on around the park and on the 13th Street right of way. So just making sure that all works together and doesn't create a headache for folks who live and work around that area.

So I'm sorry, that's, I'm not clear. So my specific question was in the RFP, is there a request for those respondents to include their recommendation for what a phased approach would look like and what some of the criteria for that would be?

The RFP is working.

And not after they've already been selected.

So the RFP is looking to select a partner with which we would develop the concept plan for how that whole block would work. So we, until we have the partner, we're not gonna be able to figure out what the phasing would look like. Cause we don't know what uses they're gonna propose. We heard in the RFI process, everything from housing, hotel use to retail and things like live workspace for artists. So there's quite a range of potential uses. And then parking is another thing we need to figure out together. So we won't be asking the RFP for a phasing plan because we're not asking for a detailed development proposal. We're asking for a mix of uses and expression of financial capacity to help deliver things. Does that answer your question?

How much of the funds have been secured? Yes. Yes. Thank you. I'm curious how much of the funds have already been secured? for this project?

So on the city end, we actually hope that this is a revenue generator. That is our goal to sell our property, reducing our long-term operating costs of those buildings and generate some cash up front. So that'll be one of the criteria that we're certainly looking at through the RFP process. And in terms of kind of what is the city participation beyond that, we will be reviewing financials at the RFP stage here to, again, to David's point, to really determine financial viability as another key factor in finding the right partner.

But my question was, has money already been secured for this project?

From the private sector, just to clarify.

I'm asking is, So I know that the team does an incredible job of accessing different types of grants to support this type of work. And I was just curious if any of those monies had been secured or other dollars that have been perhaps from the CCRS or other restricted funds that have been put into this. And then just in general, yeah, that's my question. Thank you.

Yeah, to be clear, for the East Bookend redevelopment, we are not anticipating any city direct capital contribution. We do not have that budgeted. Again, we hope that generates revenue. For the civic area project, for the Boulder Creek Park project, that money is coming from CCRS for the park project.

Awesome. Thank you. Thank you. Ryan, do you have any questions?

No questions for me. Thank you.

Awesome. I have no questions either. So I was wondering if we could get the two-minute timer up. And then we've got a couple minutes each if anybody wants to offer. Tara, it's time for your speech. Any comments or anything on the goals of the partnership before staff moves forward with the release of the RFP?

oh there we go two minute right yes yeah yeah yep two minutes please so yep all righty tara you are up first well just right back to ally the uh the arboretum path of course should not be in phase one because we have to have somewhere for it to go so i totally get that and i'm with you on that so i do apologize if you think i wanted to speed it along any faster than phase two But all I can say is that, sorry, my dinner. Thank you, husband. I'm very excited about this. And it's like, it's one of my dreams come true. That's all I have to say.

Thanks, Tara. Anyone else like to offer some comments? Erin. Erin.

So you can start my timer. But I had a clarifying question on the goals, just that they look good. But the first one is about, it says, achieve the community's vision through programming activation of the community benefits. Where is it referenced so people can understand what the community's vision is?

Yeah. So it was in, and I can present my screen again. Give me one more second. I would say that the community's vision specifically on East Book and again, the main offering out of the park plan, the 2015 civic area park plan and the engagement that we've done, as well as the market analysis, the three key themes that came up for goals would be to create a food destination, integrate with recreation and provide community arts and culture opportunity.

Very good. So I guess my one comment might be to consider calling that out explicitly rather than referring to the community's vision so that it's clear what we're trying to accomplish there with those goals. Perfect. Thank you. Other than that, it all looks great. Thank you.

Thanks, Aaron. And Matt, you are going to be next.

Appreciate that. Yeah, I mean, in general, I think This is all heading the right direction. It's a long time coming. This is big time activation in this area. And I think this is just the right steps kind of at the right time. So I look forward to seeing this continue to move on and hopefully we can find the right partner. So appreciate that.

Thank you, Matt. Tina, you're next. Yeah, thanks.

I don't have a lot of comments, and I don't want to create too many conditions to the point about not making a project impossible, but if there are a way to envision this so that people of different economic levels could participate fully in the experience, I think that would be great. As we're sort of trending toward higher end experiences in Boulder, which can also be great, it would be nice to see a place that was welcoming and able to participate for different levels of income.

Thank you. Thanks, Tina. Rob?

Thanks. I also think this is a fantastic plan. I mean, with Sundance coming and just the future of Boulder, I think it's the right thing to do to activate that area. And I look forward to it tying in the hill eventually. I kind of have a question. Well, let me read your question again. The goals of the partnership. I mean, the goals of the partnership, you stated that it's self-sustaining. And in order for it to be self-sustaining, there is the possibility of activating the West End that could actually fund the East Book End. Does staff have an estimate, I'm sure you do, of the values for the East Bookend properties under a sales scenario versus a long-term lease scenario? And will the RFP bidders know that up front so that they can make decisions based on those property values?

Yeah, I would say, and then I can hand it off to Mark Wolf to add, but I would say because through the RFP process, we'll get a myriad of responses. And some of those responses could include a mix of sales and lease and different options that some of the financials would actually have to be sort of worked out through that process. So there's still a lot to kind of weigh and look through what would be the RFP as well as the pre-development agreement.

HAB-Jacques Juilland- And Marco let you in yeah i'll just say specifically that we do we have received a broker opinion of value for all of our properties within the civic area we're not putting that number out there intentionally because. HAB-Jacques Juilland- We want the totality of the bids to come in to you know yes value of those sites are factor how they're delivering the Community. benefit and goals that we're talking about. So we will certainly be weighing those offers based off of the opinion of value, but we're not going to publicize that number per se before the RFP process.

Thank you. If I could just chime in quickly. So we know the unencumbered cost, but if through this concept plan process, we say, oh, by the way, we want public restrooms built as part of that development, that will affect what the property value is. There's also these properties are fairly large, so the tea house property includes the large surface parking lot behind it. We want to retain ownership of the tea house, so we would likely subdivide that, determining where the subdivision line and stuff would determine also what the effect would be on the property value.

Makes sense. Thank you. And Ryan, you're up.

Okay. Yeah, this is really great. It's going in the right direction. I think the goals might be complete. I hesitate to add things. Although, just one thought would be the higher level goals of the city. We have a couple of items that maybe we could clarify in here a little that we care about. One is, Tina kind of got to this a little bit, but just economic revitalization and having a synergy with the downtown and hill. I don't really see that in the goals, but ideally a partnership would really be taking that into account and thinking about the economic impacts, not just within the civic area, but the adjacent areas. important economic neighborhoods, or important neighborhoods that generate economic development. And then the other one is, Matt kind of nodded to this, but just the need to work towards long-term financial stewardship in a way that really deliberate upfront about total cost of ownership, of maintenance, you know, the different kinds of design choices we make in the front end that can make a big difference later. And thinking about, yeah, capital expenditures in that way. And also, a lot of our visitors are from outside the area. And to the extent we can be imaginative with user fees, that can help to really create more resources for us. I know that's in there. There's something in there about looking for investments or revenues. So anyway, those are maybe just a couple of nice to haves if there's a way to augment it without creating too many more constraints. Thanks.

Thanks, Ryan. Tayshia, would you like to add anything?

No, I mean, I'm really excited about the direction, particularly just balancing out the revenue generation and the sale. I, you know, again, just can, I love every aspect of where, of the direction that it's moving in. But you know, I still am concerned around the part where we cover up part of that creek. I just, I'm really hesitant to do any, anything. And I know the parks is always thinking about our climate, but, you know, we know at this stage, the best thing to do is not to move things around if you don't have to. So, You know, if people want flat green spaces, they can go to Chautauqua. There's a beautiful, huge lawn that they can go into. And we have other places and spaces where that can happen. But I would just, I would really... encourage us we tend to have a shiny penny we want the very best and and and i and i want that for for that but um sometimes that comes at a cost for for the things that we that we need and so just um you know balance out balancing out the needs and the wants is always at the forefront of my mind and and for the for future generations as well thank you thank you

And I would just kind of lift up a couple of things. I don't have any new things to add. But I think this piece about achieving the community's vision, this has been a long time coming, right? Over 10 years of sort of working on this. So just really appreciate that. And I'm looking forward to the community getting to see where all this has been going for such a long time. I'm very excited about the property management and sort of offloading some of our own load as we, especially as we're moving up to the Alpine Balsam Campus. That's definitely part of our long-term financial strategy and our facilities plan and everything. So I'm very excited about that as well. And then the partnership with the farmer's market. I mean, this sort of came out so much in what we want this area to be. I'm so excited for the idea that In the not too distant future, they will have some stable infrastructure like tents that don't blow away when it gets windy, power that they can use for fans or whatever, you know, they're sort of needing there, keeping the lights on. all that kind of stuff. Just really, really, really excited to see that grow out. And I think it's really going to help this whole area become a space that our community is activating and getting to as we are thinking about some of our other city goals and how they can tie into this area too. So I'm really excited about it. I think that this is all on the right path and I don't have anything to add to that. Thank you so much, everybody, for the presentation. And did you get what you need from us? Is there anything else? I believe we did. Thank you so much. We really appreciate the feedback.

Thank you. Thank you. Good to see everyone.

Thanks so much. All right, folks, we have one more thing to get through tonight. Another just little item of which ballot measures we want to consider. taking a position on as a city organization. So Nuria, I will hand it over to you once again. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Speer.

Yes, our last item for the evening. And I just want to thank Heather, who did a great job of really trying to consolidate at your request, some of the big information. We know that there are a lot of them. So we ask perhaps that you jot down or mind those that you may want to weigh in on. I know you don't have to, but there may be some that you do because it is harder to go back to them all in detail. And so if you're thinking about them as they're being presented, that would be great. But for now, I will pass it on to Heather.

Thanks, Nuria. Can you all hear me? Great. I'm going to share my screen.

Just one moment. And then we are going to go present.

All right. Can you all see my slides? Awesome. Let me just swap this over for myself.

Okay.

So good evening. Oh, let me, okay. Sorry. I'll go back. There you go. Okay. Um, good evening, everyone. Heather Stauffer, Intergovernmental Affairs Officer for the city. Um, you all saw a brief preview of some of these ballot measures, um, earlier on, and I'm going to give you this evening an update, updated summary and ask for some direction from council. For background, city staff are not allowed to participate in advocacy or campaigning around ballot measures on behalf of the city. However, city council can take an official position on a ballot measure on behalf of the city. To do so, a council member must request that staff draft a resolution stating the city's position. The resolution is then brought forward for council's consideration at a regular meeting. If council adopts the resolution, that position becomes the city's official position on the ballot measures. Council is not required to take a position on any of the state or county ballot measures, What I will be asking for this evening is direction on whether council would like staff to draft resolutions expressing a city position on any of the state or county ballot measures. We have one county ballot measure, which is covered in the presentation. I've also summarized eight state measures that have currently qualified for this November ballot, as well as several additional measures that are still pending signature verification. For this presentation, I'll cover seven of those pending measures. For each measure, I'll provide a brief summary, an overview of who is supporting and opposing it, how it relates to the city's policy statement, and any potential impacts to the city. All right, so first we have county ballot measures. There is currently one county ballot measure being considered that was referred to the ballot by the county commissioners on July 23rd. So this is the Boulder County early childhood care and education mill levy increase. The ballot measure would increase property taxes in Boulder County by 2.579 mills, which is expected to generate approximately $30 million annually. The funding would be used to address the high cost and limited availability of child care and preschool for young children in Boulder County. The measure identifies four priorities for the funding, childcare affordability, childcare accessibility and quality, workforce stability, and reducing administrative costs for childcare providers. One note, the measure does not currently have a ballot number. The number will be assigned once the county clerk certifies the ballot in early September. Our regional policy priorities include a statement supporting increased funding for nonprofits providing basic needs services, including childcare for low-income community members in Boulder and throughout the county. You'll see the proponents listed in your memo, the full list of those proponents, but I'll say the Brighter Start Boulder County Coalition is the primary proponent here, and I did not find any organized opposition to the measure at this time. Finally, we do not anticipate any impacts to city programs or operations. So state ballot measures. I wanted to give just a quick timeline. The state has until September 2nd to review signature petitions. After that, we'll know definitively what measures will be on the ballot. Each measure needs 124,238 valid signatures. And constitutional changes also need 2% of registered voters in each of the 35 state senate districts, so the deadline to withdraw a petition is September 4 that mostly relates to an initiative initiative 175 which will review. So first I'll go over the eight ballot measures that have qualified for the ballot. The first is Initiative 85. This initiative would raise felony penalties for making, selling, or possessing fentanyl and other synthetic opioids. It would also remove some exceptions that are currently in statute around Good Samaritan protections and would mandate treatment for certain drug felonies. The initiative is being brought and supported by Advance Colorado, with Brighter Colorado as an issue committee supporting it. Opposition for this measure includes the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition and Coloradoans for Real Safety Solutions, which is an issue committee opposed to the initiative. Our policy statement addresses some of this issue. Specifically, it states that the city will support initiatives that emphasize restorative justice and treatment over incarceration. In terms of the potential impact to the city, the Boulder Police Department regularly responds to calls related to fentanyl overdoses and poisonings. However, at this point, we wouldn't be able to determine whether this initiative would ultimately increase or decrease the number of calls that the city receives. It would likely take some time after the implementation to assess the impact. Initiative 95. This initiative requires local and state law enforcement to report certain arrests of persons who are not verified as lawfully present in the United States to federal authorities. This is in direct conflict with state laws around federal immigration enforcement and information sharing specifically through House Bill 19-1124 and Senate Bill 25-276. This is also being brought by Advance Colorado. It's being opposed by the Colorado Communities First Issue Committee and various immigrants rights coalitions throughout the state. This would change how Boulder PD currently handles immigration enforcement, and it places an unfunded mandate on the city to assist in federal immigration enforcement. Our policy statement speaks pretty directly to opposing mandates on the city when it comes to enforcing federal immigration laws, as well as opposing unfunded mandates related to reporting requirements around public safety. Next is Initiative 108. This raises trafficking of a minor to a Class 1 felony and mandates a sentence of life without parole. It's being brought by Protect Kids Colorado, an issue committee, and it's opposed by issue committee Vote Common Sense. There is no tie to the policy statement and no identified city impact. Initiative 109. This ballot measure limits K through 12 and college sports team participation by biological sex. This is being brought by Protect Kids Colorado, It's opposed by issue committee families, not politics, as well as One Colorado and a number of other LGBTQ plus advocacy groups. We do not anticipate there being an impact to parks and rec programs or other city programs or operations. However, we do have language in our policy statement under our human rights section that states that the city will oppose laws and policies that impose restrictions on programs based on gender or gender identity. Initiative 110, this bars healthcare professionals from knowingly performing surgery on a minor to alter biological sex characteristics. It also bars state and federal funding, including Medicaid, from covering those procedures. This measure has the same proponents and opponents as the last. It's being brought by Protect Kids Colorado, and it's being opposed by Families Not Politics and a number of LGBTQ plus organizations. There are no anticipated impacts to city programs or operations. However, the city's policy statement on human rights does state that the city will oppose laws or policies that impose funding limitations or restrictions on programs based on gender and or gender identity, or create barriers to service. The fact that this does limit the use of public funding, including Medicaid, would fall into that category. So next up is Initiative 175. Initiative 175 would dedicate existing motor vehicle and fuel tax and fee revenue exclusively to road transportation. The measure defines road transportation narrowly to include only traditional roads, highways, and bridges designed for motor vehicles, but not transit, multimodal transportation, or other transportation purposes. So if approved, legislative council staff estimates that the measure would dedicate approximately $1.02 billion For the rest of this year and into 2027 that's a half a year impact and 2.1 billion in FY 2027-28 and then similar amounts in future years. exclusively to road transportation. So while Initiative 175 would increase the amount of funding available to local governments for roads and traditional road maintenance, it would severely limit the uses of that funding. Then the effects on top of that of House Bill 1430, which passed this last legislative session, was designed to counter this measure. So that would reduce existing transportation revenue streams and redirect newly dedicated transportation money into a new fund. So we would likely not see very much new transportation money because of the impact of those two counter initiatives. The proponents of Initiative 175 are Restorer Roads, which is the Colorado Contractors Association primarily. And the Colorado Construction Industry Coalition is the issue committee there. Keep Kids First Colorado is the issue committee opposing. There are conversations happening with legislative leadership trying to come to a compromise ahead of the September 4th deadline to withdrawal initiatives. So we'll keep an eye on whether those yield any kind of outcome there. We do anticipate that this could restrict funding for city programs like the Transportation Master Plan, Vision Zero Plan, among others, potentially forcing the city to redesign or find new sources of funding for these programs and projects. The potential impacts of 1430 on this make it unlikely that we would see significant increases in funding for traditional road and transportation as well. This also speaks to our policy statement around safeguarding transportation infrastructure with a focus on maintenance of existing infrastructure and projects that are multimodal in design and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. So next up, Proposition NN. This proposition allows the state to retain revenue above the TABOR cap for K through 12 up to $4.6 billion. That's the cap. And it requires the state to increase public education spending by 2% per year for 10 years. The extra spending would be used for teacher pay and retention, decreasing class sizes, and career and technical programs. This was a referred measure by the Democratic majority in the state legislature. It's also supported by the Colorado Education Association. It's opposed by the Your Family's Future Alliance, the Independence Institute, and the Colorado Union of Taxpayers because of the implications to taper. There's no direct city impact, but it may have funding increases for BVSD, and it may ease pressure on the budget as a whole, which could free up funding for other programs at the state level that the city participates in. So that's something to consider. So Initiative 177, a quick update on this. Signatures were verified for this initiative, so it will be on the ballot. That's an update from your memo. So this creates a constitutional right to buy and sell natural gas for heating and cooking. It's being brought by Advance Colorado. It's being opposed by Accountability for Colorado Communities Issue Committee, Vote Common Sense. and Conservation Colorado is also opposed. The city's policy statement speaks directly to reducing emissions from the natural gas sector. It's hard to know in terms of impacts, if this were to pass, what those impacts would be because the language is very broad and vague, but it could have implications for the city's energy code requirements, which currently require new builds to use electric over natural gas. There are additional questions about the city's liability for any future programs that are aimed at increasing electrification over natural gas if this should pass. So ultimately, we probably won't know the scope of everything it could impact until it's litigated if this were to pass. So these are state measures that have not yet qualified. As I mentioned, petitions were due on August 3rd. Each needs 124,238 valid signatures, and constitutional amendments also need 2% of registered voters in each of the 35 state senate districts. The Secretary of State's office has until September 2nd to verify those signatures, and so we should know after that point what is officially on the ballot. Initiative 195, this is the graduated income tax. This replaces the state's 4.4% flat income tax with graduated rates that go up to 8.4% for taxable income over $1 million. It's estimated that this would raise about $2 billion per year and directs that revenue specifically towards K-12 healthcare and early childhood care and education. Protect Colorado's Future Coalition includes many, many organizations. The Bell Policy Center is the main one. The full list is included in your memo. Opposition issue committees include Keep Colorado Affordable and Brighter Colorado. Advance Colorado is opposed as well due to the changes in TABOR. This speaks to our 2026 state policy priority number three, protecting essential state funding, including pre-K through 12, Medicaid, among others. And I'll also just mention potential city impacts. The state being able to retain revenue for large programs could ease budget pressure elsewhere. in the budget, potentially increasing funding for state programs and grants that the city also uses. So that's something to consider there. Initiative 232. So if passed, the ballot measure caps the state income tax rate at 4.4% of taxable income for both individuals and corporations. This is meant to be a direct counter to Initiative 195, and it's being put forth by Advance Colorado. So it is being opposed by the proponents of Initiative 195. It's kind of a switch there. This won't change or decrease the amount of tax that the state receives, but it limits the possible solutions for sustained budget pressure that we've seen, which could sustain the pressure on the state programs and grants that the city participates in. So initiative 234, this is plain language ballot questions. If passed, the ballot measure adds a provision to the state constitution requiring ballot questions to be written in plain language at no more than an eighth grade reading level. It also prohibits a state statute from requiring language that conflicts with the plain language requirement. This is being brought forth by Advance Colorado. No issue committees that I have seen are opposed, but I know that Boulder County has taken an opposed position. We do not believe at this point that this would apply to the city's local ballot measures, but if this were to pass, we would need to do more legal analysis to understand the full scope. We also do not have policy statement language that relates to that. Initiative 302, this establishes a constitutional right to hunt and fish and take fish and wildlife by traditional methods and declares hunting and fishing the state's preferred way to manage wildlife populations. It's being supported by the T. Roosevelt Conservation Alliance and Coloradoans for Responsible Wildlife Management. It's being opposed by Protect Colorado's Constitution and Wildlife for All. We do not anticipate any impacts to the city. We don't permit hunting on city-owned property, and there's no policy statement language to reference on this one. So initiative 308 sporting goods sales tax revenue for conservation if passed this ballot measure designates all state sales tax revenue collected from sporting goods and equipment as wildfire and conservation revenue. It exempts it from the TABOR limit and it directs it to conservation and wildfire funds, including GOCO rather than the general fund. The state anticipates that this could generate about $175 million per year for those funds. It's being brought forward by Western Resource Advocates and For Colorado Land and Water. Excuse me, For Colorado Land and Water is the issue committee that's supporting this. It's opposed by the Eco Integrity Alliance. Our state policy priority number three does name GOCO as an organization that the city will support in terms of protecting state funding. This would increase the amount they receive. The city is a frequent recipient of GOCO grant funding, and it's likely that the city may benefit from the increased funding. We also may benefit from the new wildfire prevention and water fund if we choose to pursue those grant dollars as well. However, I would just mention that it does pull 175 million that would otherwise go to the state's general fund for use for other programs so it's not new money that's being put into these funds it's redirecting from the state general fund. All right initiative 362 this adds constitutional language that requires a voter in any federal or statewide election to sign the self affirmation on a returned mail ballot. and include either the last four digits of their social security number or their Colorado drivers license identification card or other Colorado identification numbers that meet federal real ID requirements. This is being put forth by the Colorado Voter Trust Initiative. Boulder County is opposing, but there is not an official opposition issue committee that I could find on this one. We do not have policy statement language that connects to this directly, but it would likely include city elections if we coordinate with the county as part of a statewide election. So next steps for council. As I mentioned at the top, council can take an official position on any ballot measure on behalf of the city. And to do so, a council member has to request that staff draft a resolution stating the city's position. The resolution is then brought forward for council's consideration at a regular meeting. If you identify ballot measures that you would like staff to draft, we will do that and hopefully have those to you on august 20th for your regular meeting and then council can take a formal position on those via resolution so our question for council is then are there a ballot measures that council would like to direct staff to draft resolutions for and i have a summary slide that i'm gonna pull up um This is for Council's considerations. I've just grouped together ballot measures with direct ties to our policy statement. It might be easier to see. And then all other ballot measures so we can go back and forth there as needed.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Heather. Um, as a lot of information, we have big ballot this year. Um, what I'm going to recommend, cause I, I believe that other than the Boulder County one, Heather, please correct me if I'm wrong. Um, the other five are ones that we talked about last time. Um, and they seem to be things that council was generally cool with, uh, opposing. And so maybe just like, um, if we could just say as a group, do we want to direct staff to, um, to create a resolution opposing these five. And then if people have other specific ones that they feel are really relevant to the city to bring forward to take a position on, folks can speak to that briefly, but we've got about 15 minutes to wrap up this discussion. So I wonder if we could just do it that way so that we're touching on the ones we've already talked about, and then we can go forward with the newer ones. Does that sound okay?

Do a process question. This is where a little, I think there was, there was going to be a moment to ask some questions. I was just wondering where might that fit in?

No, I hadn't just because we were given like 30 minutes for this total item. Sure. Yeah.

Cause it was in your, it was in your little script of what was there.

So yeah. Yeah. No. So no questions. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if we've got time at the end, maybe for, for some things, but if, you know, hopefully we can, especially for, that's what I was hoping on these five, especially we can, we talked about them before. Is that okay with folks? I mean, I guess the question is that we need to answer is, would we like to take an opposed position on the five that we talked about before? Basically all the ones in red on this slide. And again, we are directing staff to... to draft a resolution that would come to us possibly at next week's meeting.

Tina. Well, I appreciate, you know, having a plan and a pathway. I am curious to know if Matt, your question was around the six that we're talking about right now, or is it one of the other ones we haven't talked about before?

It was one of the others, but I still think it's appropriate to ask questions. I mean, if there's a chance to talk about it a little bit, if we go over a little bit, that's fine. But I'll leave that to our facilitator, Nicole, to decide what the best question is.

I just wanted to make sure it wasn't in one of the six that we're talking about now. And I do think hopefully we can move this fast and have some time for questions. Thank you.

Yeah.

Yeah, no, thank you. That's what I was hoping was we could just kind of wrap up the ones that we had already talked about last time, June, whenever that was, and then move into the other ones that people have specific interest in. Tina, yeah.

Yeah, I would support that.

Cool. If we could just take this down just for a second, Heather, I think what we want to know is for these five that we talked about before, do we have, who would like to ask staff to create a resolution? There may be more that get added to a no to state measure resolutions in the next one, but let's at least take these five off the table because there's so many here.

And council member, I think you want us to take down that so we can see everybody's presentation down and then we'll go back up.

Yeah.

Thank you. Thanks Heather. Okay. And Aaron, you've got your hand up. Is that for a. Yeah.

I believe you're asking for a non-binding, not a five that would then lead to things being brought back for a formal vote on consent at the next meeting. Is that correct? That's correct. Thank you. And I think we're still waiting for the presentation to be taken down.

Sorry. I thought I was not sharing anymore.

Technology.

Okay. I think I'm stopped sharing now. Sorry.

So, so for those five state measures that we had talked about oppose on who is good with the language Aaron just said. Again, non-binding out of five, you can still vote no when these come back to us in a formal vote. So who's good with the city taking an opposed position on asking staff to draft something for the city to take an opposed position? Okay, I see all of us. Okay, great. Thank you. Okay, so now we can go one by one. And what I would suggest here is folks to raise your hands if there are Couple you're particularly interested in that seem relevant to the city. Let's maybe discuss those one at a time, but we've at least taken five off the list.

Point of clarification. Yes.

Yep.

We did the oppose. Did we do something about the support?

No, no. That's what I'm hoping people can bring in the other ones that are in the presentation that we haven't talked about before that people may want to either support or oppose either state or county.

Oh, I just thought we're taking care of that whole sheet. Cause that was the obvious stuff that was up front. Sorry. Okay. All right.

Yeah, no, I was just focused on the ones we had, we had talked about before. So, um, and here I, if folks are okay with going over, I'm, I'm okay continuing to go over. I just, I want people's blessing so that it's not like nine 45 and, uh, everybody is, is wondering why they've been sitting for five hours. Um, Okay. And I know Matt, you had a question first. Taisha, you had a question. And then Aaron and Rob, I see your hands up too. So Matt or Taisha, I do want to just because you all had, okay, you're good.

All right. Real quick. Obviously, we have two conflicting state income tax ballot measures. Could you clarify, Heather, what the impact or consequences or processes should both of them pass?

Thank you for the question. And my understanding is that if they both pass, the one with the higher number of yes votes would take precedence. I have no idea if that would need to be litigated. I don't know what precedence that I've never seen that before. But that was in my research what I understood.

All right. Thank you.

Great. Then Aaron, your hand is up. Do you have one you want to bring forward?

Yeah. Am I allowed two or do I just get one?

I would say just put them all out there. Whatever it is.

I'll start with a couple. Then let's say I would be interested in us taking a support position on the early childhood education measure at the county level. And I would be interested in having us take an opposed position to the fentanyl measure. This number is escaping me. It's not in front of me, but I think that's good enough. So those are my two.

Great. Thank you. I'm just going to take notes on the ones people are tossing out there, and then we can go through and consider each of those. Rob, do you have other ones you would like to add?

As soon as I can get myself off mute. I have a question for Heather on Initiative 308. I see that Colorado or Eco Integrity Alliance is opposing it. Do you know why?

So what I could find on that, they have some information out online regarding logging and how they were concerned that this initiative would promote more logging in forests. So that is my understanding as to why they're opposed.

Okay. I mean, I would want to support that initiative.

And Rob, what is the, or Heather, what's the name for that one? Like other than the initiative number, what's the title?

Spring Goods Sales Tax Revenue for Conservation.

Okay. Okay. And you said a support, right? Is what you went, okay. Great. Erin, your hand is up again. No, okay. Old one. All right, Matt and Tara.

I'm going to combine the support from what Aaron said, so the early childhood education mill levy also support that, oppose the penalties for fentanyl crimes, but then also support the sporting goods sales tax revenue for conservation.

Great, thank you. Tara.

Sorry. Can you tell me, Heather, why people would be opposed to the human trafficking one of a minor, which seems like a no-brainer?

Yeah, it's a great question. So let me just pull up my notes here. So it has to do with increasing penalties. There's some question about whether this would apply So in some cases, people who are trafficked are also forced to traffic others. So would this penalty apply to those folks as well? There was also question about whether this provision would apply to, say, moving a minor across state lines for abortion care. So I think that Because people are not clear on the possible unintended consequences or intended, there are folks who are hesitant.

Did the county or the district attorney weigh in?

I believe that Boulder County is opposed. Let me just verify that, though.

I think I saw that.

But what about the district attorney? Do you know? I did not see any position from the district attorney. Yes, they are opposing 108. Okay, thanks.

Anything else, Tara? Is that one that you would like us to consider asking staff to take a position on? No, you're good. Okay, cool. Taisha.

I'm sorry, I don't recall if anybody added the graduated income tax initiative 195. Nope. I would like to support that.

Great.

Thank you. Anything else, Tahisha?

Okay. Tina. I'd add NN, the public education.

All righty.

As a support, I should say.

Yep, okay, cool. Okay, and then the, sorry, does anybody else have any? Otherwise, I'll do mine. Okay, I'll just jump in with mine. The road transportation funding would really have a significant impact on our ability to do multimodal improvements and interrupt a lot of our citywide work. I would love to see us take an opposed position to that one.

Was that not on the list?

It was on the list. Oh, I'm sorry. Okay. Thank you. Sorry. All right. A little bit too late. Okay. Any others?

Hi. Sorry. I... I have some concerns around the constitutional right to fish and hunt, although I appreciate the method of fishing and hunting as a conservation need because of the decreased habitat which requires us as humans to have more of a hand however I do oppose the language that the way that it's written is concerning and it it seems to prioritize that method over other methods that we know to be less harmful for wildlife so

Would you like the city to consider taking a position on that one?

No, I just have concerns around it. I, since our city doesn't have any kind of, you know, we're not, we don't even have a ton of land that's adjacent to us for hunting and fishing, but we do, you know, we have a very robust fishing community with our Boulder Creek again, but I commend our, you know, climate team and our water team for understanding that there's a variety of different ways to support the health of, of our fish besides, you know, fishing. So, And since they didn't weigh in on anything, Heather, have they weighed in on this at all?

Can you state that?

Are you asking if CPW or... No, our climate initiatives team.

They didn't weigh in specifically on impacts for initiative 302, but they... Can you, I'm so sorry, can you clarify what initiative you're talking about?

The constitutional right to hunt and fish.

So initiative 302. No, outside of what's in the policy statement, I didn't poll the climate team specifically on questions on that one, but I can if there's specific questions.

I would be curious to know if they see any unintended consequences of this policy and the need to oppose it.

I can ask those questions.

Brian. Heather, can you clarify which items we've already voted on?

The increase of LG and...

Caroline Miller, To tell you, I couldn't tell if you're finishing up or are you good, I think your connection was.

Caroline Miller, Apologies go.

Thank you.

David Ensign, To me, thanks, I just wanted to double check just for clarity what items did we already vote to oppose.

So. You took a poll on initiative 95 law enforcement reporting.

I'm just going to correct Heather really quickly. We didn't vote to oppose, right? We're asking staff to draft a non, these are non-binding straw polls.

Thank you. You took a straw poll to ask for drafts on initiative 95, which is the law enforcement reporting to federal authorities. Initiative 109, which is the male and female participation in school sports. Initiative 110, which is prohibit certain surgeries on minors. Initiative 175, which is restore our roads. And Initiative 177, right to natural gas. And those were all opposed.

That's all I got. Thank you.

Great. Thank you. And I agree with some of the ones that have already been mentioned. I think one in particular is the fentanyl measure. I know we touched on it a little bit last time. We were looking for more information, but this is something where our DA is opposed. Sheriff Johnson, a lot of our current and former Boulder County reps and senators would take $400 million from the state's general fund specifically for prison beds. It puts in place a mandatory eight to 32 year prison term for a first offense, which could just be an 18 year old giving a pill to somebody at a party. They're basically treated the same way as a high level drug trafficker. The state would be spending hundreds of millions of dollars more on jails and prison beds for people who are already struggling with addiction instead of treatment. So just really, it sounds like we're moving in that direction, but I just wanted to double plus one opposition to that measure as well. Okay, so if I have gotten this correctly, we are looking at potentially asking staff to create a support resolution of support on the county child care measure.

I'm sorry, Councilmember, we would need to have an indicator of each one.

Yeah, sorry. And that's what I'm trying to get to. I was just going to list all the ones that I think I heard and then people let me know if we left anything out and then we'll just go through one by one and see if there is a majority. The fentanyl measure, asking staff for a resolution on a no position. The sales tax revenue for conservation, that was asking for a potential yes position. The graduated income tax, asking for a yes position. NN, yes. Did I write that down, Tina, correctly? Yep. Okay. And then the, yep. And I believe that was it. Is that correct? Okay. Anybody have anything else in this long list of ballot measures that they would like us to just drop full on to come back to us? Okay, thank you. Okay, so please raise your hand. I'm going to name out the, the, I forgot to write down the numbers, Heather, but I'm hoping if it's not clear based on what I'm saying in the description. Okay, thank you. So the first one up is the county child care measure. Do we have, who is in favor of asking staff to draft a support resolution that we would vote on later? Okay, I think I see everybody. Unanimous is what it looks like. Okay, great. The fentanyl measure. Who is in favor of a no position on the city taking no position on the fentanyl measure? Okay, we've got all of us again. Okay. The sales tax revenue for conservation. And before, sorry, I realized I had a question on this one. it wouldn't impact the state general fund. Is that correct, Heather?

It would remove money that would have otherwise gone to the state's general fund. So instead of $175 million going to the state's general fund, it would essentially do the job of the JVC and move that money directly to conservation programs.

Okay. Thank you. Um, so, uh, I heard support for a yes position asking to take a yes position there. Um, yes, Aaron.

I just say, um, the taking out of the hands of the JVC just, just made me nervous. So I'm going to not support moving forward right now, but I'd be interested in learning more and maybe we come back to this. It would be my position. Maybe we support it later, but I would need to learn more.

Thank you. I feel similarly. Um, Okay, so let's just do straw poll on that one. Who's in favor of taking a yes position? Is that one?

Yep. Can I ask a question? Oh, yes. What number is this?

This is initiative 308.

It is 308. Okay, so I'm for it.

Okay, we got three. Okay, so not that one. Okay, and if anybody sees me counting wrong, please call that out too. Okay, next is the graduated income tax. There was a proposal that we consider taking a yes position on this one. Matt.

I mean, we probably have a lot of personal perspective on this. How does this impact Boulder directly?

so um it there is not a direct impact to the city of boulder however um raising additional revenue for the state would likely ease pressure on the current state budget which would ease pressure on some of the programs that the city does participate in at the state level i personally support it i'm sure the city needs to weigh in on this one thanks tina

Yeah, I'll just make a comment that it also lowers taxes for a large segment of our population that would be classified as middle and low income. And we talk a lot about cost of living impacts in our community. So I do think that that's worthwhile considering.

Thank you, Tina and Taisha. And in addition, it would specifically allow for more funding of affordable housing, transportation, multi-mobile projects, education, all of that. In addition to lowering taxes for lower and middle income, it also creates more funds to support and make our city more affordable from that perspective as well. So that's why I asked for us to take a positive position on it. Thank you.

Thanks so much, and I agree with taisha and Tina both that I think things that right now put money back into the pockets of a lot of the people who are living or working here is a good thing. Generally, and a lot of the programs that many people in our Community rely on are being shortchanged by the state budget issues. So anything that we can do to help fill that up does have trickle-down impacts on people in our community. So the proposal is that we ask staff to draft a resolution with a yes position on the graduated income tax. Who is in favor of asking staff to do that? I got, oh shoot, I'm forgetting how many we are now. Eight? No, seven. Seven. Okay. Thank you. And then the other one was NN, which is the education funding related measure, if I said that correctly. Good enough to trigger our memories. The proposal was we asked staff to take a yes, or to draft us a yes resolution on this one. Who is in favor of this one? We're asking staff to do this. Okay, looks like we've got everybody there. Okay. I believe that's it. Did I miss anything that anybody brought up that they believe the city should be taking a position on? Excellent. Heather, do you have any more information you need from us?

I don't believe so at this time. Thank you.

Thank you. And thank you for putting all this together for us. That was a lot of information to process. So thank you, everybody, for sticking with this meeting. Three big topics and we managed to get through. Apologies for taking us a little bit over because I know we've all been sitting for four hours already. But thank you. And thank you, staff, for your organized memos and presentations. Is there anything else, Maria, that you need from us?

No, just appreciate you bringing us home almost on time for three items. So thank you. We're close.

Okay, then with no other items on tonight's agenda, I will close this meeting at 9.09 p.m. Thank you, everyone. Hope you can all stretch now.

Thanks so much, Nicole. Take care.