City Council - workshop

Colorado Springs, we shoot for the moon. We train the defenders of air and space. We secure a

Yes. We better get going.

Good morning, and welcome to the City of Colorado Springs work session meeting for Monday, 05/11/2026. Will the clerk please call the roll?

Council member Casey?

Here.

Council member Crowe Everson.

Here.

Council member Donaldson. Excused. Council member Gold.

Here.

Council member Hidom. Present. Council Member Line Weber?

Here.

Member Here. Council Member Risley? Here. Council Member Williams? Here. Eight present, one excused.

Are there any changes to the agenda today? Seeing none moving on to the regular meeting comments. Are there any changes to the regular meeting for tomorrow? Seeing none moving on to 4A. Will the clerk please read Item 4A into the record?

City Council Work Session Meeting Minutes 04/27/2026.

Are there any questions to those meeting minutes? Seeing none, moving on to item six a. Will the clerk please read item six a into the record?

Highspeak Housing Network State of Housing Report.

Good morning, Jill.

President Crowe Iverson, excuse me, president pro pro tempore Risley, council members. And I'd like to give a special welcome to our new council member, mister Casey. Welcome to the dais. I look forward to meeting with you at some point. Okay. So because are you gonna click or am I gonna click? I'm gonna click. Oh my gosh. I'm gonna click. So because we have a couple new people here, I wanna very briefly talk a little bit about the organization of Pikes Peak Housing Network.

The organization was founded in 2023 by a group of very concerned and compassionate community members who really wanted an organization that was focused twenty four seven on our housing crisis. And so they formed PPHN to really advocate for housing affordability, housing production, and access in the Pikes Peak region. And we are the only organization in the region accomplishing this mission. Why are we needed? If you read through at all the region's new housing needs assessment, it says we have a housing deficit somewhere between 13,027 homes and that's a lot of homes.

As you all know, the housing opposition, opposition to any type of growth in our community is swelling. More and more people don't want us to build anything. They don't like change. And so we need a voice for those who really need housing. Our younger residents especially are unable to purchase a home and experience the American dream and so we are doing all we can to ensure that they have homes.

And without action, the lack of housing, production and affordability in our region will seriously impact our economy and our ability to hire a quality workforce. Now I'm just gonna go through a little bit of the data. As you all know, some of you did attend our 2025 actually, was the twenty twenty six state of housing event where we presented the 2025 State of Housing Report. Unlike your housing needs assessment, it is an eight page document that has very simple data in it that, any community member can understand and then share with their commute their family, their friends, their colleagues about why we housing in our region. And so that report was released.

I'm happy to send it to all of you. But it's this is just a kind of a compilation of some of that data so that you can see the concerns that we have about our our housing deficit in the Pikes Peak region. This graph you have before you is a nationwide graph. I couldn't find data locally. But as you can see, the average age of the first time homebuyer has increased from 31 years old to 40 years old just in the past decade.

And the average age of the average home buyer is now increased to 59 years old, which is my age, from 44 years old over the past decade. This is very concerning and as I said before, so many of our younger community members are unable to purchase a home. They are as we can see delaying marriage, delaying having families and we want them to be able to experience the American dream. So, oh this graph didn't display quite right. But so this is our very simple data around how we define and describe the housing deficit in the Pikes Peak region.

Your housing needs assessment has also a number for what our housing deficit is. This number is in that range, but it is a very simple way for you to share what our housing deficit is with anyone else. And that really is just to say how many housing units we have in our community. Housing unit can be an apartment and it can be a mansion. That's a housing unit.

And then we have the number of households. And that is a household can be one person and it can be a family of 10. And we should have 10% more housing units than we have households. And so this graph just basically shows the number of households time point times point one, that's the need of 331,000. Our housing unit number is 317, so when you subtract those numbers, our housing deficit is simply around 13,000 to 14,000.

Is that exact? No, there is no exact number and your housing needs assessment adds other things in there like the number of people commuting into the city for work, the number of people living on their parents' couches and such and such. But that is a really complicated number and hopefully we can all understand this one and share that with those in our community. This number, this graph really just is the one that I, if I only have one graph I share this one piece of information. And this is over the last ten years how the incomes have risen in our region and that is the red line.

They've risen about 48%. And then what our average rents have gone up and that is the yellow line at 111%. And then the average cost of a home in our region has risen a whopping 141%. So this right here in a nutshell is why our community members cannot afford to purchase a home. We just are not keeping up our incomes with the price of homes.

Now this is an an unusual graph that I I probably won't do again, but I I really kinda wanted to understand if what I've been hearing over these last many years is true. Are are we really experiencing a housing deficit or did it begin when we had our downward crisis recession back in 2008? And so I pulled the permits from regional building over the last ten actually, is twenty years so I could get back to that number to really show this. And and yes, it is true. The blue line is single family homes.

As you can see in around 2005, we were building over 5,500 single family homes per year. And then around 02/1978, it dropped down to about a thousand. It kind of has risen and risen and gone back down, but it's never gotten back to what it was back in 2005. And the other interesting piece, of course, is the orange line. That's apartments or multifamily homes.

As you can see, they've just been kind of low all these years. But then because we had a need, a demand for more rental housing because our community members could not afford a home, That number has skyrocketed up and in around 2023 those two lines intersected and we had more apartments being built than homes. And in the end of twenty twenty five that happened again where the number of apartments permitted was greater than the number of single family homes permitted. The other number I'd like to draw your attention to is the green line. That is the number of condos that we have permitted over the years.

And I don't have the the numbers in my head memorized for the last twenty five years, but I do know in the last ten years we have permitted over 64,000 housing units. Only 187 of those have been condos. So don't let anybody tell you that that's a demand issue. That is 100% quintessentially a construction defect issue that we need to be fixing at the capital.

Councilman Hinjem.

Oh. Thank you, madam president. Hi.

Good Good morning, councilwoman. Thank you for being

here as always. I have a question on the multi family number. Is that number the number of total buildings or it's not units?

It's units.

It's actually

units. Yeah. Yeah. That would be a huge number of. Okay, thanks. Okay, any other questions? I know you have a lot of questions. A lot. Okay, so this is just a little data, a little more data about single family home purchase. I wanted to kinda explain kind of in a more meaty way why community members are not afford able to afford a home.

So at the end of twenty twenty five, the median home price was 460,000. Actually, around August 2025, it hit 500,000, and now right now in 2026, it's it's like 540,000. So so it it, continues to go up. If you have a down payment on that number of 20%, your loan amount would be $368,000 with an interest rate of 6%. It's higher right now. Your monthly mortgage would be 2,800. If you add in taxes and insurance, your total monthly payment is 3,400. And for those who are paying attention, we all know that property insurance and property taxes are rising. So this is kind of a lower number. But that makes your total payment of 3,400.

And if you're only paying about 30% of your income towards your home cost, you need to be earning a 138,000 to purchase that home. And so that again is an income that the majority of our community members are not earning as the median income is about 87,000. So this just kinda shows in a nutshell a specific reason why people aren't being able to purchase a home. This is another facet of that issue on this is one of my favorites. This is a funnel graph.

The left one is based on the incomes at the end of twenty five. This is what our community members can afford to purchase. And the right funnel graph is what we the type of prices of homes we are currently building. So you can see there's a mismatch between what our community members can afford to purchase versus what we're building. And there is a bright spot to this because this data is actually about 88% better than it was last year.

Our builders who are smart and want to be able to sell their homes are shifting what they're building to smaller units, smaller homes, more cost effective and affordable homes. And so those numbers are not quite, as you can see, a direct funnel and they are building more homes in that $400 $600,000 range which is a bright spot and it's really good. Lastly, I added this data at the last minute. I wanted to you to kinda see what's happening in the rental market. This is actually at the end of the first quarter of twenty twenty six, so I have moved away from your 2025 data.

I hear a lot, and I I bet you do too, that we have too many apartments in our community, that we are apartment city. I've heard that. Well, this is actually the the fact. The average vacancy rate at the end of the first quarter is 7.27. That's a very healthy vacancy rate as any of our property owners would would tell you. And as you can see, it is down from eight point eight and a quarter at the end of twenty twenty five. Also, your average rents, which you could understand as demand goes up from the lower vacancies, the the average rent is going up. It's now at $14.10. It was right about 14 at the end of the calendar year. So we are now seeing rents ticking back up.

If you looked at that that data that I showed from the from the permitting, we do have more complexes coming online probably in the next year or two. But we we do need to continue building more rental housing both market rate and affordable to meet the demand, especially because we continue to have concerns around the ability for our community members to purchase homes.

Councilman Rainey. Thank

you, madam president. To your very point, because I do get a lot of feedback on this in regards to, having too many apartments, that are going up. So the question I have specifically to the data that I'm looking at, I think you mentioned it already, but just for my clarity, where is the data being pulled from?

Sure. Oh, I did I

guess I didn't add that onto here. So I get my data from several different sources but for this particular data I get it from a company called Apartment Trends. The Apartment Association of Southern Colorado gives me that data or gives me their quarterly report every month, every quarter. And to keep the data consistent, I consistently use the same source.

Okay. Thank you.

You're very welcome.

That concludes the data portion of the presentation. This is really just one slide about what we're doing. Are you moving my just to kinda share a little bit more about what we're doing to to to help with this concerning data. And as you know, we advocate for all housing properties, especially the controversial ones to ensure that our decision makers have the facts about this data and the need for housing in our region. We also actively lead on policy changes, land use changes that can help us to build more housing, things like accessory dwelling units and such.

We, of course, create a lot of data, articles, messaging, talking points to share with our communities so that everyone else has that same information. We build media relationships. I wanna be the first call when the media has a question about data so that I can help fulfill and and share the facts around the housing issues we're having. And we host a lot well, we host several events to share all of the information around the need for housing in our community. As I mentioned, some of you attended our second state of housing event and we are hosting our first housing conference on October 1. It is called the

did I call it?

Housing Matters. Housing Matters Summit. And we have a really great housing advocate coming in. His name is Jim Hyde. I believe you've met him, council president. And he wrote a book about building small and it's a toolkit for for building in our community. He will be our keynote speaker. We'll have a couple breakouts and then we'll have a happy hour. So it will be a great afternoon and I hope you can join us for that. Lastly, we are just trying to build a huge list of housing champions in our region, and those are the folks I reach out to when there is a controversial project or a controversial policy issue to get them to also speak up and speak out loudly about why housing is needed.

And if you are interested in becoming a housing champion, you can click on that really cool QR code to the right there. I know you're anxious to do that. And with that, that ends my formal presentation and I'm happy to take any more questions you might have. And thank you so much for giving me the time today. I really appreciate being able to share the 2025 data with you. And I will try to reach out during the year to update you on all things housing.

Councilman Williams.

Thank you. Thank you for being here.

Good morning.

Even though you don't like your silly graph, I like your silly graph, the one that shows all of the housing and what's coming and what's not coming. Uh-huh. What I think would be interesting Go

back to it.

Yeah. It'd be interesting to see, not starting at 2,005, but how much housing did we build in the eighties? This is like our community. How much did we build in the nineties? What was that trend line like? Because having lived here forever, I know it goes up, down, up, down, up, down, but it'd be interesting to see if it ever went down below 2000 and what that looked like and how we recovered because that's a drastic change on what the trend could have been for the previous twenty five years.

I I completely agree. PPR PPRPD only goes back twenty years, so I couldn't go back any further.

Maybe I'll bug the HBA and see if they have some number of thoughts or something. Somebody's gotta have a clue.

Yeah. That would be good

to know.

Right. It'd be interesting to see if that was a a trend and we were able to fill those houses up until the last twenty years.

Well, we're growing, and we just need to be ensuring that we are building everywhere in our community to meet the demand for all of the the community members who want to live all over the city close to their jobs and their schools. And so it's I it it is an interest I mean, I I would be interested in knowing, you know, just the the growth kinda information about about that piece.

Jackson, I'm lacking condos as you can see, and that's a great

way to

get started and the

real estate equity on that policy issue with the state.

Anyone else? Councilman Risley.

Thank you, madam president. Hi, Jill. Thanks for being here.

Mister Potam,

this is you.

My my observation about this graph is similar to council member Williams. I think it's a really telling piece of information and equally interesting, not just the numbers, but if you look at the numbers relative to the proportion of population, meaning as we We go, now, you know, 2005 we probably were a city of maybe 300,000 people, three fifty, and now well over, well not well over, but over 500,000. And so I think again if you look at those numbers as a proportion or percentage of population, I think it tells an even more compelling story that we're building fewer houses now for a larger population than we were building twenty years ago for a smaller population. To her point about what that looks like in the past, you know, in 1985 or 1995, what was the population and what was the percentage of housing being built at that time?

Yeah, that's a good data point that I should try to figure out is like twenty years ago, what were the percentage of people owning versus renting to today? What is that same percentage? That's a loss for our community as people aren't putting down roots and building equity in our region.

Right. And I'd offer too that even though PPRPD doesn't have those building permit records available online, they certainly have them available if you go in and ask a person to do some research.

Councilman Hinjum. Thank you

Madam President. Jill, actually another graph you showed was the funnel graph. Could we Yes go to that

ma'am. There you go.

I recognize your organization is focused really strictly on the housing stock portion of the bigger challenges related to housing. But I think this is such an important one because while our builders are adapting and making those changes, that's fantastic. There's such a bigger context here that stock alone in my opinion is never going to address and that is there's some severe income inequality and people are really working hard just to keep the homes they have. We have more and more people who are homeless. I visited Crossfire Ministries grocery last week.

They're serving four fifty families a month who are coming to get groceries so that they hopefully can stay where they're living. So I'm glad that the shift is happening in the building. I think that's super important. But there are these other bigger contextual things that are happening in the world, in our country, in our economy. And then locally, just the concerns you mentioned, people kind of fearful of change.

And I think it's important that we educate folks and take all of that fear into consideration. And we also need to build in a way that takes into consideration the constraints in our region around water and some of the infrastructure challenges that we're facing as a city. So I think this is a really gnarly challenge and really do appreciate the work that you and your organization are doing. I just feel like it's important to name. While it's a very important part of addressing the challenge, it's not the only part. I

hear you councilwoman. There are of course other organizations that are part of just the housing continuum working on on all of these issues. And me just being a one man band, this this is my lane here. I will add that apartment properties use less than half the water as of single family homes, so they are always a good environmental choice. Absolutely. And of course, this this graph doesn't speak to the rental housing piece and and what we're building, but we are, of course, shifting to building more more rental housing because we need it in our community, and we're building more affordable housing too, which is very much needed. And there's always a need for more funding for that.

Thank you for your work.

Yes, ma'am. Councilman Casey.

Thank you, madam president. Could you go back to your previous chart? I think the one that we all like.

That one there.

Yes. Yeah. No. Just thought it would be interesting to see, you know, from 2005 to 2025 what the rise in construction costs look like, the rise in land costs look like. And are there any other factors that you think about other than just general affordability that might be driving what we see on the chart?

Yeah, that's a really good question. I can't really speak to where the if the land costs were a piece of it. That's something I'd I'd like to know though. I mean, it's I really try to focus on infill, trying to build more inside our existing city because it it costs the city less for infrastructure maintenance if you can can infill. However, those land costs are typically more than building on the edges of our city or to annex new land. So there are trade offs there. But you know, I'm gonna do a little research on that and see if I can at least maybe target a couple years in there to see what if there's any trends there. Thank you for that idea.

Thank you.

Thank you much for your presentation today. Was very it's always good to see this at least once or twice a year. I don't have a question, but to your point, the bigger problem is more of the regulation that's being passed down. It's not just we can't build affordable housing. The regulation that goes into it costs more money.

The construction defects is keeping half the younger people or even older people out of the market condos and townhouses were a starter home or a finisher home. All of the new changes with electrifying everything and being forced down is very expensive. So I think advocacy is probably the most important thing we can do right now just to get the ball rolling, which I know you do. I know you're up there all through the session. It's almost over.

Thank God. Today? Tomorrow? Yes. But having said that, the advocacy mean it's just I mean yes, there's a lot of things we can't do with inflation and that are gonna come and go and you know, we've got how many Fortune 500 companies leaving the state because of our regulations. So there goes some really good jobs that pay people a lot. So while I appreciate your efforts very much and I'm glad you will continue to do them, there's a lot more that goes into this than

just

people

aren't building affordable houses. That's exactly right. You should come work for me. There's actually an article in today's paper about a new bill that is now coming I'm sorry, that you now have to honor around hardening your homes and spending more on fire resistant materials on new new builds and any retrofitting of your homes. So I don't even pretend to know what that's gonna add to the cost of home building but it's not good.

Yep. Well thank you very much.

Thank you.

Moving on to item 6b. Will the clerk please read item 6b into the record?

Hay Neighbor presentation.

Good morning.

Kelly Hey, good morning. I'm Kelly Bull. I'm the executive director of Hey Neighbor, and we're working really hard to build social infrastructure and connection in our neighborhoods and throughout our city. And my goal today is to let you all know what we're up to at Hey Neighbor and how you can use us as a resource as council members and how you can refer constituents to us as a resource as well. So you may have known us previously as Kono.

And last year we went through a rebrand to really fit the direction that we are heading in and some changes that we've made. Our mission and our vision is the same. Our vision is that everybody loves their neighborhood. And the mission is to inspire neighbors to create vibrant communities. We do that through these three steps, making connections, building relationships, and creating change.

And we do this through primarily joy and fun. And we have found that you build stronger relationships, more resilient neighborhoods when neighbors first initially connect over fun. When you have thrown a beanbag back and forth at your neighborhood Cornell tournament before you actually got into the nitty gritty of problems in your neighborhood, we find that neighbors really respond better when they've built those relationships over the joy and the fun. And we're really working on being proactive towards problem solving and finding solutions and finding those upstream solutions. So a more connected neighborhood is a safer neighborhood.

It is a cleaner neighborhood. It's a more fun neighborhood to live in and more resilient when the neighbors know each other and they care for each other and they look out for each other. So some of our programs that we have that would be of interest to you is our Neighborhood University Program and our facilitator here is here, Amy Miller. And we have twelve weeks for this course. We meet in person two hours on a Wednesday night and neighbors come to learn about how the city works.

And each night a different specialist comes in to talk to the neighbors about the departments. So we have city planning. We've had, Kevin Walker has come in to talk about city planning. We've had development night. We have transportation night.

We have all sorts of facets of the city and neighbors get to learn a holistic understanding, comprehensive understanding of how the city works and how decisions are getting made and the intricacies of things so that they have a broader understanding. And so sometimes people come in with tunnel vision on an issue that they're really passionate about, and this course really helps them understand all the different facets at play and gives them a broader perspective on what's going on. So what we're doing is we are finding neighbors, giving them this understanding, giving them perspective, and giving them confidence in participating in the civic process and just truly understanding how things work.

Kelly, I have a comment or a question from Councilman Hanjem.

Yeah. Thank you, Madam President. Kelly, you know what a huge fan I am of the neighborhood university and hey neighbor generally, but I really can't say enough positive things about this program. And in particular, I want to highlight that council member Gold and I did this last week for the Historic Preservation Board. We interviewed six people out of, I don't know, eight or 12, I can't remember, quite a few applications.

And of those six, I'm confident that I remember two very specifically said that they went through Neighborhood University and found it to be incredibly helpful. There are people who are, and we recommended it to another candidate who mentioned that they really want to figure out how to plug into the city and this course is such a great way to do that. So I just think it's so fantastic and I wanted people to know that I think it's starting to yield. You've been doing it for about two or three years, no longer than that.

I think

four years now.

Four and a half, yeah.

But I feel like you're reaching a bit of a tipping point in that sort of critical mass that's helping to create neighborhood leaders. And I just see so much positive coming from it even in most recently in the town hall I did for Papeton Cragmore and they have really really strong leadership in their neighborhood and are finding all kinds of positive connections with the city and just among themselves as neighbors. It's really fantastic.

Great, thank

you for that.

Because I

don't really have a question.

You. Councilman Gould.

Thank you, madam president. I also don't have a question. It's more of a comment. My apologies as I can't be there in present in person. I have a plumbing issue at home today that I'm trying to get taken care of, but I do wanna give my kudos to Hey Neighbor, especially Neighborhood University. I think the the education that's happening there is tremendously helpful to to residents so they can understand how our city operates and how they can be their own advocate and get change done. It's really empowering, and thank you just for the hard work. I want to make sure if I I'm not sure if I heard it, but if you mentioned the 150 tables that are project that's going to be happening this this summer, fall?

It's coming. I'll mention it in a minute. Thank you. And I'll mention also that Councilwoman Gold is a graduate of Neighborhood University as well. So and to show you what our NU alumni go on to do is this is actually the d three town hall that was hosted last month with councilwoman Williams.

And this is Dave Valancourt and he is he graduated from the last cohort of NU and he organized this town hall and facilitated and just did a fabulous job. And he didn't even know I was in the audience and he plugged Neighborhood University of everything that he had learned like five different times. So they're really going on to do be very passionate about the community and do great work to spread the information that they've learned in Neighborhood University as well. And here's just another testimonial of somebody who was very thankful for what they learned, but I'll move on for time. So the next step for our neighborhood university graduates is then they graduate and then they become a neighborhood leader.

And so what we're doing is we're building a network of neighborhood leaders, of more engaged citizens, more engaged neighbors who want to be part of the process, who want to be more involved. And with this network we are able to create more of an informational conduit where if you were trying to reach out to a neighborhood, you can reach out to us as council members to say, hey, I'd love to talk to this neighborhood. Do you have a neighborhood leader we could talk to? And we're there to then help match you up with a neighborhood leader that you can consult and get information about a certain area or to spread information to that neighborhood. So we're really trying to bridge this gap between the city and citizens and make information flow more freely and with neighbors who understand things on a broader level.

It's not moving. There we go.

So they sign up to be a neighborhood leader when they're done. We also You can also become a neighborhood leader as a more engaged neighbor in this program without doing neighborhood university, but neighborhood university is our preferred method to get you into being a neighborhood leader. We also have community coordinators. So these are our neighbor staff that you can reach out to as council members and neighbors can reach out to the community coordinators and we consider them like our community concierge. That if you don't know, if you have a dangerous intersection in your neighborhood and you have no idea what to do about it, you can call your community coordinator and they will start matching you up with the right person to talk to or tell you which department in the city to talk to.

So it's really when people have no idea where to start, these are a great place to start. They also help with supporting all of our programs with neighborhood university, with neighborhood gatherings that I'll tell you about in a minute. But these are really great connected folks in the community that you also can use as a resource.

Councilman Rainey.

Thank you, madam president. What's the difference between a community coordinator and a community leader?

Leader. Great question. So community coordinators are our paid Hey Neighbor staff. A neighborhood leader is more volunteer position that you are a neighborhood university graduate or you're a neighbor that wants to be more involved and you sign up with us as more of a volunteer position. And the community coordinators are kind of the main point for the neighborhood leaders. They help train them, they help connect them, they host events to help neighborhood leaders get together. So did that clear

it up? Yep, thank you.

Councilman Casey.

Thank you, Madam President. A quick question for you. Back when you were Cono, I think Cono had a role where they coordinated different homeowners associations and kept track of that and points of contact and that sort of thing, but I understood when you went to Hayden Neighbor that guess self ad admission kind of went away, is that the case?

Yeah, the Hey Neighbor no longer keeps track of that. It has moved on more to the city, to the Planning Department.

Okay, thank you.

Okay. This is a picture of one of our neighborhood leader. They do quarterly meetings of meetups to get together and talk about what's going on in their neighborhoods. It's often a lot of resource sharing that somebody will be having an issue in their neighborhood and they bring it up to the neighborhood leader group and then they'll talk about it and share resources. And just it's a great way to connect and get to know each other and have support.

A lot of times our neighborhood leaders feel like they're the only person in their neighborhood who cares about community anymore and it's kind of isolating. And when they meet each other and they find out there's other people all over the city who still care about community, it's really magical experience when they find each other. We also have a program of neighborhood gatherings. We were part of the Thousand Gatherings, the mayor's initiative. And one of our most powerful programs within neighborhood gatherings that would be great for you all to take advantage of is our Neighborhood Cafe.

And this is actually a picture of Councilwoman Gold's Neighborhood Cafe. It is a very low bar way to get people together and it's magical what has come out of these where the premise is if you get six or more of your neighbors together, the coffee's on us. And neighbors just get together and it is just very casual and building those connections. And at these cafes a lot of great things have come out of neighborhoods have then built their Facebook page or they have scheduled their cleanup. So just these very simple conversations leading to really powerful next steps.

We also help with block parties. So we help people with the permits for shutting down your road for a block party which is actually kind of difficult. So we help them navigate that. We rent out barricades, very cheap so it's safe to close your street down. We have toolkits to help people throw gatherings and kind of checklists to make it very easy.

So we've had them all over the city and we've been a really great resource for them. Cornhole tournaments. We also have these cornhole boards and it is amazing how a cornhole tournament brings people together. It is very simple throwing that beanbag back and forth, but it is powerful, the connections that have been made out of that. We're also doing planting parties where neighbors get together and they transform an entire front yard together.

This is happening in my neighborhood in Stratton Meadows and also a very powerful way to connect people. And then what Councilwoman Gold was talking about is our 150 Tables initiative. So this is kind of the next iteration of the Thousand Gatherings where we are bringing people together over a shared meal and inspiring other neighbors to host tables. So Hey Neighbor will be hosting our table celebrating National Good Neighbors Day on September 27. And then we're hoping there are a 149 other willing hosts out there to get people together all throughout the city.

So this would also be a great way for you guys to meet more constituents in your area if you were wanting to host a 150 tables gathering or if you'd like to be invited to one, I would love to invite you to other tables that are going on in your areas and your districts. Councilman Hincham.

Thank you, madam president. Would you go back a slide, please? Sure.

Uh-huh. That's not it.

To your yeah. There you go.

Mhmm.

You didn't mention this, but I would love it if you would talk about your own work. By the way, Kelly Bull is sits on our storm water advisory committee, so she's serving the city in that way as well. But you are very, very conscious of and are helping people with really planting water wise and a lot of sustainable kind of front yard plantings or whatever it might be. In fact, I believe you yourself have a passive stormwater project in your home. Could you just speak a little bit to that? Because I think people are so focused on water right now. Sure. It'd be great for you to mention Yeah.

My background is in permaculture landscape design and really water wise design. And so specifically in my neighborhood, I'm creating a neighborhood food forest where we're planting fruit cheese and berry bushes and herbs and pollinator plants. And all of it is watered with the roof water from a house. And so everything is very water wise, lots of native plants that don't take a lot of water. And so what we're trying to do in Stratton Meadows is become a demonstration site for other neighborhoods that you would be able to come and tour the houses, the yards that we've redone together as neighbors and then bring it to other neighborhoods as well.

So yeah, just very very passionate about the water water wise landscaping and improving our environment and making our yards more beautiful and bringing the neighbors together to do that.

Thank you, Kelly.

Yeah.

And then that's it. I wanted to leave time for questions in case you guys want to know more or and can let me know other ways that I can help. And then one thing I missed too is one of our goals also for our neighborhood leaders is to start joining more boards and commissions, and they are starting to do that. I've joined stormwater management. We have a current and new student right now who is joining Advisory Committee for PPACG, and another one who has joined the cleanup committee, the cleanup costs within the city.

So we're really working on getting citizens more engaged. So that's it. Oh, also, if you guys ever have news that you want spread to neighbors, we have a newsletter that goes out every month. I also encourage just signing up for it and reading it because it's always very positive about great things that are happening in our community. So we would love to get the news out if you are ever holding town halls or you would like to meet with your constituents that we would love to facilitate that and make that happen for you.

Yeah. Thank you. I'm just wondering, I'm looking at Michael. Michael, can we make sure that, are you on our press release list? Because that's when we announce town halls and that might be the easiest way to

Yes, I am.

So you are getting those notices? Yes. Okay, great, thanks.

I think that was all of it.

Was that the end?

Yep, okay. Any more questions?

I don't see any, thank you. Thank you. Moving on to item 6c. Will the clerk please read item 6c into the record?

Item 6c, Pikes Peak State College presentation.

Good morning Donna. Good morning.

She was tall. No. I'm not short. Thank you. I am and I have on heels.

Thank you. Jesus.

Alright. Alright. So good morning council president Crowe Iverson, pro tem, Risley, all of city council. Hi Sarah. Hi Wayne. Good to see everyone here. My name is Donna Nelson. I'm the Chief Advancement Officer for Pikes Peak State College Foundation. Also here with me is our college president, Doctor. Lance Bolton, who you will hear from shortly.

Thank you all for making time to hear from us this morning. We are here to give just a brief update on some of the things that we've done, some of our successes since we changed our name from Pikes Peak Community College to Pikes Peak State College. And like I said, this will be very brief because there are so many things that we have done in the past few years since we made our name change that I'm actually gonna try to schedule to come here maybe twice a year to update you on some of the things. So we're just gonna go over a few right now and we'll give you more later. Also well, we'll talk about that a little bit later.

So we're also gonna talk about a little bit about our Law Enforcement academy or LEA as we call it, which could serve as somewhat of a pipeline to help address the manpower issue with CSPD. We already work very closely with CSPD on different things. Some of our trainers or instructors come from CSPD as well as CSFD or Colorado Springs Police Department and our fire department work closely with us. And you guys, most of you guys know my close relationship with police and fire from my time at the city as well. So let's jump right in.

Let's see. Alright. So why did we change our name? As the saying goes, it's all in a name. What do you guys think of when you think of community college? Don't answer. Just think about it for a moment. When people think about a community college, they think that it's the place to go if you can't quite make it at a four year university or maybe something that is a little bit less than, not quite as prestigious or up to snuff. Pikes Peak State College is anything but that. And we are out to change that mission and what people think of when they think of community colleges or state colleges.

Big thing about changing our name is that we decided to offer bachelor degree programs. Because in community colleges they typically go up to associate's or two year degree programs. We decided to offer bachelor's degree programs. And if you are a student who graduates with a bachelor's degree or if you're an employer that's hiring someone that requires a bachelor's degree and you see that they got it from a community college, that may be confusing. So that was a big part of why we changed our name from Pikes Peak State College or from Pikes Peak Community College to Pikes Peak State College.

Also the level of work that we're doing at Pikes Peak State College is incredible. It is above what you normally think of. As a matter of fact, we are working right now with some of your council staff to schedule a tour for all of you to come to our 70,000 square foot state of the art medical simulation center. It is absolutely the best in the state and one of the best in the country. I guarantee you when you leave that facility you will not think anything less of us.

You will be quite amazed. Also changing our name helped to increase our enrollment at the college. We have enjoyed year after year for several years of double digit enrollment increases. To put that into perspective, about a four or 5% increase at any higher education organization is a big deal. Again, we've enjoyed back to back years of double digit increase.

We're set to have our highest graduation class ever this year. And we will also we also expect to be back at higher than pre pandemic levels next academic year. So we will be increasing well above what we were pre pandemic at the beginning of our academic year next year. We are on track to continue to grow. We're doing great things.

And so again that name change helped to increase our visibility, helped to increase people wanting to come to our college and it shows that it's working. Right now we have seven bachelor's degrees and I've just listed them there for you. Our flagship I like to say is our Bachelor of Science in Nursing or our BSN. You gotta know somebody to know somebody to get into that program. We're very proud of it.

Again it takes part at our simulation center. That place is so incredible that we have enjoyed up until this past year a one hundred percent first time pass rate of the NCLEX exam when they graduate for RNs. Last year there was one person who didn't quite make it but for four years in a row one hundred percent first time pass rate. The national average first time pass rate is about 70%. So again what we're doing is incredible at Pikes Peak State College.

Everything that we do is new. That is like that. Our dental center that opened last summer is a simulation center as well. Dentists who came to that ribbon cutting and saw what we have there were just floored. They couldn't believe the type of technology and simulation that we have at our dental clinic.

So we have dental assisting, dental hygienists and we're working on an even higher level of dental training there. We also started seeing patients at our dental facility. You can get a crown made same day with our three d printer for less than $100. So you get the best service, best quality at prices that go to scale based on what you can pay for. Our other bachelor's degrees are a BS in behavioral health, cyber security which is bursting at the scene, emergency service administration, early education advanced paramedic practitioner, and then our one of our newest and most popular business and business administration.

Were you about to ask a question? Okay, got it. So again we're not stopping with there, more to come. We're looking at some other bachelor's right now with I think it was electrical engineering that because engineering is bursting at the seams as well. These are these are offerings for careers that are in high demand in our community.

They match with the workforce needs of Colorado Springs and El Paso County. We know that being able to obtain a bachelor's degree at Pikes Peak State College makes higher education become in reach for many of those who thought they would never be able to obtain it. Because we're just a little bit less expensive than again your traditional four year universities. We're not trying to take the place. We complement our sisters and brothers that are four year universities.

Just over a third of our students are military or military affiliated And many of our students are first time generation as well as working adults or they are considered non traditional students. That means that they're age 25 and up. So a lot of them have families and they just simply need a lot of flexibility with being able to get the higher education that they want. I like to say that at Pikes Peak State College that we put people to work and we put people to work in careers that give, what do we call it, living wage. In careers that give them a living wage.

So we don't necessarily offer what I call the basket weaving degrees. Although you know weaving baskets is a good thing because I have a lot at home myself. But we offer degrees and programs in careers that count. Again careers that are gonna earn you a living wage. That's what we like to do.

That strengthens our community. A lot of times if you go out in the community and look at or look at the workers that have graduated from our college, they are mostly local students who stay local. That's a big deal. We are really the lifeblood of our working community in Colorado Springs and El Paso County. We're very proud of that being able to offer that to people wherever they are.

So you know everybody likes to say meet people where they are. We actually do that at Pikes Peak State College. We're very welcoming, we're open college. Our only programs that you have to qualify for are our medical campus programs, our RN program because it is quite competitive. So I will bring up our president, Doctor. Lance Bolton, to go into some of our awards and talk about our leadership.

I do have a question from I'm

also Council Member working the Academy. Yes.

Thank you, madam president. Now you asked earlier about what we thought about when we heard the word community college. I thought about affordable and responsive to local industry workforce needs, so you've kind of explained why you're responsive to local workforce needs. But what about affordability? Has fees, tuition, things like that gone up with the transition from a community college to a state college?

I don't know that they've gone up since then. I know since I've been there, they haven't. Doctor. Bolton can tell you that.

Okay. And the other part, just more of a comment, my dental hygienist is affiliated with the program that you have there, and she said the equipment is so good there, sometimes people graduate and have to kind of learn new equipment when they go to actual dental office because they use older equipment.

Yeah, they're like what is this?

Councilman, I'll help with question about affordability just a little bit. The answer to your question is tuition tends to go up a little bit every year because cost of living and operations go up a little bit every year. We want to be able to offer raises to our employees, that kind of thing. So I would say three to 5% typically in a year and the cost of attending Pikes Peak is still well below the amount that is awarded through a Pell Grant. Most half of our students attend using Pell Grants and that's kind of a markup you're below or near the federal poverty line.

And so we wanna make sure that students who are really low income always have the ability to attend Pikes Peak. We pay very close attention to keeping the cost of attendance below the Pell grant award amount.

Thank you.

You're welcome. Well, hey, counsel, thank you for having us today. I really appreciate the opportunity to chat with you. Some of you, Councilman Williams, know a lot about Pikes Peak State College. Others of you might just be learning a lot today. So just an opportunity to to engage with you. I wanna start with an invitation. Our commencement ceremony is Saturday. You've all been invited to We would love to have you. So here's a little information about Pikes Peak that I think just starts with startling people about the impact we have in our community.

This year, for the first time since 2019, 2020, when the pandemic hit, we will award more than 4,000 degrees and certificates in our community. So when Donna talks about the impact of our college and workforce, anywhere you go in the Pikes Peak region, you're going to run into our graduates. This is really the fuel that runs our economy here. We have to have trained workers and over 4,000 of them are leaving Pikes Peak State College and going into the workforce this year. Such major impact and we're really proud of that.

So if you can make it 10:00 Saturday morning, we serve breakfast, we would love to have you. Brandi used to be part of the stage team with me and we always appreciated that. If you have never been to a community college graduation, you have never experienced the pure joy of first generation students, young people, middle aged people, older people, people standing up and cheering for their grandparents who are finally getting that college degree. It is a day of, I'm not kidding, unbridled joy. My face will be sore for weeks from smiling so much that day, and we would love love to have you experience what that's about if you could join us.

Pikes Peak has been recognized quite a bit with national awards, and I just wanna talk about a couple of these if I can. Hopefully I get this right. Just this year, a few months ago, we were recognized with the Bellwether Innovation Award. And this is a national award. Community colleges all over the nation compete for the Bellwether Award.

We were chosen as one of 10 finalists and invited to San Antonio to present where we were left with the showcase award for that and we are really proud of that. And the award we received there was for the D2 Promise program. Do any of you know about D2 Promise program? So if you don't, this is the only program of its kind in the nation. It is the nation's only publicly funded first dollar promise program.

So 85% of the young people coming out of Harrison School District two are Pell eligible. If they are Pell eligible, they get a Pell grant. It's about $7,000 a year, $7,500 a year to be specific. They come to Pikes Peak State College. They keep that $7,500 because district two pays their tuition and fees to come to Pikes Peak State College.

This tripled the college going rates out of Harrison School District two, and we have moved the fall to fall retention rates for those young people from 40% fall to fall staying in college to 80% fall to fall staying in college. So people have often wrung their hands about what do we do to help help District two and to help low income families there? Get them into college, make it affordable, take care of them when they get to college, and get them to graduation. That's what you do to change their lives, and that's what we are doing. So we won a Bellwether National Award for that program.

It is an extraordinary program. Our partners in District two, I would be remiss not to mention Superintendent Burhansel, was last year the Superintendent of the Year in Colorado, is an amazing partner and together through this partnership, we're doing extraordinary things for kids in District two. We've also recently been recognized with a HEAT Award, Higher Education Excellence in Diversity Award. Also, were recognized one of the best places to work in community colleges through the same organization. And all of these awards and more really point to the national level of excellence at Pikes Peak State College.

For those of us locally who just start to drop by the building and the building looks same every time I go by, nothing really changes. You think, well, it's just there's nothing happening there and there's so much happening there. But yes indeed, as you drive by it does typically mostly look the same, although we do finally have our Pikes Peak State College signs up in place of our old name. I'll just recognize one other award that I wanted to mention. We won a national gold award for a best marketing campaign for a campaign for a promise program for First Nations.

So it's called First Nations Promise Program. Native American students can come to Pikes Peak State College and they're guaranteed that their tuition and fees are covered. We think this is particularly important for Native American students because of the damage and harm done through the name of education to Native communities, through boarding schools and things like this, enormous breaches of trust. Local, locally, in Colorado Springs, Native American students have a fifty five percent high school graduation rate. We should be concerned about this.

In our neck of the woods, we're trying to do what we can. Oh, I'm so sorry. I have a plumber at my house just like Councilman Gold. It's that day. But we felt really important to do what we could in our local community to help bridge that gap and build trust with the Native American community and education.

Councilman Hinjum.

Thank you, Madam President. And Lance, thank you for being here. I imagine you're going to get to this just by looking at the next slide. I do want to hear the rest of what you have to say, but what you're sharing right now just prompts for me kind of a comment, and maybe you can incorporate it in the rest of your slides. By the way, I had no idea about the Bellwether Award and what you're doing there with District two.

Thank you. That's fantastic work. Really appreciate that. And this question about what is a community college or what comes to mind. My next door neighbor is a professor actually retiring from Colorado College, and I see nationally liberal arts colleges are struggling really to, they're losing enrollment, they're getting more and more expensive, students graduating or having a hard time finding jobs, and some of it related to AI and just other changes.

But what I love about what you're doing, and you're gonna show another program here, just the real practical preparing people for real time jobs that they can earn a living in, which is, excuse me, I think fantastic. I think we are in the middle of a big conversation about our educational institutions, what they're for, why do they exist, how do they operate, and those shifts are happening, and clearly you're adapting to those. But if you have any thoughts on that kind of broadly and impacts of AI and liberal arts colleges as you continue Oh, know, and the other question I was gonna ask was, I know that you have programs that connect high school work into programs that you have as well at the college. If you could speak to those if they're not on the slides.

Sure, yeah. That was a lot. We could go for a long time on all that. I'll say we're working a lot with AI. I was just an invited speaker at the sort of the National Higher Ed Tech Conference, which is called ASU GSV out in San Diego. We've moved past wringing our hands about what we're gonna do about AI and really embracing it as a way to increase engagement with students. We think that's really important. We know employers want those skills when students are coming out of our college, so we're working hard at that. With respect to concurrent enrollment, about 20% of our enrollment at Pikes Peak State College is concurrent enrollment. Those are students who are still in high school, taking college level classes.

We do a lot of that on our campus because a lot of it is what we call CTE focused, career and tech ed focused, so it is hands on programs like auto tech, healthcare programs, culinary arts, that kind of thing. And as Donna alluded to, we have a huge effort going on around ensuring that every program at Pikes Peak State College students graduate and have access to living wage jobs. We use the MIT calculator for living wage jobs. We peg it at about $48,000 for a single person in Colorado Springs. If program is not getting students to a living wage job, we're not gonna continue to have that program.

So we're really focused on this living wage jobs as a way of ensuring the students' investment in their education pays off for them and their families. You bet. Just gonna talk real quickly about the Pikes Peak Law Enforcement Academy, and I just wanna say so the same comments also are related to and apply to our fire science program. So we've had this program for many, many years. The students coming out of the Pikes Peak Law Enforcement Academy are going to work for police departments all over the state, but they're not going to work very often in Colorado Springs, which is troubling to us.

Colorado Springs has really high wages for the police department relative to especially some of the smaller departments that they go to. I'll say we have a 100% placement of our students, but again, there's a challenge around getting enough students and opportunities in Colorado Springs. And so we continue to press forward with this that we believe we have a really high quality program. We know that students coming through our program also have to do the training with the Colorado Springs Police Department. We have no problem with that and neither do many of our students because that's a paid position when you're in the training academy with the Colorado Springs Police Department.

What I would say about both Fire Science and the Pikes Peak State College Law Enforcement Academy is that number one, they provide a pipeline of employees to the city, and number two, for those who want the police department and the fire department to look more like the citizens that they're serving, this is the opportunity because our programs are very diverse. Many, many of our students in both Fire Science and Law Enforcement Academy are coming out of the Army into these programs, and so they're really terrific people to hire. And unlike recruiting police officers and firefighters from around the country, ours will stay here. They're from here. They're looking to stay here.

They're looking for jobs here, and there's an opportunity, I think, for us to build this relationship and make it stronger. And so just a few things looking forward. Again, Pikes Peak's very focused on the workforce needs of our community. Donna mentioned it, but I just wanna say in the last two years, we've started seven engineering programs at Pikes Peak. We have the state's only associate degree in aerospace engineering, so we're really proud of that.

We think that's really important to our local community. We work really closely with a lot of our tech community, really closely with healthcare community as well, and we continue to look for ways to better serve our community and ensure the programs we have align with the workforce needs here. And that goes for the city as well. We think that there are a lot of employment opportunities, and if there are things that we could do to better position Pikes Peak students coming out of our programs to be hired into fire fire department, police department, we would be eager to do those things, and that that's what we have.

Councilman Hinjem.

Thank you, madam president. Actually, Lance, on that last slide and just the opportunities to work with the city, I'm gonna ask our chief of staff if he would, like to comment on how we might, continue or engage in conversations with the State College on those opportunities.

We are always happy to have those conversations. I know that our police department is working on some different options and happy to have those discussions with you as we go forward.

Sure. And sorry, I was gonna have to say we've had a lot of those conversations. I'm happy to continue, but would love to see more action following some of those conversations.

Well, I am new, so I can't speak for what's happened in all of the conversations before, but I am happy to engage with you going forward.

I think that's an Elvis song, but I won't do it.

Councilman Risley.

Thank you, Madam President. Thank you both for being here and for your comments today. I don't really have any questions, but just wanted to make a couple of comments myself. First, my company is proud to employ several Pikes Peak State College graduates, The folks that we've seen come out of the architecture and design programs have been really high caliber and really great quality and I would say equal quality or caliber with folks that come from four year and even master's degree programs. So thank you for putting out some really excellent students.

We also had an individual more seasoned who used to be a professor at Pikes Peak Community College and had always great things to say about culture, the work environment, and sort of just the overall sort of tenor, I suppose, of the community there at the school. So thank you for all of that. I just want to quickly, and you've mentioned this before so I'm not going to belabor the point, but I just want to really underscore a comment, Donna, that you made that enrollment will achieve pre pandemic or exceed pre pandemic levels here coming up. And I think that's really important because going back to some of the comments from Councilmember Hengjem, I think that underscores the relevancy of the programs. It underscores the fact that you understand how to stitch together workforce development and work collaboratively with the K-twelve community.

You've maintained relevancy in a way that a lot of higher education institutions just have not. And so, again, you should be commended for that and thank you for your presentation. Thank you.

Councilman Rainey.

Thank you, Madam President and Doctor. Bolton, thank you both for being here. I know we've had tremendous amount of conversations over the last several months, specifically about the law enforcement pipeline. It's no secret. I'm a huge advocate for it.

And to our chief of staff, I will be having, deeper conversations with you about that also. I've had those conversations with the chief of police, and, not only am I a advocate for it, it makes sense. What I don't like personally is when I hear people complain about manpower and we have something at our fingertips, something that's homegrown, something that contributes directly to the workforce right here in Colorado Springs. So I think that there was something there for us to leverage. Now granted, I'm quite sure we have to get through all the nuances of, you know, what does it mean to go through the academy, what does it mean to become a sworn officer, so forth, in correlation with your program?

But to me, you you definitely leverage and you lean in on that. So thank you very much for being advocates for that program. I will continue to be an advocate for that program, because we have a manpower issue and I think this can actually help resolve that issue. And I go back to your comment in your slide presentation and I do love it. It's actually up right now.

City's workforce needs, and I can't emphasize that enough, homegrown talent, keeping the talent here to contribute right to our city needs. So continue doing what you're doing with your leadership. And the last thing I wanna say is I love how when you mentioned the graduation attendance, which of course I'll be there this weekend, you said 4,000 degrees, correct?

Correct.

And I go back again and maybe I'm just in a happy go lucky mood these days. 4,000 degrees in graduation right now. Right across the street, another thousand from the Air Force Academy and from other institutes in this area. Boy, we are awesome ass city. I'm sorry.

I just gotta say it.

We are awesome, and we're doing some great things. And I love seeing leadership like yours out in our great city doing great things with great students. I actually have a couple of students at in in my business from Pikes Peak State College and you guys are doing great things. Continue to do it and I look forward to continuing to build a relationship specifically to this law enforcement pipeline. So thank you.

Council president, may I Yes. Councilman Rainey, we were remiss in not starting with a huge thank you and gratitude to you for the invitation to be here and for the ongoing conversations. Much appreciated.

In the newsletter.

In the newsletter, yes. We have a Pikes Peak State College newsletter that you're hopefully all receiving that was inspired by a conversation with Councilman Rainey.

Councilman Williams.

Thank you, President Crowe Iverson. I should have this memorized, Doctor. Bolton, but I don't. So what year did you start as president of the now State College?

2011. This is Oh my fifteen years. Oh, was when It I

was very interesting. It's amazing for you to have this much inertia for fifteen years. Like that is impressive that you wake up every day and I can say it's with the same amount of energy you had fifteen years ago when we first met. So we are all a benefit to that. If you could figure out how to bottle that and sell that and give it to all of us, I think we could all then elevate the entire community.

But what you have done and the legacy that you have built is going to go on for generations. And you're getting those 4,000 graduates, you're giving back to the community, you're making people proud, and as Kelly said, there's joy and they're smiling. I mean, you're creating a whole new world and a whole new pipeline right here. And I definitely can't thank you enough. I'm not gonna ask too many questions.

I had nine years to ask Doctor. Bolton questions because he made me a redshirt year. He didn't let me leave during COVID so I had to stay on the Advisory Council a little bit longer which I greatly appreciated. And Donna, I'm glad you're part of the team now too and all I really have to say is keep up the good work and it's very admirable what you are both doing and especially your energy and passion year after year after year. So thank you.

Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate the kind and affirming words.

And I echo everything my colleagues have said to hear today over the course of years of just watching it go from the community college college. I actually started in a community college, so of course I am very, passionate about that path forward. And now seeing an RN BSN in one school would have been nice, but I did have to go to the university and and finish off to that to that regard. I still have my toe in the medical field a little bit, and I can tell you that your nurses by far are exceed expectations from any nurses of any schools in the state. They pass their boards first time around.

They're critical thinkers. They're very smart. They're very engaged. And so that is just, because of your leadership in the program you've put together. I have been through your dental hygiene program on a tour, and it was amazing.

Anyone went would love to have those types of learning tech labs. It they're you're right. When you go to the dentist, they're probably like, I don't know how to use this equipment because it is fantastic and that just shows what you put into your students so that they really are good students. When they go out into our community and they provide health care services and other to the community, they're getting the best service that they can get which is an attribute to your forward thinking. I think it was just a couple weeks ago I did see some data and I'm not sure if it was Tatiana Bailey's report or one of the economists that said in the next five to ten years universities will close by 50%.

And because of your leadership and forethought, I think it's really going to you're not just gonna come out of the the pandemic with numbers. I think it's it's going to be much stronger numbers because of that because, you know, things have changed. People do need their kids to get a job. They are looking for affordability. They're looking for just the things you talked about.

So and that's that's really to your foresight and thinking forward not knowing the pandemic, what it would do, not knowing what we know today. So that that's all to your leadership, and I stay in touch with Donna frequently on the students and helping kids mentor which way they wanna go and the career pathways and whatnot up to my it's their decision. But thank you so much for the presentation and what you adorn our community because it really is making a difference, especially in District 2. I've watched that program from the beginning and it's exceptional. So thank you both so much for coming today.

Thank you. You're welcome. We appreciate your time.

Moving on to item 7a. Will the clerk please read item 7a into the record?

Agenda planner review.

Does anyone have any questions or changes to the agenda planner? Seeing none, for the record there are none. Moving on to item 8A.

So 8A through D will be one presentation, so I'll read them all in.

Thank you.

8A, resolution authorizing the acquisition of approximately 40 acres. West CMSV Parcel 1 is an addition to the Cheyenne Mountain State Park through the trails open space and parks program. 8b, ordinance requesting a supplemental appropriation to the trails open space and parks fund up 262,000 to complete acquisition of approximately 40 acres of property identified as Parcel 1 West CMSP extension for the purpose of public open space and trails. You can see a resolution authorizing the acquisition of approximately 40 acres West CMSP Parcel 2 as an addition to the Sean Mountain State Park through the TOPS program eight d, an ordinance requesting a supplemental appropriation to the trails open space and parks fund of up 262,000 to complete the acquisition of approximately 40 acres of property identified as Parcel 2 West CSMP extension for the purpose of public open space and trails.

Good morning, David.

Good morning, president Creel Iverson, president Pro Tem Risley, members of the city council. You for the opportunity to share these two parcels for acquisition and to consider them all in this one presentation. So I appreciate that opportunity. So I'm here today to introduce the idea of this acquisition for two forty acre parcels into our TOPS program and for the expansion of Cheyenne Mountain State Park. Just a little bit of background here I wanna introduce that our park system master plan from 2014 remains our guiding document as we look for these opportunities with open space expansion.

On a side note, we are wrapping up our new updated master plan and you'll see that here in the coming months. But we still continue to move forward with this recommendation to expand gaps in our open space network, to continue to pursue opportunities for partnership, and really focusing in on these target areas primarily on this presentation in the Rock Creek area. So on this map, this is our 2014 Park System Master Plan candidate area open space map. And the Rock Creek Canyon area shown on that star on the very Southwest Side of Colorado Springs adjacent to Cheyenne Mountain State Park and the Air Force I'm sorry, the Space Force Station and Fort Carson. A little bit more history on Cheyenne Mountain State Park.

The original acquisition in 2000 was a partnership between our TOPS program and the state of Colorado with about 60% ownership by the city of Colorado Springs. Through that partnership, the city provided funds to acquire our portion of the property and then the state park agreed to manage and maintain that land. So it was a really great opportunity to utilize the funds for a TOPS program and then have the state manage those properties. More recently, back in the late fall of twenty twenty five, you saw before you an acquisition of a 130 acres. That was a similar approach where the city acquired through our TOPS program and incorporated an additional portion of that acreage into the state park.

And that partnership was about a 490 acre acquisition between the state and the city. And the the state has continued to confirm their willingness to engage in these MOUs updates to maintain and manage those properties as they brought into the state park itself, and this is no exception to that. So a little bit more focusing on our area. This map reflects the Cheyenne Mountain State Park as well as our Fishers Canyon open space on the Southwest Side of Colorado Springs. Highway 115 runs on that right side of the image more or less north south.

And then there's two different colors of green highlighted between state ownership of the state park and then the tops ownership in that area along Cheyenne Mountain itself. So we're looking at two individual 40 acre parcels both owned by two separate families. They contacted us after hearing news of the expansion in the fall of twenty twenty five. And so it's a great opportunity to expand and enhance the state park through this assemblage of property. It's adjacent to Cheyenne Mountain State Sports Station as well as Fort Carson.

And it provides for this opportunity with additional connectivity which I'll highlight here in a moment. Through our TOPS program, we had the opportunity to evaluate the land. And in that, there were several characteristics that came forward, and you can see them listed here between wildlife habitat and those corridors, water resources, significant vegetation, the scenic quality, open space linkage, this passive recreational opportunity, and our opportunity for the partnership. This photo represents our TOPS working committee on tour. Hiking out to those properties, it was a pretty rugged day.

But just to show the characteristic and the really unique beauty that this area provides. I mentioned the connectivity opportunities and this is a vision plan that has been in the works for the better part of fifteen years as we look to expand Cheyenne Mountain State Park in the Rock Creek area. This idea of the Cheyenne Mountain Heritage Trail which encompasses a trail around Cheyenne Mountain itself, estimated about 30 miles, two thirds of which are already existing today. The idea comes from really the legacy trails from Spencer Penrose when he had bridal trails that provided opportunities for guests to Broadmoor to go horseback riding around the area. This is an opportunity to really connect the Rock Creek portion on the Southern Side Of Cheyenne Mountain to existing trails on that loop.

The idea too is it provides a figure opportunity with the Fisher Canyon plan that we have recommended from last year as well as this is a side spur to the Ring Of The Peak trail system that is actively in discussion with our community. So of the two properties, this is our first one. This is parcel one identified here in the orange highlight. It's on the south side adjacent to Rock Creek Canyon Road. It serves as, again, that mountain backdrop, trail connection opportunities, wildlife habitat, those regional partnerships from our TOPS program.

We are under contract with the owner subject to the approval of city council for the appraised value of a $160,000. Two photographs to represent a little bit more of that area in context. The first one on that left hand side.

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the South Side of

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The summit of Cheyenne Mountains Yes. That rocky crab high point in the image. And then a photo from the property itself with just the the vegetation to show you that ruggedness. Our second parcel, again, another 40 acre property property higher up on that mountainside, has similar characteristics for those opportunities. We're also under contract with this property subject to city council for that approval.

And it too was appraised for a $160,000. And as we show a photograph again from the South Side Of Cheyenne of Rock Creek looking to the north, property is highlighted in that color swath. The Shine Mountain Peak the top of Shine Mountain is shown in that rocky crag on the right hand side. And then the other point of reference, if you're familiar with this area enough, the Dixon Trail actually comes pretty close to this location.

Councilman Hinjem. Thank you, madam president.

Can you go back a slide, David? Yes. I don't know if you know the answer to this question, but the property just to the east of the property that's not owned by the park or the city. And there's little little tiny pieces there. Do you can you do you know who the owner of that property is?

We do. So over the years, we've had the opportunity to expand this portion of the property back in the 2007, 2008 time frame, And then in really the 2018 to 2021, we've picked up several smaller properties. That 80 acre parcel, is just to the right of the orange color

Mhmm.

Is privately held by an individual here in Colorado Springs. We worked with them several years ago. They were not interested to sell the land, but they did provide a seven acre trail easement for the Dixon Trail. And that Dixon Trail alignment is approximated in that white line that cuts that corner.

The very top corner. Yep.

And then there's a series of privately held properties ranging from anywhere from two acres to the 80 acres. That little network there was a leftover remnant subdivision from many years ago and there are a couple properties that are owned by the federal government that we've researched and haven't found much information on other than that they're identified as federally owned. And then there are some private properties in that area.

Okay. And do you have any idea what they what plans they have for that property or

The short answer is no. We've talked to several of them. Again, a lot of them have come forward to promote their property and to sell it to the TOPS program for preservation and conservation. The property that is just north of that yellow box, we actually did a site tour with that family member who was part of the heirs to the Dixon family which owned homesteading on top of the mountain. And so we took them out, toured the property, said that we were willing to continue a conversation if they're interested. And he said, no, I'd like to hang on to it more as a part of our family history. And so if and when they're willing to sell, we'd be able to talk to them.

Great. Thanks. Councilman Lineweber and he's online.

Great.

Hey, thank you. I guess my questions are kind of just similar you know because I'm looking at those infill properties that are to the right of what you've just highlighted. You just stated, just to make sure I got that right, those are owned by some government entity?

The vast majority of those to the right of that yellow highlighted property are privately held. And then there are sections of these smaller subdivisions that are identified in there that identify as US government. But through our research and our previous employees that have worked in this area, we're unable to identify points of contact. And so it's an element that we need to continue to research.

Okay. Yeah. It's just anything to kinda make something like that whole, and then we're also, you know, gonna landlock those properties. So will they retain any kind of access rights or anything like that, or do they have anything like that?

I don't know if I can speak to that behalf right now. I can certainly get that answer for you if you would like.

Yeah. I'm just curious about that because it could could change the value of the property if they don't if they don't if they haven't maintained some kind of access right away, it be interesting. Okay. Thank you.

Okay. I'll continue on. So I'll finish talking about this photograph showing that property. As we look into our funding, again, we are here on behalf of the TOPS program to incorporate this through the TOPS program funded by the open space category. And so right now through the end of twenty twenty five, our estimated balance was just over $10,400,000.

Additional revenue from quarter one in twenty twenty six saw $1,300,000, And then we hold a 10% reserve on that. So available funding specific for open space acquisition is $10,600,000. So just to highlight, this is dedicated funding just for the acquisition. Again, we continue to move forward with the agreement, Cheyenne Mountain State Park about maintenance and management of those properties. So we envision that it would be part of the state's responsibility.

A highlight of our timeline represents presentations to our TOPS working committee and our Parks Advisory Board in April. Last week, we had a vote for recommendation from our TOPS working committee, a five to zero vote. Those five represent those that were able to join us on that tour and who could officially vote on the recommendation. We will be at Parks Board this Thursday seeking their recommendation to council and then here today for an item of introduction, and then plan on returning for the city council regular work sesh regular sessions here in May and June. With all this going well, we do anticipate a closing by the end of third quarter.

So as mentioned, there are four different readings. We have the supplemental appropriation request for a $162,000. That is the purchase price plus the closing cost for parcel one. We have the resolution for authorizing the acquisition. And then parcel two represents the very similar language for a $162,000 to incorporate the purchase price plus the closing cost and then resolution for acquisition.

With that, I will leave you with this last image taken from the top of Shine Mountain looking back towards the Rock Creek area. And both the properties are visible in the the right hand side of this image. But just as a point of reference, the incredible beauty that this valley holds and the rugged remoteness that it's also encompassed. With that, thank you for the opportunity.

Thank you. I don't see any more questions at this time.

Okay. And if I may request, could it be considered for consent or would you like us to bring this forward for new business?

Consent. K.

Thank you so much.

Thank you. Moving on to item eight e. Will the clerk please read item eight e and eight f into the record?

Eight e, an ordinance admitting article one administration and repealing article four urban forest of chapter four parks recreation and cultural services of the code of the city of Colorado Springs 2001 as amended pertaining to urban forest Eight f, an ordinance creating a new article nine urban forest of chapter three public property and public works of this of the code of the city of Colorado Springs 2001 as amended pertaining to urban forest and providing penalties for violations thereof.

Good morning.

Hello. Good morning, president Crowe Iverson, president Pro Tem Risley, and members of council. My name is Matthew Puckett, and I am the City Forester with Public Works. So thank you for having me this morning. I will be covering both the amendments to Article I and the ordinance creating new Article IX, Urban Forest, that's on the agenda within this presentation.

Before I begin, I want to note that I received word late last week that our prosecution division has identified some necessary changes to the proposed forestry ordinance. I have not yet received that finalized document outlining those revisions, but it appears that the issues are manageable and relatively minor. So just wanted to preface it with that. So today I'll be walking you through the recodification and the operational responsibilities connected to these updates. I want to begin by emphasizing that the changes we're proposing today is how we already operate.

Our current urban forest ordinance was originally written in 1968 and it was revised in 1980 to establish the street tree program and has had a handful of minor updates since then, but it has never had a comprehensive modernization. So that is here what I'm bringing forward to you today is the first modernization in about sixty years of our proposed ordinance changes. I'm gonna start with just the background details. I want to briefly outline who City Forestry is. Forestry is one of the few divisions within the city that have legally codified responsibilities for both maintenance and enforcement.

We are required to maintain public trees. We accomplish this through a combination of internal crews and contracted tree care companies. We also have staff foresters who inspect trees, work directly with residents, managing licensing tests with contractors, and respond to requests through GoGov and our standard phone calls. Moving on, I wanted to cover. If fully staffed, our division has 22 team members.

Two are federally funded through 2028 through a grant. And then we have 13 operational field arborists. So those are the technical professionals that are responsible for your daily pruning, removal, storm response and the specialized tree care maintenance. So there's a lot of data I'm about to throw at you, just fair warning. We manage approximately 130,000 right of way trees and 20,000 park trees, totaling about 150,000 public trees citywide.

This is the largest number of public trees managed by any municipality in Colorado providing complete tree care maintenance. With 13 field arborists, each arborist is responsible for roughly 11,500 trees. The past two years for example have been our most productive yet, maintaining around 5,000 trees per year and even at that rate, we are on a thirty year pruning cycle whereas industry best practice is a seven year pruning cycle, a target many comparable front range cities have already achieved.

I have a questioner, councilman Hinjem.

Thank you, madam president. Good morning.

Good morning.

I'm Matthew. So I suppose we could do the math, but given that it's 150,000 public trees and we have 11,500 per arborist with a pruning interval every thirty years and seven being the industry target. Can you just tell me what that equates to in number of foresters or arborists that we are down in the city of Colorado Springs if we were to meet industry

You know, when it comes to proactive maintenance, the hardest part is that initial, you know, getting through the cycle. After that, it's proactive and your maintenance responsibility isn't as high. But you know, we essentially estimate that, quick math, that we're looking at four times the staff or increase in contracting budget to create that operational need. So four times in staff would get us there though.

So 16, is that no? Four times 13?

So for operational staff, yeah, it'd be four times 13, but we typically need a staff force or two so that would impact the number a little bit. Know, it'd be 17 times four, give or take.

Well, thank you for sharing that and I think it's important for my fellow council members to be aware of that just because every year when we do our budget we have to do these really hard prioritizations this is one of those other levels of service that quite frankly you guys are doing a tremendous job with the resources that you have but there's an impossibility of what you know, there's only so much you can do with the staff that you have. I just think it's really important that we're aware of that, and this is another example of levels of service that we really are not meeting ideally in our city. And we get people who reach out to us all the time regarding the trees, the city owned trees. So thank you.

Thank you for that.

Another thing I wanted to cover is we also significant tree planting deficit. So between 2023 and 2025, we removed 2,200 trees and at City Forestry, we only planted 121. That's about an 18 to one tree removal to planting ratio. So at that removal to planting ratio, the city may not need a city forester in about a hundred years. But believe me, that's not the succession plan I am working towards.

So regional threats like the invasive emerald ash borer when it arrives could increase and compound this canopy loss. If left untreated and unmanaged, EAB has the potential to kill every ash tree in about fifteen years in this city and that makes up about 25% of our public tree canopy. The pest was confirmed in Denver last year and has been progressively moving south along the Front Range, though it has not yet been confirmed in Colorado Springs. That topic warrants its own separate session, but it has major implications for our management and oversight of the urban forest. So another thing I wanted to cover this year through grant funded efforts, we will complete our tree inventory.

Our goal is to make this inventory publicly accessible in 2027. A public facing inventory will allow residents to view maintenance history, tree species information, notable and historic trees, and will provide a comprehensive tool for citizen interaction and engagement. This will significantly improve transparency and support and just community involvement when it comes to our urban forest. Other front range municipalities have done that already as well.

Councilman Hinjem.

Thank you. Matthew, and and I did we did have a chance to talk last week about all this. So the ash beetle I think is something that, and we talked about this quite a bit last week, but I would like to just make a formal request here that we have a presentation at a lunch coming up about realities. There's a lot more to go into around that ash beetle and the impacts it's going to have on our city and our tree canopy. So not necessarily for now because it's quite detailed, but I would like to request that for a future lunch if I might.

Can I make that request for a future lunch item? Yeah. Thank you. Just whenever you can fit it in I think it would be great to, yep, great, thanks.

Perfect, thank you.

Yes, and like Nancy said, that is a topic we could talk about separately and it's got huge implications on our urban forest. The next thing I just want to cover for council is just letting them know what is public and what is right at private trees. So the bottom, your detached sidewalks. This is typically common. You'll find this in the old North End. And actually it's one of the most difficult places for a tree to live and grow because typically it's shared easements, right, with utilities. You have to meet ADA compliance. Oftentimes you'll have sidewalk displacement. It's tough conditions for our trees. On the top right, you'll see attached sidewalk and it's hard to distinct what is a public and private tree.

You typically have to use mapping tools such as Springs View to determine that. And you'll find that Village 7 has a lot of this. In the top left, we have a no sidewalk public right of way. Areas of the Broadmoor have this. They can have up to 20 feet right of way. So our right of way for trees varies a lot throughout the city. So I just wanted to give you a quick background there so you understand what I'm talking about here shortly. So you guys have probably seen some of our trees are in this condition. Citizen requests drive much of our workload because our workload unfortunately is reactive and our canopy is maturing. Risk increases.

Older trees sit directly over vehicles, sidewalks, homes and public spaces. Unfortunately, the photo here is just one of about 800 that's backlogged in our system. Our top priority is reducing public risk while preserving and enhancing canopy health. So the highly technical work that you see here does require skilled, trained, and certified arborists and sometimes special equipment. Sometimes we have to use cranes.

Sometimes we have to use specialized bucket trucks to access and manage these trees. So this is just a quick overview. I just want to, within our standard operating procedures, this is the level of service that we try to offer our citizens currently. Five days for initial request response, thirty days for inspections, five days for urgent hazards similar to the photo you just saw, and ninety days for high priority work. And our medium and low priority tasks, which would be your smaller trees that need pruning.

It's really as resources allow if we can get to it. So moving into and that covers our brief background on our operations. This is the first ordinance amendment on the agenda, and it is straightforward in only one slide. City forestry moved from parks to public works in 2022. This, of course, occurred under the Sothers administrations and aligned more closely with our right of way management and infrastructure interactions with public works.

This change has been overall very beneficial for us. So we are now recodifying the Urban Forest Chapter from once was Parks and Rec Chapter Four to Public Works Chapter Three. Like I said, this is primarily administrative. We've been part of Public Works since 2022. The next slide here is our definitions.

So our original forestry ordinance did not have any definitions from 1968, which made implementation inconsistent. We are not reviewing every definition today. I just wanted to put them on the screen of what was most relevant. The City of Forrester, for example, or designee definition is especially important because with our recodification here, it clarifies who has the legal authority to determine weed tree status, identify hazards or conflicts, issue notice and orders, or initiate abatements. As well as approve planting permits, oversee right of way vegetation compliance.

So this will tie into the enforcement structure later in this presentation. So this is the first one I wanted to cover and that's duties of property owners. Article nine establishes clear expectations for property owners. Again, these duties are not new. This is how we already operate.

We just don't have that enforcement capability. And like I said, we are updating our code to reflect that of other city departments that have updated theirs as well so they can all tie in together. So the first requirement is property owners must maintain or remove vegetation the right of way that they planted or allowed to grow that is not on the approved street tree list. So you may ask yourself, what is the approved street tree list? So what this is, this is a dynamic document that can be used and updated as new species prove suitable for our climate.

And this is already a document that we've had for thirty years at City Forestry. It has not been referenced within our code. So what the approved list does, it protects our long term canopy health by ensuring species are suitable for our climate. And I'll just give you an example. About twenty years ago, we prohibited the planting of ash trees because we knew that EAB was eventually going to be a threat for urban forests.

That's what this document does. Know, foresters of years past, they just wanted to plant what grew here and unfortunately that resulted in a lot of green ash being planted, a lot of silver maple and now with regional threats like the emerald ash borer, we could lose all of that canopy, 25% of it in fifteen years. So this is a very critical document to have because like I said, it equips our citizens to know which trees do well in our climate, but also which trees do well in an urban setting, right? We want a citizen planting a tree that is gonna cause sidewalk issues. We want the right tree in the right place.

So that's what this document is referenced as. So another thing that I wanted to cover and just let members of council know is that studies suggest when the right species is planted in the right place, trees can increase hardscape and roadway longevity by moderating temperatures and reducing stress on surrounding infrastructure. Along with these benefits, trees provide many benefits and significantly enhance the aesthetic quality of our neighborhoods. A maintained tree also increases your property value. So I'll stop being a tree salesman, I promise.

Although I know that General Palmer would probably approve. He likes trees just as much as me. But again, these benefits only occur when it is the right tree in the right place. So how do we ensure the right tree is in the right place? We have a free permitting process for our public trees And we'll cover that in just a couple slides.

So this is the first example I wanted to show Council here. I love blue spruce. They're great trees, but within our right of way, they can cause visibility issues and accessibility issues. So if we were able to talk to this resident beforehand, I would communicate to them, Hey, let's choose a different species. If you want a conifer, maybe a ponderosa pine, which is an approved street tree.

Because you can tell the photo on the right that's blocking the stop sign and the photo on the left is blocking that accessibility. So the next duties of property owner I wanted to cover was planted after 01/01/2020 without a city foresters permit. So trees planted after 01/01/2020 require that free permit. And you may ask why? January 2020, that's when 80% of our tree inventory was completed.

So we manage living assets at City Forestry. Allowing residents to plant a tree in the public right of way without a permit is like a resident installing a park bench within that right of way and then now the city has the right to maintain it. So to manage that access, we need the citizens' buy in and that partnership to know it exists. With our limited staff, we have no clue. If all of a sudden you put an asset that we're supposed to manage without having that the free permit filled out and approved.

So the 2020 date also serves as practical guidance. We're not taking core samples of trees to try to backdate and age them. My staff is committed to educating and working with residents to find solutions. Ultimately, we want more trees just in the right place.

I want Madam Hincham.

Thank you, Madam President. Yeah. Matthew, on on that last slide and the permitting, do you do you have any guesstimate as to how many people residents in our city actually even know they need a permit to plant a tree in the right of way?

So we've had this permit process on our website for, gosh, I'd probably say ten plus years, and it was in our original code that it was the City Forster's the City Forster had to approve any tree that was planted. But, you know, we've worked with local community organizations and partners, many of which who've written letters of support today to get that message out there. So I will say it's hard to give a firm estimate, but I would say 50% of residents or But more should be aware of we've also talked with the communications team and we've explored the opportunities of putting out push notifications as reminders. Just making sure every resident is notified.

Yeah, that's great. And I see you've prioritized response in forty eight hours just because you're being proactive in trying to

Yeah.

With that limited resource, you want to respond quickly to these to make sure the right trees are planted in the right place.

Exactly. Thank Yes. And here's a couple more examples where the heart was in the right place but the tree was not. So, you know, the photo on the left, we have a resident that planted a tree right in front of a stop sign. Now at City Forestry, they didn't get the permit. We have to go there and be the bad guy. And it's we want the tree. Just if you would have worked with us, we could have planted it 15 feet further south or whatever it may be to accommodate the resident's request. On the right, I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with willows, but do they belong in a three foot right of way? Probably not.

So right now that tree is great but long term it's gonna cause those sidewalk displacement issues. So again, we would probably steer them to a different species. You want shade tree. This is a near right of way. Let's do a fruitless crabapple.

Know, let's talk about options with the resident and that's what that permit process is for because what's even worse is going out there and having to remove a completely healthy tree just because it was missing that partnership and that teamwork in the beginning. Alrighty. Moving on. The next one I wanted to cover is slide 15 which is duties of property owners continued. However, property owners must manage weed trees and sprouts that obstruct or could eventually obstruct the right of way or damage infrastructure.

So some council members here might be familiar with Siberian elm and tree of heaven. Those are both common examples of weeds that require control and they are both listed as noxious weeds per the Colorado Department of Agriculture. So, and I wanted to show these real quick. These are quick two examples of what's happening a lot within our city. Is that oftentimes citizens will zero escape or they will put rock within their right of way and they feel as if that removes them from the maintenance responsibility and then years and years later you will get this.

So in this situation, if you did xeriscape and you did put weed fabric there, still have the responsibility to go through and spray down weeds. So that's but if left neglected, our current code requires this to be ours. And with I'm sure many of you have seen this around town, adding that responsibility to my staff with our current backlog of what are approved street trees is incredibly taxing. Especially as a lot of these will result in public risk. You know, if you leave this neglected, it'll block a stop sign.

And this is a good example. So in 2019, this right of way, you can tell maybe it's not mowed. It's set aside. And in 2021, you can already see the elm starting to take shape. And then 2024, there we go.

So it's a good time lapse of what what could have been taken care of with just some regular maintenance and mowing in 2019. And oftentimes we will get a call and I will have to direct resources from a technical tree removal for what's happening here at 2024 because it still is a public safety concern. It is still blocking a stop sign. However, it could have easily been prevented. So here's another one and I have a lot of these to pull from but we have a rock right of way with Zero Escape as well in landscape fabric and you can tell 2019 and then 2024.

One more example. This is actually a before and after. So before and after. So and I just wanted to let let everyone the council members know that last year alone, we spent about $80,000 on vegetation management. That wasn't just in the right of ways but it's primarily just managing Siberian elms and redirecting resources to directly that.

Again, like I said, that is pulling the skilled arborist for small trees that don't require that skilled and technical care. The next slide here for duties of property owners is native vegetation within the right of way. Whether planted intentionally or not, it must be managed when it creates or may create safety or visibility concerns. Here, we have small ponderosa pines that will eventually obstruct traffic visibility and we understand that native vegetation is common, especially in the interface areas around town. But in this case, it is more appropriate to work with the adjacent resident to address these trees before they would become a hazard.

Again, these are not issues that my staff would ever be patrolling for. This is us responding to citizens reporting them. So another update. Property owners are responsible for vegetation from their property line to the center alley. We have already operated this way for years because chapter nine already defines expectations for alleyway weed maintenance and you can see that there.

We have just further clarified what a weed is that is a weed tree. So what is a woody weed so to speak. So I just want to put that in there. Also trees shown on approved landscape plans must be maintained by the adjacent landowner, HOA or special district as specified in the plan documents. This was already established in Planning's Code Chapter seven.

We are just adding again that clarity in our chapter because again, special districts often have additional funding and unique vegetation requirements. We have already been operating this way. Again, we are just updating our code to reflect that. Okay, this next slide I wanted to show is privately owned trees obstructing the safe use of the right of way must be maintained by the property owners. So both these examples are private trees.

On the left, of course, you see the tree encroaching the street and the sidewalk and on the right, that's a private tree obstructing a stop sign. Historically, forestry has had no enforcement authority on private trees, which has resulted in city resources being used to prune or remove private trees without no form of restitution. So in 2025, we spent about $10,000 on private tree care maintenance. Some years have been higher, but without enforcement tools, when a resident doesn't comply, we must often perform the work ourselves due to safety concerns. Concerns.

So we also partner with the clerk's office to manage licensed tree care contractors so the public has qualified, educated, professional resources available for this tree care maintenance. But like I said again, we did spend approximately $10,000 last year because we don't have that enforcement tool. Work with the residents and we say, Hey, please get this done in fourteen days or we'll do it for free. And that's not the best course of action or management strategy for City Forestry. So how would we go about enforcing this?

This recodification provides code enforcement and city forestry with the authority to enforce these tree related issues using the same processes that are already established in code enforcement chapter nine. We are completely mirroring their notice and order structure. So these are not new fees. This is not a new process. It is the same appeals or abatement process that code enforcement already has.

And I just wanted to stress again that this is very much few and far between for city forestry. It may only be three to 4% of residents that don't comply and we have to go through this process, but we shouldn't be using any of those resources, of our internal resources on private trees for instance. So this is how we currently enforce is we always, we contact the property owner and we give them a tree and shrub hazard notification. If there's no response, we'll always verify if it's owner occupied. If it's a renter, you know, we'll work with them and get contact with the landlord directly.

If there's we give them fourteen days to respond to the issue. But like I said, after that, there's no enforcement. So it's fourteen days or like I said, we'll do it for free. So following that, if there all what's highlighted here is new. So no response. We will issue a notice and order. We will do the abatement or appeal from property owner in ten days and we will follow the code enforcement process. But that's it for enforcement. Is there any questions?

Mhmm. Okay. Councilman Casey.

I I just thank you, madam president. I had a quick question. So if on some pieces of land, they're owned by property owners. You can kinda tell that. But what about common areas like, you know, maybe HOA or Metro District Maintain. Do you have a way of contacting them to deal with trees that need to be pruned or otherwise taken care of?

Absolutely, we do. And oftentimes, HOAs, Metro Districts, they have more stringent requirements than us. You know, you may have to plant two conifers in your front yard or however may be but our process is if something gets reported to us, we will contact the HOA directly. We have a list of their representatives and let them know what work needs to be performed.

Thank you. Okay.

Moving on from enforcement. We are getting rid of our street tree program. So we are striking the original 1980 street tree program language. This program functioned until 2009 when staffing constraints of course made it unmanageable. But the language remained in code.

This program used developer contributed funds to provide new street trees to homebuyers. While the intention was good, it was very difficult for my staff to administer. My plan is to use any of the remaining funds to plant trees wherever they are needed most. Oftentimes that's not in new developments, it's replacement trees. Know, trees that were removed due to ADA compliance or sidewalk displacement or come up with a replacement strategy for emerald ash borer when it does arrive. So that's what the remaining funds for the street tree program will be used for. However, that section will be striked from code and removed.

Okay.

So we worked through this rather quickly, but I just wanted to let you know that this recodification is about clarity, consistency, and transparency and just really trying to be responsible stewards of our resources. A key comparison highlight is several Front Range municipalities place full responsibility of the right of way trees on adjacent property owners. Their forestry departments only work on park trees. For example, Denver does that. They place the full right of way responsibility on adjacent property owners.

We do not operate that way, right? We manage our street trees. We are simply requesting for clear tools to support the way we already function, managing approved city trees while ensuring non approved species, volunteer invasive trees, and private trees impacting the right of way are addressed appropriately. These updates will allow us to focus our limited resources where they belong on the technical skilled care of our public living assets. Ultimately, my mission is for our team to be the best, again, possible stewards.

So, thank you again for your time. My contact information is on the screen and if you have any questions?

Councilman Lineweber and he's online.

Sure.

Hey. This is great information. I really appreciate you, bringing this forth. But, and and maybe I I might have missed it, but I don't think I did. But, what what happens when we have a big storm event and, you know, we get a number of trees down on utilities and all that kind of stuff? How does this all affect that if you're not going to be responsible for those trees? Are you going to be responsible when there's an emergency or how does that correlate?

Doctor. So because all those trees are grandfathered in and when a storm would happen, yes, we would be responsible for all those trees. This is just how we're trying to operate moving forward is to catch those volunteer elms, right, when they're young and be able to notify that property owner and have them address it. We would continue to operate as we always have. Like I said, this would just be moving forward. Everything else is grandfathered in. We were just trying to prevent those invasive or volunteer trees from becoming that issue. And we already operate as special districts and HOAs are responsible for their trees, so there would be no change there.

Okay. Great. Thanks.

Councilman Hincham.

Thank you, madam president. Just yeah. A couple of specific tree questions and on those weedy, Siberian elms. So I'm curious. Do they are they primarily, do you find them primarily in the central older parts of the city or are they in all 200 square miles?

Yeah, second. Everywhere. They are primarily all throughout the city. However, the farther north you get towards the Palmer Divide and west out of the city, the more elevation you get, the less you're gonna see them.

Okay. Well, they they abound in my general area neighborhood. When I walk, actually, I stop and I kinda do my part. I try to pull them out because they're everywhere. I mean I've pulled hundreds and hundreds I'm sure over the time that I've lived in my neighborhood. But my question really specifically is even when they're just a few inches high, they're really hard to get the roots out. So if you don't get the entire one pulled out, will that root even as a seedling continue to grow?

You know, it depends on the site. That small typically it wouldn't come back. However, if you have a larger tree and you just cut it down without using any chemical, anything to suppress that weed, it will come back. The larger it is. The smaller you might be able to get it with

But the seedlings, if I don't get every bit of that root I'm probably still doing good.

You're probably still doing good, yes.

And

you know oftentimes specific to the right of way, it can be taken care of just by mowing And if it is a rock right of way, with herbicide application once a year. Okay.

And then last question is given the two really hard frosts we had after trees had budded, can you just give some general recommendations for how to take care of those trees that now look like they're dead but we know they're not dead but could you just give us a little information because that was tough this spring?

It was and on top of that was also tough is just the drought. So the drought mixed in with those two freezes because some of those were back to back. But I will say this, trees are incredibly adaptable and they have what we call secondary or auxiliary buds that typically get pushed out after. However, you will probably see frost damage hanging on those leaves for all year. But some of the best things that you can do as a resident for your tree is apply a two inch layer of organic hardwood mulch which we actually give free to our residents at 1601 Recreation Way.

It's first come first serve. But applying a two inch layer of mulch that helps hold soil moisture, it helps protect those roots from those hard freezes and it gives those nutrients back into the soil slowly. So that would be my number one recommendation. And then also in times where we're trying to be water wise, it's easier to replace turf than a tree. And that's just what I'll say is that if I had to pick one of the two, would of course add supplemental watering to the tree. Yeah, thank you.

Councilman Williams. Thank you, President Kerr Iverson. You mentioned the dollars that were spent because of your fourteen days and, you know, they just told you good luck with that.

Yeah.

Have you gone through the exercise, insourcing versus outsourcing? I know $70,000 $90,000 is probably a lot to the budget, but have you done the math to see if it's better to hire one of the contractors you mentioned to handle those things, or like you said, have your skilled employees kind of focus on the things that they're skilled for.

Absolutely, and I'm glad you brought that up. And it really depends on the project. Reactive maintenance is typically not good for contracting because it's higher costs. Hey, I need you to take care of this ASAP. So when we have outsourcing or contractors, we try to plan projects like, Hey, there's this big area where we can do some proactive maintenance and we're gonna put the contractors there. And then for in sourcing or things we do internally, that's where we typically have the reactive, abrupt, Hey, I need you at this part of town and I need you to finish over here because like I said, it's more cost effective that way.

Yeah, thank you.

I couldn't do a second.

I

don't know where that's coming from.

That's it for questions. I know that we usually ask oh, it must be out there, for if you want this on consent. But because you said earlier that there's a few tweaks, I don't know that that's why at this point. We don't need the whole presentation again, but probably when you come back, for the vote, the new information needs to be added. So I don't think we can put this on consent.

Okay. Thank you, madam president. I think one month we should be able to provide that information.

In a month. Okay. And just the new information?

Yes. Just the new information. Perfect.

I mean, it's all great, but I mean, I'm just saying I for you, I'm sure you don't wanna come do the whole thing again.

Yes.

Okay.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you. Moving on to item eight g. Will the clerk please read item eight g into the record?

An ordinance submitting an ordinance submitting section 14 o four code adopted by reference to part 14 building codes of four development standards and incentives. Chapter seven unified development code of the city of Colorado Springs 2001 is amended pertaining to adoption of Pikes Peak's regional building code standards of single exits and stairways.

Yep. Good morning, Roger.

Good morning. Roger Lovell, Regional Building. Thank you for thank you for your time today. We're here today because in 2025, the state of Colorado passed legislation, specifically house bill 25 dash twelve seventy three to require single exit stairs or to allow an option for single exit stairs in multifamily buildings. So what the legislation does is it allows for a building up to five stories with four up to four dwelling units per floor to be accessed by a single exit.

There's a lot of additional provisions that are included in that that we can go through. This requirement applies to municipalities over a 100,000 population of which Colorado Springs is one of those. So again, it is specific to the city of Colorado Springs. The department has worked in conjunction with Colorado Springs Fire, specifically Chris Cooper, who's here today as well, to address this topic and come up with the ordinance that we have before you today that matches, that meets or exceeds the requirements of the state of Colorado. The the life safety provisions that make up for the loss of that second stair are are pretty maybe we could go to, I guess do I have control of this here?

Do I? Yep. If we could go to oh boy. I gotta read that. This is a copy of appendix d or a partial copy of appendix d which is contained in the Pikes Peak Regional Building Code with requirements specific to the city of Colorado Springs. So if we if we start off this this option to build these multifamily buildings with a single exit would be effective 12/01/2027 in accordance with the state statute. Again,

no

more than five stories including any occupiable roof. And then the building has to be constructed of type one, two, or four construction. Type one and two construction are non combustible types of construction, the type that you frequently see of office buildings, steel, masonry. Type four construction is not widely used, but it is timber heavy timber construction. We have yet to see any heavy timber construction here in the Pikes Peak region.

The building would have an automatic sprinkler system, a full commercial automatic sprinkler system. That's an additional requirement on top of what would be required in a in a in a up to a three story building. And I guess to be clear, the the international building code, which is what we're what we're on right now, the 2021, it allows for a building up to three stories to be accessed by a single stair. So this provision allows us to go up to five stories. The gross floor area, which is the floor plate area for each floor, can exceed 4,000 square feet.

It can be increased up to 6,000 square feet, but the exit has to move up to 54 inches wide from the 48 inches wide, which is also a wider exit than what the code requires. It limits exit access travel distance. It requires an emergency escape and rescue opening, which is a egress window in each dwelling unit. And it does require smoke control throughout the building, which is a way of pressurizing the stairwells so that you have a safe evacuation zone in the stairwells. It requires a full fire alarm system, and it does not allow for any electrical outlets in corridors or the exit stair, and that's for charging of electric like scooters or that type of thing.

I have a question from Thank Chidsomann

you, President Carraberson. Did that 4,000 square feet include exclude that one floor that was allotted below allowed below grade? I couldn't tell if it was all five and then the one that was below grade. Or

The the below grade floor would be limited to 4,000 square feet as well.

But it's 4,000 total?

No. It's 4,000 per floor. Okay. So it it doesn't limit the overall area, but each floor plate is limited to 4,000 square feet. Right. If that makes sense.

Yeah. Does. Thank you.

Okay.

I'll just step up here, council members. Dan Sexton, planning manager with city planning. Roger moved a little bit more quickly than I did to get up to the dais here. But just so to to frame this consideration of this code update is within the UDC because the regional building code is adopted as part of chapter seven of the UDC. And as referenced within that section, this is where this would be incorporated if adopted.

And ultimately post this conversation here today, if we're able to continue to move it forward, this would come back to you at the was it the the next meeting this month? So what is it? The twenty sixth. Yep. So if there's any questions, feel free. We can ask them, and Chris Cooper is here as well to answer any questions regarding fire.

Councilman Risley.

Thank you, madam president. I I have a number of questions that I think, will probably be best answered by Roger and Fire Marshal Cooper, but I'll just start and you guys can chime in as you see fit. I have a few problems with this provision, and sort of the first and foremost is that in my view this continues to erode and undermine and usurp Home Rule authority. This is yet again another example of the state in their infinite wisdom telling us locally what is best for us. And not just us, but the other 11 municipalities that have 100,000 residents or more.

So on its face, I have a problem with that. I think that for a city with Home Rule authority, we need to flex that authority. That is the reason that you have elected officials that sit here and, look out for the best interests of our community and our our residents and our constituents. That aside, I have a number of significant technical questions and and concerns. Roger, you mentioned right now that we're under the 2021 International Building Code twenty twenty one IBC.

This type of construction, and I acknowledge that this this change would not go into effect until December 2027, but this type of construction would not be allowed under the 2021 IBC as I understand it. You just mentioned the difference between three stories versus five stories. But on top of that, there are a number of other, very, in my view, significant and critical departures from what is allowed under currently. So I have concern with that because if we don't adopt the '27 IBC by the time this goes into play, you can't technically legally allow these modifications. Am I right in that?

Roger Lovell, regional building. I'm not quite sure. I I guess I'm not quite sure I understand the question. If

So if I came in tomorrow and proposed that I want to build an apartment building with a single stair five stories tall Gotcha. And and maybe I'm proposing a sprinkler system or maybe I'm not. Maybe I'm proposing, you know, a pressurized stairway, maybe I'm not. Would I be allowed to proceed with proposing this under the 2021 IBC?

Straight out of the code, no. There could be a possibility for either variance request, A variance where you could prove an equally better form of construction would be about the only path, which would be very hard to prove in this case because it's it's a pretty it's a pretty big step away from what the model code does allow. For the rest of council, some of what to some of what councilman Riesley is speaking to is there is a the international codes are on a three year cycle. Historically, locally, we have always adopted every other code cycle. So we adopt a new code every six years rather than every three.

We're on the twenty twenty one now, which would mean our next target code would be the twenty twenty seven code, which is yet to be published. But there are discussions and there is a proposal to allow for single exits or an increased use of single exits in the twenty twenty seven code. I don't know specifically what the requirements are along with those provisions, and it has yet to be approved as well. So we don't know exactly what it'll look like. There are a couple couple difficulties in that.

When the twenty twenty seven code does does come out and is published, we will review that and look and try and move towards adoption with amendments locally. It could be interesting to see if this if this ordinance is adopted, how these requirements here before you today play in with what the twenty twenty seven code allows. And as far as home rule, I completely understand where you're coming from, councilman. I think one of the risks that we need to consider is in the event that this ordinance is not passed and the state does does force the city of Colorado Springs to implement this requirement, that would be an update to the building code. And an update to the building code after 07/01/2026 drives the the well, what will be at the time the current energy code, which is the Colorado low energy and carbon code, which is a heavily amended version of the 2024 energy code that is significantly more restrictive than the energy code that we will be moving to on on 06/30/2026.

So there's a risk associated with it.

I appreciate that. Roger, can you talk a little bit about with House Bill twelve seventy three, in your view is this supplanting prescriptive tried and true measures that have been built into the building code over decades of practice with something that's driven by statute that doesn't recognize the reality of all of the things that go into a building code?

I think the fair answer to that question is yes. I believe that building code should be should be written by the people who know how to write building codes which is the International Code Council. With that said and in full disclosure, the this bill was initially introduced in 2024. At that time, it was to apply statewide. They didn't have exception in there for municipalities over a 100,000.

They also didn't have all of the additional requirements that are in the appendix before you. When the bill was introduced in 2025, I did again testify in opposition to that bill. It did pass, but throughout the process it was heavily amended to include a lot of the requirements. And at least in my opinion, the additional requirements for these buildings do provide an alternative, in my opinion, an equally good or better alternative to the second stair.

So you said that this was I guess we're establishing that this is not performance based, and I think you made the comment that something like this is probably better drafted instead of by a state legislature by building code officials and and experts in in this realm. Is that a fair statement?

I I would agree with that. And I think this that that at least where where I feel personally on this situation is we were able to affect change throughout

legislature and get some of your additional requirements in here to offset the need for that second

stair. Ideally, these requirements would come from the International Code Council and not the state of Colorado, but this is what we have.

So knowing that this would only apply were if we were to move forward with the city of Colorado Springs, how would you deal with the rest of the member jurisdictions in Pikes Peak Regional Building Department?

In the event that that a developer wished to build one of these in a in another jurisdiction?

Correct.

That would require that would require a variance to do so.

So if I'm on the left side of a line out near Mark Shuffle as an example, city boundary, and I'm in the city, if we were to move forward with this, you would determine that it would be allowable, legal, safe, justifiable, but literally across the street, would it would it fall into the same category?

If if the other side of the street is, say, in El Paso County, no. It would not be it would not be legal. And and that that variance process would be would be would have to be pretty extensive and robust because we've looked for input from the the local fire department or district of are they able to to serve this facility as well. And and that's one of the reasons that they limited it to jurisdictions over a 100,000 because additional capabilities that come with their their fire departments

Fair.

That rural fire departments may not have.

Fair. How many people do we have living in unincorporated El Paso County?

I I can't answer that.

It's about 250,000. So it's okay within the city of Colorado Springs, but it's not okay in the county that has 250,000 residents. Can you talk a little bit, and and this may be a little outside of your expertise, but I think it's close enough that you can probably reasonably answer, talking about hardened construction materials, commercial grade fire sprinkler systems, noncombustive structural systems, type one or type two construction, pressurized stairways, all of these things. Is this what are the speak to the cost drivers a little bit from a construction standpoint, the cost of construction.

The there's a there's a report that I believe went to council as well from Cal Fire, and they did a a pretty extensive and a good report on this this type of construction, not specifically specifically this this criteria here before you today. But they estimate that not including a second stair in a building such as this saves in the neighborhood of seven to 12% on the cost of construction. In my opinion, the the requirement for type one type two construction, a full NFPA 13 sprinkler system, pressurization, smoke control, a full fire alarm. In my opinion, those costs will exceed the seven to 12% savings. With that said, I don't believe even I don't believe that this will be a widely used option in Colorado Springs.

It could be more widely used in in Metro Denver and whatnot, but I don't expect it to be a popular option here that everybody's gonna be rushing out to to build.

Which goes back to my point that Home Rule authority should have some factor here that if this makes sense for Denver, let Denver do this. If it doesn't make sense for Colorado Springs, why should we have to? Thanks for your answers. I appreciate all that. Maybe moving to the fire side of things, Chris, if you don't mind, I do have a question for you.

Can you speak a little bit to this from the perspective of fire operations and when I use that terminology, I don't know what terminology you or the fire department gravitate toward but very often in buildings where you're responding to a fire or a medical emergency or some other situation, often you've got two paths of travel, one which is the evacuation or egress path, and then another which often is called the attack path. Right? So if you've got a fire on the 3rd Floor of a building, you would ideally want to be exiting people out of one area and having fire operations come into another area. Am I correct in that?

Chris Cooper, fire marshal. Thank you for that question. The hope is by the time fire crews arrive that the building's been evacuated, right? I mean that's best case scenario. You know, at that point if people are already in motion facilitating what stairway they go down versus what we're gonna do an attack on is pretty difficult to coordinate that late in the game.

That said, if I could back up a little bit and the fact that every code is written based upon tragedy. You know, people don't sit around and think about code based upon hey, this would be a nice to have unless you're a product manufacturer, unless you have some ulterior motive. But generally speaking, know, they speak to every policy has a name associated with it. Well, code generally has some type of tragedy assigned to it. And when the code councils work together and through that code development process, you have people who have the ability to, you know, fire code officials, you have building code officials, you have product manufacturers, you have firefighters, you have everyone who's able to provide input in that process and code is written as a result of feedback and input from all those things to include consideration of fire department operations.

You know, and when code is written legislatively and you don't have all those people at the table, then that's a really difficult situation. The fact that you're writing code based upon some ulterior motive and if it's motivated by cost, then generally, you know, I stopped short of using the word cutting corners but you know, the intent is to reduce some overall level of safety as a trade off for financial savings. Going back to your question operationally, in Colorado Springs, I can count handfuls of fires where we've arrived and we have report of trapped people because they've opened up their apartment door and the corridor's full of smoke and they don't feel like they can safely get out, stay shelter in place. I can think of several fires where we've had that common stairwell compromised by fire in the fact that there's no other choice other than be rescued because that stairwell is not capable for the community to use at that point of the residence. And so our response is all hands rescue at that point before we can even facilitate firefighting operations with life safety being our number one goal.

We worked hard to do rescues. You know, I think at the Castle West fire, which was a very tragic fire. They had three stairwells, but that was an arson fire. Someone, lit the main stairwell on fire and our fire crews on a very, very cold night facilitated over 80 rescues out of windows to get the occupants out of that building. We did have two fatalities on that fire.

So from a fire perspective, single stair does concern me. You know, you can build in the, you know, all the provisions that you want in terms of other life safety offsets, but at the end of the day, you still have those problems. And, you know, when we think about type of construction, everyone says, oh, you know, the building's not gonna burn. Well, it's generally not the building that's burning but it's the contents that are burning. And we live in a society with a lot of manufactured products and a lot of chemicals and so that smoke becomes very toxic very quick.

You know, back when we had single stairwell buildings, time for flashover which is when the entire room becomes fully involved in fire because the superheated gases ignite at the same time could have been fifteen to seventeen minutes. Today you're about a minute and a half to three minutes. And so if you're not able to facilitate a rescue quickly or evacuate yourself, then you're in a really bad situation. Can sprinklers offset that? Absolutely they can and that's the intent.

But even sprinklers fail at some point, know, and so to put all our eggs in one basket I think is a very dangerous situation. You know, thinking about the history of codes from single stairwell buildings, then you know we moved past that. People realized this is a bad thing. People are dying because they can't get out of buildings. Soon we saw exterior fire escapes come into place. That was an alternate design but again we said we can do better. We moved past single stairwell and fire escapes and we went to multiple stairwells. And we've seen much better results as a result of that. You know, sure technology has changed. Sure we have new fire protection systems.

We have alarms and sprinklers. But I I do worry about the impact to people's ability to evacuate. I know that was a long iteration to your question, but there's a lot of information there.

And I think there's a lot of nuance to your concern, which is important to express. How often in fully engulfed buildings or when you've got a situation like this, how often is the power either partially or permanently interrupted to the building during during the event?

I don't know that I have a good answer for that. Generally speaking, if the, you know, modern electrical systems, right, we have breakers and if the electrical to a given circuit is compromised, ideally that breaker trips and that is a circuit by circuit unless it fires outside and impacts the transformer, the source of power coming into the building. Now that said, as soon as our firefighters get there, one of the things that we do is we will secure utilities which includes gas and electric to the building. We'll disconnect those because those are ignition sources that can allow the fire to continue to spread and also puts our firefighters at risk. So we will, very early in the operation, shut down those utilities.

And given what you said about smoke and the ability or the the risk to both responders as well as occupants in a building to poisonous and toxic gases, if we're relying on a pressurized, a mechanically pressurized system to pressurize the only way out of the building, Do you perceive that as being an additional risk because one of the first things you're gonna do when you arrive is you're gonna shut off the power to this pressurized mechanical system?

Yeah. Again, hopefully by the time we get there, the occupants have had the ability to escape, you know, and evacuate the building. But the idea of that pressurization is that it is going to pressurize that stairwell and try and maintain that as a clean environment. So if you have a fire that starts in an apartment, the idea is the positive pressure of the stairwell, even if someone opens a door, would be pushing into that apartment versus allowing the smoke to come into the stairwell. So that is the intent of that and again that works as long as you have power for sure.

Yeah. As long as you have power. Great. Thank you. I don't want to belabor the point but I just want to underscore as a design professional and somebody who lives and breathes this on a daily basis, I can't tell you how bad this is for us if we were to move this forward, so I would just encourage my colleagues to seriously consider the input that you received today from the experts that deal with this on a daily basis and assuming that we bring this forward for a vote, I would highly encourage us to decline to put this into law locally. Thanks.

Councilman Williams.

Thank you, President Co Iverson. I'm sure there's easier words or bigger words or smaller words, but the only word that came to mind today was extortion, that it really seems like we as a governmental entity are being extorted by saying you need to put these rules in place or else. And I don't think that's good governance personally. I did come up with a question as I was sitting here last night listening to Councilmember Risley. If you're developing, and it's probably for Roger, do you have an option to do it, what I'm gonna call the old way, the existing way? Is this a you have to do it like this, or is this an option that you can do it like this?

That's a great question, council member, and I I should have addressed that. No. This is this is an option. Okay. This doesn't force anybody to have to do it this way. The the allowance to build a three story building up to a a three story building with a single stair or a taller building with two stairs will always remain an option.

So they're thankfully not being forced into this because I heard increase in cost and I think the purpose of this was actually to decrease costs, but I don't know that that's actually gonna be reality.

That's fair. Yeah. The the current provisions would still be 100% allowable regardless of what happens with this piece.

Okay, thank you. And then to the chief of staff, depending upon how we do or do not go down what I'm still calling the extortion route, if we then say no to this, and as we know there's another domino that falls after this. I'm not gonna put the mayor on the spot today but has he thought about that and how the city would proceed forward because the same individuals in this room are not quite ready to implement the rules that come if this doesn't get passed.

We're in discussion with city attorney's office on this because, obviously, if there is a lawsuit filed against the city for failure to comply, we will need to make sure what our basis is, and that'll be, I've asked our acting city attorney, and we'll have a discussion with our new city attorney once she's approved by counsel.

Thank you.

I don't see any other questions so we will not be putting this on consent. So we'll see you back in a few weeks. You should have known better. Come on. You could have guessed that one, Dan. Moving on to item eight h. Will the clerk please read item eight h into the record?

An ordinance amending chapter seven unified development code of the code of the city of cause brings 2001 as amended pertaining to adult or child day care centers.

Good morning, Allison. It's still morning.

It is morning still. Crazy to think. Good morning. Allison Stocker, senior plan with the Land Use Review Division. Today, I'm going to be giving a quick refresher on the child care ordinance which includes changes to the unified development code pertaining to child and adult day care centers.

So just a quick overview of this presentation. We're gonna go through some of the project goals, stakeholder engagement, some general things particularly about child care and how it's regulated in the state and here locally as well as some definitions and things like that. And then we'll get into commercial, zone districts and how they relate to childcare and then residential zone districts. There are a couple of changes since the last time this body has heard this ordinance as well as city planning commission, so I'll try to highlight those as we're going through so that we can talk about those changes and why those have been made. So why are we doing this?

You've heard from a number of different advocacy groups over the last couple months about how child care impacts our local economy. So, of course, that is something that is very front of mind for planning and we're looking to make these changes to make the process quicker and easier for getting new child care permitted here in the city. Of course, planning can only, touch on this issue in the capacity that we are the land development regulatory agency. So, of course, we can't do anything about some of the cost and state licensing and building codes and things like that. But in the capacity we can make changes, we're looking to do so.

So a refresh on what we have done so far. This issue came front of mind back in the fall through different presentations made to city council. Since that time, city planning has been working on drafts to, put together proposals on what changes we'd like to make. As of February, we brought this ordinance draft forward through an open house, and we took in new survey data, took all of that, put together a more final draft, and then have since been presenting it, at lunch sessions as well as city planning commission. Some of the input we've gotten from the community throughout the process has been that the project does not necessarily fix the pressing issues.

Of course, we acknowledge that it doesn't. We can't, again, fix the financial issues around childcare, where those go, things like that. We've heard from family home daycare, so our in home daycare providers, are concerned that the need isn't as large as maybe it is represented by some groups and that they have, recognized that some home daycares do have vacancies still. So they are worried that, changes to land use regulation might be negatively impactful on their businesses. And then we've also heard from people saying that they want childcare conveniently located to their homes and workplaces, but they want to be sure that these locations are safe, secure, and compatible with those areas.

So before we get into the nitty gritty, I am gonna go over our definitions just because they will kind of impact how we talk about these. So our adult and child day care centers, these are our commercial child care facilities. These are Montessori schools, they're kinder cares, things where we have children being dropped off, picked up, and everyone goes home for the day. So that is kind of one of the big ones we'll be looking at today as well as the new use type we're looking to add to code which is adult or child daycare accessory uses. So similarly, this is an accessory use that would co locate with other commercial or industrial uses, but the use the primary use again would be kind of that commercial industrial components.

These are categorized by large and small daycares. Large is more than 16 children whereas small is anywhere between six and fifteen. And then similarly, we also have home or adult child day care centers accessory. Keyword in here is home. So these are our accessory uses that occur in the home where the residential unit is the primary use of the structure.

So we're not making any changes to this use type in code. We're only just kind of presenting this for context particularly in the size differences. So a large home daycare is gonna be anywhere between six and eleven children whereas a small is no more than six. A little background on childcare licensing. So anytime a provider wants to open a new childcare facility, whether it's commercial or an accessory in home childcare or they want to relocate where their license is, they do have to come to city planning to get verification that the zoning allows for that use in that location.

So daycare providers are working with our department very regularly to make sure that these locations work, and that is the point in time where we check things like parking ratios, landscaping, accessibility to and from the site, things like that. There are a lot of standards that apply at the state level and at the building code level. I won't get into that because it's a little complicated, but there are a lot of other factors that do influence where these facilities can locate and kind of the feasibility of locating in a particular building or location. It's important also to recognize that these child care facilities do have minimum floor areas for children. So 30 square feet is required per child for indoors and 75 square feet outside for our commercial daycares.

And then in home, it's thirty five and seventy five respectively. Respectively. So some general changes we're making to the code. These include making all of our zone districts allow childcare either as a permitted by right or conditional use across all of our zone districts. So that'll massively expedite and allow these uses to occur in more locations without having to go through more cumbersome applications, more technical applications such as use variances, zone change, things like that.

We are making sure our naming conventions are consistent across our use types in code. We are also making sure our definitions are updated accordingly to make sure that all of them are written correctly and then they address the additional use type we are adding. One big change that we have made since presenting this to you guys at lunch session and at City Planning Commission is we are removing the reduction in parking we had initially proposed, and this is due to conversations we've had with some neighborhood advocacy groups. And just because that was more of an ask to the community and into council, and we did not feel that that was really at the root of the issue, we felt that that was a good compromise to make with the community. And then the last two big things to keep in mind is we did update the parking table just to reflect the new use types, and we are changing the use specific standards to reflect the change in the use table as well as some of the other ways we are like we prefer to regulate these uses.

And I'll get more to that in a bit. So for our nonresidential zones, this table includes our commercial and industrial zones. The top set of rows is our old chapter seven, so how this was regulated before 2023. The middle section is the current way these are regulated, and then the very bottom is our proposal. So the green boxes you see on the bottom set of rows are where the flexibility has been increased, whether it be gone from conditional to permitted or prohibited to conditional, these are all areas where we've expanded kind of the flexibility allowed.

Two that did change with some further discussions was we did expand the light industrial and general industrial to allow childcare as a permitted by right use. And this is just due to some of the additional use specific standards we have input into the code which we'll talk about in a bit as well as just recognizing that our child care providers are going to be doing the due diligence on their end to co locate or locate in areas where they feel comfortable based on some of the other state and building code requirements and we feel that they should have kind of the ability to pick and choose those locations based on their

needs. Councilman Hinjim.