City Council - workshop

Good morning. Welcome to the City of Colorado Springs work session meeting for Monday, August 10th, 2026.

Will the clerk please call the roll? Council Member Casey.

Here.

Council Member Crowe-Iverson. Here. Council Member Donaldson.

Here.

Council Member Gold. Here I am. Council Member Hingem. Present on line. Council Member Leinweber.

Here.

Council Member Rainey. Here. Council Member Risley. Here. Council Member Williams. Here. All nine present.

Are there any changes to the agenda for today? Seeing none, moving on to regular meeting. Are there any changes to our regular meeting tomorrow? I don't see any.

Do we wanna, I'm looking at Sarah, I'm sorry. I think we're moving for tomorrow for Bravo Delta off of consent.

Councilman Donelson? I may have a request. Which one is Bravo Delta, what's that?

I don't have the agenda right in front of me. But I know the annexation is not recorded yet associated with that item. It'll be recorded by week's end, but we don't wanna have it on consent.

So it's one of the annexations. Utilities is gonna present today on something that's currently planned to go back to back tomorrow. At that presentation, I may request just to have it taken off the agenda tomorrow and just put on the regular schedule of it's introduced at a work session. Two weeks later, it comes back to a regular session, not back to back, unless there's a reason it should be done that way, which I'm just not aware of. So that's it.

Okay, we'll take note of both of those, thank you. Moving on to 4A, will the clerk please read item 4A into the record?

Work session meeting minutes, July 27, 2026. Are there any changes to these minutes?

Seeing none, moving on to item 5A. Will the clerk please read item 5A into the record?

Acacia Lindar versus John Pannunzio, Don Leach, Jeremy McClure, Byron Franklin, Troy Kochavar, Greg Burkett, Ronald Thurston, Leroy Mora, JC Williams, Pueblo County Board of Commissioners, Pueblo County, Pueblo County Sheriff's Office, Bradley, Pratt, and City of Colorado Springs.

City Attorney? Good morning, Stephanie Boster, City Attorney. The Civil Action Investigation Committee voted to recommend to the City Council that the city provide representation for the officer pursuant to the City Code, the Colorado Governmental Immunity Act, and the Liability of Peace Officers Act. The committee further recommends that the city reserves the right to decline payment of any punitive damages award. At this time, we request authorization from city council to provide representation.

Can I get a thumbs up? All thumbs up. Moving on to item 6A. Will the clerk please read item 6A into the record?

Plain and safe presentation.

Good morning, Chelsea.

This is on. Good morning. Good morning, President Crowe, Iverson, Pro Temeris Lee, and City Council. My name is Chelsea Gondek, and I serve as the CEO for the Downtown Partnership. I am joined by Pat Rigdon, who serves as our Director of Downtown Environment, and we are here to just give an update on the Clean and Safe Program that you guys so graciously helped fund this past year. Just want to make sure I'm in... Sure, there we go. All right, so just a reminder of why we launched this program and the issue at hand. And it's really about kind of three groups of individuals. Of course, our downtown businesses and their concerns, as well as prospective investors into downtown and their perceptions of downtown. And last but certainly not least, our residents and visitors to downtown to make sure that they feel like it is a welcoming and walkable environment. so middle of last year we launched a 19-month pilot program really to enhance cleaning and safety specifically to the downtown development authority area and that is what you can see on the right outlined in red and really the approach we were taking was coordinated data-driven and human-centered and so before i pop it over to pat to kind of talk about the three pillars of the program and some of the insight. We did just do a pulse survey a month or two ago and wanted to share kind of some of the overarching information that we received. As you can see on the right hand side, a majority of our respondents were business owners with then a handful of residents and of course some visitors and other patrons of downtown. And about two thirds both stated that they saw a positive impact overall downtown from the launch of this program, as well as noticing an increase in cleanliness downtown and a little over a third notice decrease in loitering and camping. And then when it came to kind of the different aspects of the program, we also inquired on the value and about 43% valued all components equally and then a little under a third valued security the most. So with that, I'm gonna toss it over to Pat to run through each of the indoor pieces.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for having us.

We have, Councilman Donaldson has a question.

Yeah, could I just ask, who did this survey go out to and how many responded?

I believe we had around 70 respondents and it was really highly pushed to our street level businesses, but also anybody and everybody who visits downtown. But as you can see from the respondents, a majority of them were those street level businesses. We did direct pushes to office tenants as well.

Okay, thanks.

Good morning, everyone. We do talk about the three, I guess, components of this program, but often we also forget that we have a fourth component to that. We have a clean team downtown that's funded through the bid, and we've had that for some time, and they do a fantastic job. But for the most part, I'm going to address the three new components. First of all, supplemental security. That began late July, but we kept Just to clean it up, we kept stats August 25 through June of 2026. They managed 2,850 total incidents. Those range in variety from campings, sit and lie, ordinance violations, as well as other disturbances, suspicious circumstance, those kind of things. We also had 564 merchant calls to that team for help, which tells you a lot of the things that they manage are things that they find on their own, which is a super value component to this. I think one of the big takeaways for us on the security impact is that only 2% of all of those 2,850 incidents managed required police intervention. And when you think about the financial impact of the city of that, I wouldn't say that every one of the 2,850 incidents could have required police intervention, but many, many could, the vast majority could have. They were able to handle things at a lower level and resolve those effectively without having to take away our police officer's time from other valuable things that they could be doing. There's also, when we do talk about financial impact of that, CSPD, It's about $133,000 for a level one peace officer annually. That's salary benefits versus full-time security. And the cost to us is about $65,000 for a full-time person there. So it's a little less than half that we're able to pull off there. If you look at... A couple other impacts that we look at our merchant requests for assistance. Those have steadily climbed throughout this program. That's actually a positive. We've reached out to our merchants. We've asked them to use security when appropriate and when it is not something that is of an emergency nature that requires police. And it's really gone up steadily. On top of that, last July was another big spike or this last month where we had about 80, but we're averaging about 55. or so calls by merchants a month. And that's up from 35 prior to the program beginning. Also wanna point out on the screen is our hourly calls for service. We track this in order to help guide us where to best use our personnel. Prior to this program, our security was doing a, it was only two officers. It was 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. We expanded that to begin at 6 a.m. and go to 10 p.m. We see a lot of calls at 6 and 7 a.m. and that is folks that are sleeping in doorways and things that we routinely got merchant complaints from that they would show up, they'd have to either call the police, they'd have to call security and get people out of their doorway. We're resolving those situations proactively before the business owners come in. But we have seen a steady climb throughout the day of calls that they're handling as well. And the main reason for that is we added security from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Those are our primary times where merchants are seeing foot traffic, and we wanted that visible security presence to make our visitors and merchants feel a little bit more comfortable downtown. A couple of other things that may not look positive, but I think they are. We've seen an increase in the number of calls that we're handling on sit, lie, ordinance violations, disruption, suspicious activity, and camping. But that is again, because they are proactively dealing with those situations where many times before that we weren't recording those because they were going unaddressed. So again, they're out there beating the pavement and finding these kinds of things before they become a bigger issue. When we looked at our security responses about security, 76% had a positive rating of their effectiveness of three or above and 44% at four or above. I think the big thing though is if their operations ceased, 94% rated that as a negative impact to themselves or their business and 53% was a four or above. If you look at the chart on the left about interaction with security officers, you do see that about a third of them, of the respondents, interacted weekly with security, and another quarter was monthly, with 7% being a daily interaction with our security, so they are getting used. Our ambassadors is the next phase I'll talk about. They began about the same time we enhanced the security. They've had over 10,000 touches with either businesses, visitors, or our homeless population. You'll see a vast majority of those are with visitors. They are our hospitality arm. They help people find dining. A lot of times they'll talk them through how to work the parking meters, those kind of things, and just hopefully enhance that experience for someone that's coming downtown. 1,948 business check-ins. They go in, they find out how things are going, if anything we could do better for them, cleanliness, any kind of service that we need to give our business owners and report that back to me. And then they had 2,267 contacts with the homeless population. Those are generally just a light touch with folks that might just be checking with them, saying hello, finding if they need anything. And then they have a fairly routine contact with our outreach workers as well to report those and have some communication on if they can help folks get further services. If you look at the survey respondents regarding our ambassadors, 78% rate them at three or above on effectiveness, 64 at four. Negative impact if operations cease, 97 at three or above, and 50% at four or above. I think the big thing here too is that most folks reported interacting with them. Our biggest chunk was a weekly interaction with our ambassadors. So they are getting out there and being seen and making an impact. I should also mention that they do a lot of supplemental cleaning for our clean team. They pick up garbage all day long. They've taken that on as something that they enjoy and it is making an impact. They go and clean the alleys on a routine basis and it makes a difference. Outreach services is the third component I'll talk about. We're pleased to have Steve from Homer Pike Speak. That's who we contract with for the outreach services. He's with us today. They started in September 1st. So between September 1st and June 26th, they've interacted with 221 unique individuals. that may not sound like a big number but many many of those individuals they've interacted with dozens of times and it takes dozens of contacts to help get these people into programming of those 221 though they've helped 24 reach stability and that could be either into a supportive housing environment sober living could be getting them a ticket to be with parents or relatives outside of the state, those kind of things. So they are making an impact. 135 individuals have accepted case management, which is often the first step into really getting them true help. And 158 of those 221 are actively seeking housing. They are out there every day doing very difficult work. And it takes many hours of conversation with a lot of these folks to have an impact. As you can imagine, this is probably the least visible of our services. They are not routinely going into businesses, but they're out there contacting the homeless population. So as far as how often they're interacting with our respondents, that's not as frequent. However, You can see there that 96% of the survey respondents rated the three or above on a negative impact if operations ceased and 47 out of four above. So they are making a difference. I think people see that. They're just not as visible publicly.

So what we have up here in terms of the program budget are our actuals through June of this year, but also with projections through the end of the pilot program, which would be through the end of this calendar year. Not surprising to us, of course, is that security is the largest piece of the pie when it comes to the budget. And again, we base this budget and this program off of similar programs in other downtowns, and we expected this to be the case. Next up are ambassadors. The one piece that I'll note in here is that the outreach component is small in the overall program budget because we really just funded launching that aspect of the program initially. From there, it's been carried through by federal dollars. So a majority of our funding, of course, going to the security component. Councilman Risley.

Thank you, Madam President. Good morning, Chelsea. Thank you both for being here. Just a real quick question on that last slide. I was curious, what's the difference between personnel, admin, and management?

Yeah, we take in a management fee. The personnel admin is kind of a bucket that includes some of our outreach printing, stuff like that. So some of that administrative cost is encapsulated and captured in that. So maybe not necessarily the best title for it.

And that's different from, you said there's a management fee?

Yeah, the management, that 4% management fee is a percentage we take to help pay for our time in managing the program.

Okay, I guess I'm still not completely clear on why they're two separate buckets, but you're just breaking out the fee separately from other costs that may be associated with management.

Yes.

Okay, thanks.

Councilman Hengem and online.

Thank you. Actually, I was hoping you could go back to the outreach slides. That's where I had my questions. Maybe one. There you go. And Steve might need to answer these questions, but I would like to just hear a little bit more, if you could, on the number of individuals engaged, you know, if that 220 seems to represent the folks who are unhoused walking around downtown. Is that about the number we suspect are in and about and around downtown? A little bit more about the services provided. We're not seeing them anymore downtown. If you could just give some more color and also talk about the the app that Homeward Pikes Peak has launched. Yeah, we'll bring Steve up.

This is Steve Wyant from Homeward Pikes Peak. He runs the outreach program. He's also out there on the street a lot. So, Steve, if you don't mind just telling them a little bit about what that population represents in your opinion.

You want me to start at the 221? Those are what we call as unique individuals, meaning we may have contact with multiple people a couple times throughout the week or the month, but each individual person, there's 221, so I guess that's the single population that we have worked with.

So I think one of her questions she's interested in is 221, does that seem like, this is probably hard to answer, but is that the number of people that are in and around downtown, or does that number fluctuate?

All of those numbers are in the downtown area. There's people coming in and out of the downtown area, obviously. And so I don't think if we went around and counted them exactly at this spot time, there'd be 221. So it kind of fluctuates. And also we've helped people, you know, with bus tickets and stuff. And so they are able to go to different places and stuff.

Maybe another way to ask this question is of the 221, how many would you say are kind of more, you see more frequently and know really well by name and are kind of standard downtown folks?

I'm thinking. Probably around 100 that we see on a regular basis and we know their name and hopefully they know us.

Okay, so about half of them, more or less, and I realize this is huge guesstimating, but are potentially really transient moving through downtown.

Probably, yeah.

Yeah, and then if you wouldn't mind, Steve, actually speaking to a little bit how the app is working and how people have been using that, and I would appreciate hearing from you also and you may not want to speak to this but just if i recall right the four percent overall cost to these services i just want to hear sort of a return on investment that's a small portion of the budget for um you know kind of what we're getting here in terms of outcomes with the outreach

I apologize. The first question. Can you repeat that again?

Well, I think, Steve, what you can speak to is just the app that you're using, the app that you guys launched. I think the app is going. Maybe Chelsea, yeah.

I believe the app is going fairly well. We keep track of that. We had an initial lot of referrals right when it opened up, and it's kind of decreased now that we'll get a couple a week. And some of those are also outside the downtown area, but it gives us an opportunity to go directly to the individuals. And what we hope to do is also with that is educate the caller, the reporter that has a concern about somebody. And so we can kind of help. We can't give any personal information on the person, but we try to inform them about homeless population and things and kind of the struggles and what works well and what doesn't work well and appreciate them being involved and reporting their concerns.

Right. Okay. Thank you. And Chelsea or Pat, maybe you could speak to just the value of the 4% overall cost and what we're getting in return.

Yeah, I mean, in terms of the program here and what we're presenting here, it is about 4% of the costs. And as I noted, that's because we just funded kind of the upfront launch of the outreach services. If we captured all of the costs of the outreach services throughout the program, it would actually account for about 30% of the program costs.

Okay, can you say a little bit, I don't quite understand why the four versus the 30. Sorry, I'm on medication by the way, everybody just so you know.

No, I understand it's a bit tricky. So we're presenting actuals today as well as forecasts through the end of the program. of what we are directly contracted and overseeing. And so when we initially launched the program, we anticipated potentially directly contracting with the outreach services. How it came about was we directly contracted with them for the initial start, and from there, and I don't know if Amy would like to come up and speak to this, that direct contracting for the ongoing monthly outreach services has been through the city's department. So... in terms of what our oversight was about four percent of what we're overseeing um goes to the outreach but if we were to incorporate the monthly costs that have been a federal pass through the through the city's department it would actually be about 30 of the program cost okay that's helpful and and if amy wants to give a more comprehensive picture that's great um but we can i can also move on to All right, I just would like to hop back into, and certainly time for questions, but some of the successes, challenges that we've seen throughout this program. As you saw from that poll survey, certainly the positive response that we've seen from businesses, as well as the increased utilization of security by the merchants. And because we did expand hours, as well as put more teams on the ground, we have also seen quicker response time by security. I'll say that we've also seen the increased utilization of support services individuals who are experiencing homelessness. And I'll say that is very directly because we have a team that is dedicated to the downtown beat who are able to establish that rapport by those kind of repeated touch points with individuals. And of course, as Pat mentioned earlier, the decreased use of CSPD for some of these minor issues. In terms of challenges, certainly persistent waste cleanup. So we have individuals who are overturning public trash cans or going through dumpsters, creating a mess that sometimes takes our different components of the program off the street to address it, as well as lack of enforcement tools for non-criminal behaviors. And we have up here, STP stands for same 10 people. And generally, right, we might have people who are making the downtown environment feel uncomfortable, but their behavior isn't necessarily criminal. Therefore, there isn't something that we can enforce on it. Also, consequences for low-level offenses. So maybe not something reaching a level, although it is disruptive to the downtown environment, is not leading to charges and or taking someone off the street. Consistency of CSPD presence. So there has been some fluctuation in what the downtown CSPD presence has been throughout this program. Previously, we had a downtown area response team that was dedicated to the downtown area that shifted to cover other areas of downtown and recently has come back. While we do feel that a majority of the issues that we are dealing with downtown can be handled by security, it is really, it became very noticeable to our downtown merchants that that presence wasn't there and they did still want that in terms of backup if and when they are needed. And then of course the limited ability to compel engagement with services. So some of those same 10 people who might be experiencing homelessness choosing not to engage, there's a limit to how we can have them engage with services.

Councilman Rainey.

Thank you, Madam President. I know you just mentioned that you really want to kind of press for time, wanted to get through the presentation. And I can wait, but are you going to be talking about, because in the previous, I think it's three slides back, you talked about the calendar year and what the poly program is currently under. Are you planning on getting into some of those funding aspects later on?

for continuing the program? No, we were just planning to do kind of an update on the program to date.

Okay, I tell you what, Madam President, I'll hold my three questions until you finish your presentation.

Councilman Lineweber.

Yeah, I just wanted to kind of It really dwells second-hand on these challenges because I think that's kind of the key part where we're kind of stuck because it's the same 10 people. And I haven't heard that phrase before. So we have an STP. That's okay. No, that's what we're dealing with. So because when I think about like the numbers that are on the slide with the, you had the numbers of engagement, I was curious like how many of those are actually making it to the rescue mission to spend the night versus just sleeping on the street? Because a lot of them will leave the rescue mission in the morning and then just go downtown. and then they'll come back to the rescue mission at night and sleep there or something like that. So there's kind of that kind of engagement. I was curious if you had a sense of that.

So we're fortunate to have Steve and Travis Williams from the Springs Rescue Mission here, and they can chime in. But I will tell you that early in the morning, our cleaning crew and then our security do engage a lot of people sleeping in doorways and in alleys and on the street. I would estimate it's probably in the neighborhood of 25 to 30 that consistently sleep in those areas downtown in doorways that they find. That's a real ballpark figure. That doesn't mean though that some of the other people aren't not making it to the mission. They might be going down to Monument Valley Park, they might be going to the creeks and other areas that we don't necessarily patrol or address folks in. I hope that helps. That's a little bit.

Well, I wanted to get a better sense of like, how is the rescue mission kind of engaged with this, according to your numbers, because I wanted to know it from the downtown perspective. And so what you're basically telling me, there's 20 to 30 people that aren't going to the rescue mission. The rest probably are finding their way there.

Well, again, and I might let Travis or Steve chime in, that's another number I don't know if I could say. They certainly appear to be going somewhere else other than downtown. I think what's hard to say is if they're actually going to the rescue mission and checking in and those kind of things. And I don't know if even Travis or Steve would be able to accurately answer that because we don't really track like, hey, were you downtown and did you come into those facilities? So it's really difficult. I can tell you that STP, the same 10 people, I think that is actually an interesting concept and I'll tell you how we're trying to address that. We have monthly meetings with PD and then every two weeks I check in with them. But between police and security, we identify who we think are our top five offenders and we focus on them. And I will tell you that's been very effective in the last month or so when PD has come back to a regular presence downtown that of the five that I focused on the first week we did that, four of those ended up being taken off the street by PD. Now, is it long-term? No, sometimes it's short-term, but two of the five are still in jail for various offenses. But these are kind of the ones that are truly causing the issues downtown that we focus on. And I know that's not answering your question, but I will tell you, we are trying to address those folks with the chronic homelessness, mental illness, addiction issues, because they are actually the ones creating most of the problem.

Well, and that's actually, I was getting ready to go there, because that's the piece, I'm kind of chiseling it down, because I understand that, I mean, we have a low bar rescue mission, and so, and basically, not to speak directly for Travis, but believe what he's communicated to me, is that that's anyone that can take care of themselves. They have to be able to take care of themselves, because the rescue mission doesn't have services to take care of people. so they're not a hospital, they're not a clinic, they provide a bed and everyone's gotta find their way to the restroom type thing. So that leaves a segment of the same 10 people, and we'll just use that terminology, I think it's good. What we're determining on where they should go currently is jail.

So I think that is an excellent point, is that one of the gaps I think that we continue to see is that when we encounter these people with addiction and serious mental health issues, that oftentimes the criminal system ends up being what they use as a mental health tool. Avenue, it's very difficult to compel these individuals to check into any kind of facility or any program on their own. And there's very little tools, I think, that can compel them or force them to go into those same facilities. And so they, a lot of times, if they're not doing something fairly serious in the criminal nature, they continue to dwell out on the street rummage through garbage, scream, yell, and wreak havoc, and there's very little that we can make them do.

So this is kind of my thing. If we had a 13-year-old that was out in the street of downtown, we would immediately take care of that individual. That individual would have a place to stay, would have a place to eat, would be able to have all these. But as soon as you turn 18 or older, you lose all that. And there is no way for us to step in and help these people. And so there's no, it's just a cycle. So the only thing we can use is jail, which is, I wish it wasn't the tool, but it is the only tool we have. And this is the area that I think has to truly get addressed in terms of competency. Because when you have an individual who's 30 years old but has an IQ or whatever of a 12-year-old, they need to be treated as a 12-year-old.

And I would agree, and to our point of the same 10 people, right? There's certainly a handful of individuals who are kind of this ongoing challenge downtown, but the vast majority of individuals that we are encountering are willing to engage with services. So I don't want that to get lost. It is certainly- No, no, no.

That's why we're talking about the same 10, right? In the previous slide, you're dealing with 200. You're thinking you have about a hundred that are regulars, but there really is this smaller group, this smaller segment. that we don't have, again, I'm not comfortable with saying that our best tool is jail. It just goes against my being. We need to do better. We need to find something better than jail. And again, if a 13-year-old was downtown who's a human individual, they would be taken care of. But if you have a 30-year-old who's behaving like a 13-year-old, there's nothing for them.

And I think that really speaks to obviously the work that Amy and her department do. And I won't ask her to come up here, but certainly a piece that has been elevated through this pilot program.

Well, it's certainly a gap that I think the city has to kind of embrace and look at. And we need to bring together the key players and really kind of address this particular issue around we need better solutions than the jail. I could tell you that the sheriff would really like us to find a solution.

Certainly.

Because he's not, you know, he likes to deal with criminals. And these people, like you just said, aren't criminals, but we have to find some way to make them criminals in order to get them in jail. And again, then I start to have problems with all that. But it's the tool we have, which is very, very difficult. And I just want the public to understand that we're in a stuck place because these same 10 people, we don't have solutions and we can't... get them to do what they need to do. So they're not taking responsibility for their lives because they don't know how. They're 13 year olds in a 30 year old body or 45 year old body or whatever it is, right?

I will tell you though that I mentioned that we've been focused on these top offenders and when four of them, just four of them were off the street, it was a noticeable impact downtown. Like the numbers, like I walk up and down Tejon and all those areas all day long, it was noticeable. The lack of people screaming or rummaging through the garbage and all that stuff, just four of them. So it does make a difference wherever they might go

No, I totally agree. And what if we could do 10? Right. So that's where I'm trying to get to is that this is an issue that I think our state needs to deal with in terms of restructuring our competency laws. And then also us just... being responsible and taking care of other humans who are made in the image of God and have immense value, just because you're 18 doesn't mean that you don't have value anymore. And so there's a point where society has to step in and help. And we need to come up with a solution. And that's what I wanted to really highlight here. You guys are doing a great job because you're really working with a lot of people and you're working with key partners like Travis, the rescue mission, all the great work that they do too. And with Amy and all of those things. I love the program because you clearly we're seeing good successes come out of this, but we've identified the gap. Now we need to kind of figure out how do we get that particular gap? Because that's the one that's the most noticeable. That's my point.

certainly and well heard and i don't want to lose this opportunity to make the point that prior to this pilot program right we didn't have a dedicated team of outreach to downtown where we do see a concentration of these individuals compared to other areas of the city and having the availability of a downtown dedicated team so that they can establish that rapport and have that many touch points in order to be successful in transitioning them because it takes I've lost count of the number of touch points they say now to actually have people engage with services and move through. So I think that's a really important piece to speak to of how this program has been successful. And I'm not sure that my clicker is working anymore. If I could go to the next.

While you're doing that, Councilman Hingem.

Yeah, thank you. And just so Councilmember Lineweber really kind of went down the path I was hoping to go down. But I just want to support some of that thinking. And, you know, I agree that actually having some terminology to kind of help hone in on a smaller portion of the population, which you would sometimes call, at least in the mental health field, people with severe and persistent mental illness, um that we yeah the jail is not the best place for them but uh where where and how can we uh serve those folks and uh just to piggyback on something else council member limeweber said is how can we as the city we don't provide those services obviously um i think you know wondering about um you know, what other behavioral health dollars are available through the county or the state that we might help access. But how can we as a city potentially convene folks who do treat these folks in our city and kind of address, be more targeted in how we're addressing the needs of this very small population, at least in this area at any rate, and help provide them services that are not putting them in jail but are both helping them and also um uh really impacting positively our downtown so um i just want to make those comments and actually if if i wouldn't mind hearing from amy on that and if she has any thoughts on how we might how we might initiate something like that or what we're already doing that I'm not aware of. I might appreciate that and I very much appreciate this presentation.

Thank you, Amy Cox, Chief Housing and Homelessness Response Officer. This is a complex question, and the City of Colorado Springs, as Councilman Hengem and Councilman Lineweber pointed out, did not provide behavioral health. One of the things that we are doing, however, is we're trying to bring greater leadership to the broader system. So we have these two, we work on the internal issues, right, better coordination with our law enforcement, our fire department, our cleanup crews, And then we're also trying to make the bridge so that people who are encountered have a place to go that best suits their needs. So we are in conversations with providers in the community, funders about how to tackle this. We have in our work plan to host some type of behavioral health or mental health summit. either this year or early next, to begin to bring parties together. Again, our role would be in leadership and some potential leveraging of federal dollars perhaps, but we do not provide that care directly. Does that help?

uh that that does help amy thank you very much and i'm i'm wondering in particular how and you don't have to answer this question but a question to ask is how can the county um work with us on that well i yeah and i think that would be part of that conversation i don't want to i don't want to speak for the county yeah of course thank you no of course thank you thank you very much i appreciate it i'm done thanks thank you councilman donaldson madam president this is is this your last slide

I think we have one more after this.

If you would like, please go ahead and finish up and then I'll ask at the end.

Thank you. Obviously, we've identified some challenges and opportunities kind of throughout this conversation and certainly what Amy just came up and spoke to in this broader issue of gap in terms of services in our community. But in terms of this program, we were really focused and narrowed in on downtown and kind of those audiences that we were talking about at the start of the presentation and some of the opportunities that we see, some of which we have implemented again, right? We were taking data to kind of iterate on this program through time, as well as to potential Council Member Rainey's question, what this might look like in the future of opportunities that we can carry forward after this pilot program. So first and foremost, of course, activation of public spaces, we know you know, placemaking 101, having activated places is one of the best ways to avoid some of the issues that we're seeing. And so of course this year, one of those aspects is the Acacia Park Concert Series. Also having a more noticeable, visible, clean and safe presence. So we've seen this certainly through the Pulse, but also anecdotally the Pulse survey, but also anecdotally from our businesses. And this kind of goes with the next bullet point as well as understanding what the available resources are and making that very apparent to both merchants and the public what is available to them. Expanding the cleaning enhancement, so Pat did speak to some of these that are already happening, but of course through that pulse we also saw the desire for more frequent power washing, quicker graffiti removal, and attention to key hotspots, of course alleyways being kind of the top one that people note. Stronger enforcement around repeat issues and in high activity areas, which we spoke to just in terms of the individuals who are disruptive. And then, of course, encouraging locked dumpsters and exploring options for public waste receptacles that wouldn't allow individuals to create those messes and take time away from our teams. The last thing that I would share is just a business perspective from a business owner who unfortunately couldn't be here this morning because he is running his shop that he has had downtown for over five decades and really just encapsulating the fact that downtown is certainly an economic, civic and cultural heart of our region and just the immense impact this program has had and the desire from our merchants for it to continue in this sort of bolstered fashion that we've seen through the pilot program. There should have been one more slide, but it looks like it's all, I guess I'll leave it on Sam's quote. Councilman Casey.

I think Councilman Donaldson was first.

There, you're back on, Councilman Donaldson.

Okay, I appreciate that. Chelsea, can you remind us what, how much does the city provide for clean and safe and what percentage of the cost does that cover?

The city, you guys provided, I believe it was $700,000 towards the $1.8 million, and I cannot do public math, therefore I don't know what percentage that is of the total funding.

Yeah, it's a little over 40% or so. Pat, it violates one of our city's ordinances to sleep in a doorway downtown, right? You're breaking the law, correct?

That's correct.

Okay. And so when, like, do we get a bunch of calls in the morning from shop owners that, hey, there's someone in my doorway, and the clean and safe folks come by and tell them to move along, essentially, right? Yes, sir. Okay. So... We're not enforcing our city's ordinances. We're just letting people sleep downtown. And then we talked a little bit about how many is it that keep doing that. There are spaces at Springs Rescue Mission. I mean, Travis is in the back, but I think we can all say, yeah, there's been space every night this year. Is that right? And I'll just say it, because nobody will know it, Travis from Springs Rescue Mission is nodding his head, yes, there's space every night. And there are a handful of people who can't go to the Springs Rescue Mission currently, but not very many. So we're really allowing people to sleep downtown, and I'll point out it's the mayor's responsibility to enforce our ordinances, not city council's. We can't, we aren't allowed to. We can pass a budget, we can pass ordinances, but we don't control the police, and so I can't tell the police to do more about this, but the mayor could. We don't create criminals, like find a way to turn somebody who's a vagrant downtown into a criminal as was said. We don't look for a way to make them into a criminal. They commit a criminal act like sleeping in someone's doorway. And we've put up with this way too much for too long. And we're just sort of calling them 12 year olds like they're nice 12 year olds who are just confused and don't know what to do. I walked across Acacia Park less than two weeks ago at about 6 p.m. across one of the lines, the sidewalks that go through it. On my way heading north, everything was fine. A couple hours later, coming back, somebody had scattered all their stuff, all their possessions right in the center were the two crosswalks paths. Crosswalks cross. And as I walked, I could tell, and this may not go good, but I'm not gonna turn and go the other way. There's a muscular young man in a pair of jeans and no shirt who had his back to me as I approached, but then I couldn't tell if he saw me or not, but he spun around and swung his fist at me, at my stomach, and then stopped right up against my abdomen. He goes, oh, sorry, bro, didn't see ya. And and I had blood on my on my shirt, on my elbow. And I didn't know, was that for me? Is that from him? But, you know, I think it was from him. I don't know where he was bleeding from. Yeah. I just believe this is totally unacceptable. The city needs to do more. We need to enforce our ordinances. Those guys sleeping in the doorway should be arrested in the morning. And they should be, if we can only hold them for two days because they have to be in front of a judge or released that fast, we should do it. That's what the city should do. we've put up with this for too long and it makes our city unbearable and it makes all cities unbearable but uh you know i call on the mayor to do more citizens avoid downtown even now even though this is some degree of an improvement I'm married to one who avoids downtown, because when she came downtown for my swearing in, the last time I was sworn in as a city councilman, my daughter and she were kind of confronted by a guy on the other side of the car. And they didn't know which way to go, and they had to go the other way around the car to avoid him. And that's at the swearing in of city council. I get frustrated when, oh, they're 12-year-olds. They don't know what they're doing. Unacceptable. They're breaking the law and they should be punished for that. They should be jailed. That's one thing we can do and it incapacitates them from doing anything else dangerous or frightening for citizens. And I'll accept that. I'll take that as a temporary improvement. Citizens want order and safety, that's what they want. Again, I'll point it out, it's the mayor's responsibility to enforce the laws, I wish I could. I'll ask the city attorney, how long can we hold someone for if they are sleeping in a doorway, and they're cited by police, what can we do? What can the mayor do? I'll put it that way.

Stephanie Boster, a city attorney, Madam President, through you to Council Member Donaldson. It depends on when the individual is cited. If it's over the weekend, they have to wait to see a judge. So it could be the entire weekend if they're cited that Friday and arrested. So it would really depend, but the mayor would have to have his police officers and his prosecutors follow city code in terms of how long they could hold them.

How long is it on a weekday?

Typically, it's 24 hours. Depending on when they're arrested, that could be the longest amount of time.

And what is the penalty if they're convicted, which they should be. It's pretty obvious. They're laying there sleeping. What's the penalty? What's the maximum penalty for that under our city ordinance? And you may not know off the top of your head. I understand that.

Madam President, through you to Councilmember Donaldson, I don't know that, but I'll find that information for you.

Okay, and what I believe is we need to do what we can with the tools we have, and this is the tool we have as city government. It's one of the tools. We don't have mental health services, and it's very difficult to sort out who's doing what for what reasons, but what we can do is enforce our laws, our ordinances against crime, and it is a crime. If we don't want it to be a crime, let's remove it from the books, but as long as it's there, let's enforce it. so i appreciate what what you're doing i just think we as a city we can't follow along with all the other cities across america that kind of let things go to hell denver being one we need to maintain colorado springs as a good safe orderly city for families and businesses thank you councilman casey

Thank you, Madam President. My question has to do with the clean part of Clean and Safe and the program budget slide. You had the pie chart on. There wasn't anything allocated towards cleaning. Can you explain why or where that costs are or any issues that are associated with the cleaning part? Thanks.

Yeah. So as Pat mentioned earlier in the presentation, the Business Improvement District does have a clean crew that is out seven days a week. And so that is currently being funded through the Business Improvement District to the tune of about $400,000, but that also includes some landscaping services within there. And so that's why it wasn't encapsulated in this budget specifically, but I think it's important to note that that's a crew of two or three that are coming in early in the morning. And then we have the ambassadors who are doing some of that additional cleanup throughout the day. So while it is captured as ambassador and really the hospitality aspect of it, they are doing enhanced cleaning because they're there and have more coverage of hours.

Thank you.

Councilman Lineweber.

Yeah, I wanted to, obviously you invited Travis to come just in case he had an opportunity to speak, so I'm going to give him that opportunity, Travis. So my question to Travis is, you know, the Rescue Mission has been dealing with homelessness for a long time. You have been dealing with homelessness for a long time, so you've seen it for... over a decade. And so from your evaluation, how is this clean and safe program working and how does the rescue mission engage with it? And where are some areas that you feel like the rescue mission is looking to improve? And also where are some things that we should be looking at or highlighting within the clean and safe program? So I'm kind of both ends, right? I wanna understand the rescue mission perspective. from what you're working on to kind of embrace what's happening. And then we're also looking at putting something similar in play for the South Nevada corridor. It's a little bit different, but that's gonna be added here shortly. So as these things begin to roll out, maybe even comment on that a little bit about what you perceive. I just want your, I wanna understand your perspective.

Well, thank you, Council, and thank you for the hard work, and thank you to the Clean and Safe Committee. I really appreciate everybody leaning in, I think. My name is Travis Williams and serve as the President and CEO of Springs Rescue Mission. You know, one of the more important things that I saw from the Clean and Safe just perspective is that we hear a lot about the numbers and how big they are. And what I appreciated about clean and safe is that we're able to pinpoint that, yes, we do have a significant amount of people who are experiencing homelessness in Colorado Springs, but particularly in the downtown corridor, it's a relatively small amount of people and it's many of the same people. And those folks are challenging. When it comes to Springs Rescue Mission, again, we try to keep as big of a front porch as we possibly can so that folks can get in off the streets and into the right kind of services. We are not a mental health facility, although we do have resources for mental health on campus. For example, we do have Diversus on campus. 1 of the things that I really appreciate is that homework speak has done a great job getting out there with outreach. 1 of the considerations that I might propose is that there's often. Scenarios where folks are not sure if they can come to the rescue mission or not. And so I think one of the pieces that we could explore as a community is if Springs Rescue Mission in particular did more outreach. So a lot of the narratives in the city have been folks coming to Springs Rescue Mission, which is great. And it takes a lot of staff and a lot of energy for us to do that. But one of the pieces that we haven't seen is perhaps what would it look like if Springs Rescue Mission went to the people and then trying to encourage folks into the best intervention that we currently have is to get folks, and the fastest intervention that we have, to get folks potentially off the street. Now the piece that is really difficult for all of us, particularly when it comes to mental health, Even with adequate services, it's really difficult to, it's difficult to help somebody who doesn't want to help themselves. There's only so many ways that you can get folks off the streets. And so I think that's, some of that is just the, the the civil liberties and the freedoms that people have right i mean even with the springs rescue mission is we can't have anybody stay at the rescue mission i mean we can't we can't keep them um so folks are free to come and go but i think we've done a great job of creating an environment where more and more people are staying and i think that's the piece that you don't see often is yes you may see the same folks out in the downtown, but what you may not see are the 400 people that are doing exactly what we hope in this community is that they're not on the streets, they're in a place of relationship, connectivity, and many of those are taking steps to find a pathway forward. Is that helpful?

Yeah, I think that's good. And I think you touched on something I think is really important, because I really like that idea about engaging because of the safety issue. Because if someone's sleeping out on their own at the creek or downtown or down some alley or whatever, there's some safety concerns for that individual. But at the rescue mission, there's a process where you come in, you have to go through security. It's fenced, so you can't... get in or out, and then you have patrols that are actually there that kind of make sure that it is a safe environment where you can actually get a possible sleep that night. And so I wanted to highlight that aspect, but that could be a really great message that, hey, why don't you sleep safe tonight at the rescue mission? I think I like that idea a lot.

Well, we like it a lot. And, you know, we don't necessarily believe that it's compassionate to allow folks to be isolated and alone out on the street. And we love to see people engage with services. And there's a lot of rumors about what we do and don't do. But we keep our, we're open 24-7. And folks, we're not trying to kick people out on the streets in the day. They can engage and during the day we have a robust collection of services that folks can voluntarily engage in. We can't even force folks to engage in the programming, but we're trying to encourage that. And we spend a lot of our days leading with hospitality, creating relationships. And if you think of the Springs Rescue Mission as a big invitation, it's really a big invitation to engage in those kind of services. But the first step in that is encouraging folks not to be isolated and alone on the streets and into an environment where they can embrace community.

The last question I wanted you to engage with, because I think we have a similar view, are all these people criminals? No. Who are they?

You know what, I think that's a great question, because I think when you think about Springs Rescue Mission, you can think about homelessness and just this broad case. And I think it's really important to recognize the humanity of the individuals that we serve. When you think about a place like Springs Rescue Mission, almost whatever your cause is within the community, it's happening at Springs Rescue Mission. So if your cause is, for example, caring about women who are fleeing sex trafficking, we have those folks at the rescue mission. If it's veterans who slipped through the cracks, we have those folks at the Springs Rescue Mission. If it's women fleeing domestic violence, we have those folks at the Springs Rescue Mission. If it's individuals struggling with mental health, we have those folks. If it's seniors, which is a growing population that we're seeing, we have many of those folks. So it's Yes, you can have some of those with some criminal activity in their background, but we have those folks too.

And how well do most of these people navigate our society?

you know a a a good percentage of them are going to be fine and i think that's where what we're trying to understand ourselves is what percentage of folks are actually able to move forward with very minimal intervention and then what folks are going to need a longer term intervention and so we're in on that journey uh right now but we also have folks who just get in the spout or in a fight with their spouse and they need a place to stay and we're it for a couple of days until they can turn their act around. So I think that homelessness is complicated as you're gonna have so many folks across a spectrum of a community that are gonna need some temporary engagement. Some are gonna need some long-term engagement and some are gonna need some really serious treatment interventions. And we've had some folks, for example, a gentleman who I know who's been at the rest commission for at least a decade, which is really sad that on one hand, I'm thankful that we've been able to be the stopgap. On the other hand, I'm really sad that we've been the only stopgap. Severe mental health challenges, wouldn't even stay in the shelter, but we have cared for him and today he is actually trying to stay in his own apartment. But it's taken 10 years of long suffering from the team at the rescue mission to care for this individual. And I think those are the kind of solutions that I'd love to see us find in the community as those folks that need those longer term interventions or for seniors who may not be able to find a better path because of employment. How can we help those folks? Thank you. Thanks. Thank you.

Councilman Rainey.

Thank you, Madam President. I'm gonna go back to the pilot program calendar year. So based on the current city investment into this, the 700K, when are you looking at I guess, or even if you are looking at coming back to the city for further investment and when you mentioned calendar year, are you talking about at the end of the year? Are you talking fiscal year rollover? What does that look like for you?

Yeah, so the pilot program itself was 19 months and that'll be ending at the end of this calendar year, so December of this year. It has been an ongoing conversation with the task force that includes many of the individuals you've heard from today about what does this look beyond the pilot program. And so we're in active discussions right now about what are the opportunities come January 1 of 2027 to carry this forward. And we ourselves work off of a calendar year budget for several of our entities that we manage. And so we're in active discussions about what are some of the resources that could be brought to that. Realistically, to have the level of service that we've had through this program, right? We went to the business community for the pilot program saying, we're trying to figure out something that will work specific to our downtown area. We're asking from one-time funding from them. But in order to keep up this level of service, it would require ongoing funding from the city.

okay and i'm glad you brought that up um has that feedback been positive from the business community that if there's no investment directly from the city that those business entities downtown would be willing to invest themselves into the program to help you know protect their businesses based on the feedback and some of the successes

I don't wanna speak directly for the broad business community, but essentially when we came up with the pilot program, the intent was this would be kind of a one-time investment from them. We do have resources from the Business Improvement District, which are raised by property taxes that are paid by those businesses that we intend, excuse me, to use for the ongoing funding. But that is just a piece of kind of the pie that would be needed to fund this.

Okay, and besides someone like Amy, who else on the city staff are you working with? What organization, entity, chief of staff, like who else in the mayor's staff are you working with?

Directly on the task force, Amy is a participant in that as well as some CSPD presence, but we're in regular conversation with administration, both Wayne and Mayor Yemi.

okay the other question i had and my colleague council member risley already touched on this on that one slide um and i guess only because i got experience in this and i i personally don't like it because it completes and confuses things that personnel admin slash management feed at four percent like i would highly recommend maybe tweaking that to make sure that people don't feel like there's a double dip between personnel and the management fee. And the one other part on the slide that really kind of jumps out at me, there's a, on the success side, it mentions the decrease in CSPD involvement in minor, thank you very much, the last bullet on successes, decreased use of CSPD for minor issues. the however piece is on the challenges part, consistency of CSPD presence. The delineator there, are you basically saying that while we don't necessarily need them on those minor offenses, you would truly appreciate them when the offense definitely looks like it's gonna become an arrestable offense or something to that effect? Is that kind of what the delineation is there?

Yes, so essentially, right, a majority of the issues that mostly our ambassadors or security are dealing with don't escalate to requiring CSPD intervention. However, we've seen and witnessed and certainly heard from the business community that just having that consistent presence makes them feel more comfortable if and when something would escalate to requiring their intervention. So yeah, nailing that, yeah. Can I chime in on that too?

So just to let you know too, so it kind of started out with the traditional DART unit, which was six police officers and a sergeant. I know they've reorganized. I think we've actually come to a very good place where we're effectively using them, where a lot of times we have two officers downtown during the day. Our communication with them is really excellent right now. I'm able to reach out a lot of times directly with the sergeants, inform them of issues. As I mentioned, we share like who our problem people are, they focus on them. And I think that's really working well and making a difference downtown. So I kind of feel like we're, using our city resources extremely efficiently right now. And while I'm giving out some kudos, city neighborhood services is fantastic. When I have cleanup issues, certainly large items, like somebody dumped a refrigerator in Adam and Allie the other day, they came and got it that day. Those kind of partnerships are really good. To your point, having CSPD there, frankly, and the population down there talk to each other when they know when police are not present, and they know when they are present. And so they're kind of a little bit of teeth behind some of the security actions. So it does help.

Okay, and the persistent waste cleanup, had a meeting with someone most recently, and I think this is gonna be a way forward. It sounds like the trash cans that are on the corner throughout the entire corridor, they are probably not the best trash cans because it allow people to go in and kind of, I don't wanna say dumpster dive, but trash can dive. And then some that just take it and dump it over on the sidewalks and now people have to go in and clean up. But it seems like there's a potential to purchase other type of trash cans that will prevent some of that. Is that something that you're currently pursuing?

I'm looking at that. you would be surprised at how expensive trash cans are, but the public metal trash receptacles, certainly the ones that lock from the outside that I'm looking at, are like $1,700 a piece. And if I look at the quarter where most food waste is disposed of, I'd probably need to replace about 25 of those so that price goes up, but we are looking at it. It would save a remarkable amount of time. I personally probably push the liner in and close the current metal trash cans by three times a day, because they get out and just leave them out.

Okay, thank you, I greatly appreciate you being here and providing this context, and it's not an easy topic, that is for sure, but thank you for your efforts. Thank you.

Thank you. Councilman Williams. Thank you, President Kerr-Iverson. Councilmember Donaldson, I think you brought up a good point, which is there are the two separate branches of government, and while there's a reason for that. This body actually plays a role. And I would like to thank this body for approving the $700,000 because that is a way for us to say, this is important. We want this taken care of. Our downtown is important. And I appreciate your willingness to be the recipient of that because none of this would be happening without that partnership. So definitely thank you for all of that. I'll piggyback on, what Councilmember Rainey said, which is it's budget season. So we don't know where this is going, but if there is a place that this needs to go into the future, the sooner this body gets that information, the better, which I know you're aware of, but just going to stay at it for the record. The human race is not a one-size-fits-all, and I think that's the hardest part, is that people are different. Where they are in life is different, and we're taking this one day at a time, one year at a time. I just recently went to my fiancé's 40-year high school reunion, and it's evident that mental health is a recent conversation. You talk about their parents, you talk about their grandparents. I can't even fathom how these children were raised because they weren't. They literally made sure that they were still alive, but to talk to them, they were literally just let go on the world. It's a totally different world. And then those parents raised the next generation and the next generation, but mental health is a recent phenomenon. Literally, it was a hundred years ago that survival was that you did everything as you could as a person to stay alive. The fact that you were happy, healthy, and whole while you were alive, completely irrelevant. So this is still relatively new. I had a great meeting with Amy Cox just to discuss mental illness, when you can catch it, how it starts. This is groundbreaking and I know it doesn't feel like it because we've been having these conversations obviously for 50 years, but that's how long I've been alive, but it is still groundbreaking. It's still not solved. That's my way of saying you get a lot of grace for this. We all get a lot of grace for this because we could do it the old-fashioned way. But I think we're trying not to do it the old-fashioned way. And we're trying to do it in a way that if Amy can get to those young people, then they'll have a better life when they're in their 40s. But I have friends whose kids didn't get it when they needed it. And they're never going to get out of this mental illness that they're in just because that's how brain chemistry works. But again, that's all a recent phenomenon. So that's a long way of saying thank you for what you're doing. The sooner you give us hard numbers, the better. And if you need anything, just let us know. Thank you. Thanks. Councilman Risley.

Thank you, Madam President. Pat, Chelsea, thank you both for being here today and for presenting this information. Thanks to your teams for helping to address this very complex, difficult problem. Travis, Amy, and others in the room are obviously great partners in all of that. And again, we're trying to solve something that is very difficult to solve with a lot of variables and a lot of different moving parts. So I just want to acknowledge the effort that you've put into that. I own a small business that's headquartered downtown. I live this every day. I know exactly the problems that you're trying to solve. I know how difficult it is to try to solve them. I've had to deal with the folks that camp out on our front porch. I've had to step over human feces to get in and out of my office building. I've had to escort some of our younger female employees in and out of the building so that they feel safe coming and going at night. I've also had conversations with some of these folks that are struggling and trying to figure out, you know, what they're doing. One of the guys said, apologized to me. He said, I don't want to be out here. I don't want to have to sleep in your parking lot, but I don't have any other choice. To which I replied, let me walk you around the corner to United Way and let's talk to some of the folks over there or let's go down to the Springs Rescue Mission and have some conversations about that. All that to say that what you are trying to solve, what we are all trying to solve, as I've said, is a very difficult situation with a lot of moving parts. But what I wanna underscore is that this program is moving the needle in my view, and I believe it's moving the needle in the right direction. Your statistics clearly articulate that. I've witnessed that myself, that I think we are making good progress in the right direction. Is it perfect? No. Do we have a long way to go? Absolutely. Are some of my colleagues correct in that enforcement is a big component of this? without question. But I don't want us to dwell on sort of the doom and gloom of the fact that we still have a long way to go. I think we need to focus also on the fact that we are making some headway here in this problem. The other piece of it that I just wanna comment on, again, as a small business owner, I think a lot of people overlook the cost and the expense to those of us that own businesses and own buildings downtown. If you think about not only the expense that you're putting in to try to address trash cans and so on and so forth, Every single business owner downtown who's helping to try to control this problem is spending a huge amount of money on private security, on building fences, on enclosing dumpsters, on all of the other security cameras, all the other things that are being put in and have been put in to try to monitor and address and control the situation. And so to the question before about whether or not small businesses or the business owners downtown would be willing to chip in on this, I think it's fair to say that we're bearing the brunt of the cost of this problem and what the city has been able to do through the work that we've done with budgeting on recreational marijuana dollars and some other levers that we have to pull I think that's really important. And I think it's important for the city to continue to step up where and when they can. But I don't want people to lose sight of the fact that it's the small business owners, it's the building owners, it's the companies that are headquartered downtown that really are bearing the brunt of the cost to try to address this right now. And so what Clean and Safe can do augments that without question, moves the needle in the right direction, in my view, without question. But there are some other components that need to be taken into consideration as well. So again, thanks for being here. Thanks for trying to do what you're doing to address this. And I think if we continue to work together, we'll hopefully make more progress in the right direction. Thanks.

Councilman Hingham. I thank you, Madam President. Yeah, I too want to express my appreciation very much for the presentation, for the really in-depth conversation. I would encourage us to think about this not really as a problem to be solved, but as a challenge to be managed. And if we think about it as a problem to be solved, we're never going to solve this. This is such a, it's a part of such a much, much bigger set of challenges that we face as a society. And I do agree with Council Member Risley, Pro Tem Risley, that we've made tremendous progress. And I think we need to focus on that and appreciate that. And it's progress toward managing challenges a challenge. And we will continue to manage this for, I think, as long as we're alive on the planet. And I think that's important. So just in terms of framing, I did want to go back to really briefly, I know we're concluding, but there was some conversation about the trash cans and the trash problem. And I just wanted to hearken back to a recent meeting I believe Pat Rigdon was having with all council members I know he had one with myself and council member Rainey with some request and sharing specifically about this this particular issue and Pat if you wouldn't mind just speaking a little bit to what are the things specifically that council might be able to do in addition you know we're going to and any budget stuff is you're going to decide how to use those budget dollars and I know you're working on But are there other things that council can do to support this from a legislative perspective?

Well, I know one thing we did mention was encouragement of the downtown businesses to lock dumpsters. There are some other areas and cities that have ordinances that do require that, similar to honestly west of I-25 with the bear thing. But it is amazing. I guess, I don't know if it's apathy or what from a lot of businesses that they won't do it voluntarily and we do speak to them about the impact that it could have if they could lock it. But it does, I think, get to be, you know, they see it as one more thing and it's tedious for employees to have to unlock. But I think I've told some of you this, I would estimate that about 90% of the garbage that we pick up has been thrown away at least once. And if we didn't have to do that, we could do a lot of other things that would enhance downtown if we weren't just picking up the same stuff over and over. So that may be a consideration, but in the meantime, I think we'll continue to fight the fight and ask them to, I actually kind of have my own photo array of these, so I show business owners the impact that it can have with the bagels all over and those kind of things and hopefully make an impact that way as well.

Well, thank you. And I don't know the content of each of your individual conversations. I know how it went. And in our conversation, I recognize that there's this balance between, you know, kind of property rights, business rights to, you know, to not be mandated to do this, but I, if you could, you know, if we could consider as a council and think about the cost benefit of not requiring business owners to lock their dumpsters on the cleanup that, you know, we're spending, resources on having people clean up garbage twice. I just think it's a worthy conversation. It's a worthy request. It's done in other places. And I would be interested in individual conversations, talking with my other council members about how you feel about that. Thank you.

I'll just note in kind of putting a pin in this that anecdotally we know that alleyways are a really big concern for people visiting downtown. And it was not shocking in terms of our poll survey to see that alleyways were kind of repeatedly or frequently mentioned in terms of places to address better cleanliness. And a majority of the issues that we see in those alleyways are related to Pat's point. Trash has already made it into a receptacle and has come back. Oh, yeah. If we may have another business owner who attended. Good morning, Luke.

Hey, good morning. Nice to see you all. Haven't been here in a while. Recognize some faces. Great to see you. Luke Travens, Concept Restaurants in the Carlton building. I have been entrenched in downtown since the early 90s. My partners opened Jose Muldoon's in 1974. We own and operate Jose's and McKenzie's Chop House. We also have a five story office building, the Carlton Building, which the street level business is Colorado Craft. So other than living in District One, my life is downtown. My office is downtown. I'm here all the time. I've been here for a long time. Really enjoyed the conversation today. I'm also a founding board member of Homeward Pikes Peak. In fact, Pat Regnan and I were board members together when he was a commander with CSPD. So I understand a lot of the levels we're talking about today. And my one suggestion to keep it brief is that there are other communities in Colorado and other states nearby that keep their downtowns clean and safe much better than we do. You mentioned Denver being a real problem, but if you go to Cherry Creek, where my oldest son lives and works, they haven't figured out. I don't know what the answers are. Perhaps it's some of the enforcement criteria you brought up. I don't know, but I think we ought to look at best practices and see how does Scottsdale, Arizona keep their community so clean. Cherry Creek again. So I will leave you with that. I thank you for your attention to this matter. Obviously, I would like to ask for continued funding for Clean and Safe. Councilman Rainey, you asked if the downtown businesses would invest themselves. I would say we have since the 70s. We've taxed ourselves with the BID, with the DDA. We fund the Downtown Partnership. So I think we're already doing that. So any questions, I'm here. If not, I appreciate your time and attention to this matter.

Councilman Donelson.

This will be for Pat. Thank you, thank you. Pat, do we have call for service numbers for PD? For the period since we've had this supplemental security, August of 25 through June of 26, I guess is what is being reported on today, for that same period in the prior year so we can see, you know what, call for service actually did go down, or call for service calls went up. Do we have that?

So I've been getting that data from CSPD since the program's inception. What I don't have is like a prior year, but I think they could provide that.

Have you looked at that yourself? Like, hey, have the calls gone down or up?

Yeah, so what made it a little difficult was we had a gap from about February till the end of June where CSPD altered their service delivery downtown and the downtown area response team went to the homeless outreach team. it made it difficult to make it apples to apples, but overall call for service day to downtown, which is something I can see, I don't think has changed tremendously, but that's every office, that's not just downtown officers, that's every officer assigned, that's nighttime, that's 24 hours, so.

Yeah, and I understand that the DART team came and went and came back, or whatever it is now, but just number of calls, because it's not so important to me, unless you can correlate that, when there wasn't the DART team call for service, go through the roof, and when they're back, they drop off. But I think that would be useful for us as a body to know. I can absolutely get it. This is what has happened over this period of time compared to the preceding, and then try to, if the preceding was abnormal for some reason, tell us that.

I can't speak for Lieutenant Tepley who oversees HOT in the Downtown Area Response Team, but I know they have specific goals this year towards reductions in many of these areas. So I send him our security stats, he sends me the PD stats, but the prior years I'm happy to get and I can send them out.

And go only as far into this as you want to, because that's really my question. But the previous gentleman brought up like Scottsdale, Arizona, Cherry Creek up in Denver, Do you know, I'm sure you look, you're trying to figure out, okay, what else can we do here to fix this or make it better? Are you aware of things that they're doing that we're not here?

I think there's some examples from some cities and as a matter of fact, john reader claymire we attended a session with a gentleman from grand rapids michigan where they came up with this unique model to address many of the things that council member line weber was talking about where they've got kind of a step approach where there is some mandate to go to mental health services in lieu of arrest and then it steps down and gets people some help i think we've looked at some of that We looked at, based this program on several cities that appear to be having success. I think Cincinnati was the visit that many folks made, but there are other cities that have done that as well, Reno, Nevada. So we've tried to mirror some of those components. I think what makes cities unique and is hard for each city to go, well, why is it working here and not there is that You know our service providers are the locale of our service providers being with like, you know Springs rescue mission being the biggest to the south You've got the Marion house. We've got the bus station. We've got the library in Acacia Park kind of puts downtown in the center of that I don't know if other cities have exactly that same setup or is there service providers more dispersed rather than being a little bit more centrally located. I think that could be the elephant in the room, but that does factor into it.

Okay, well yeah, that's real important to recognize if that's the case, because that's maybe the difference with Cherry Creek is they don't have those services there which are kind of the environment that attracts people who are in that situation right now. Okay, thank you. Thank you.

Councilman Williams. Thank you, President Kerr-Iverson. I just had a thought with your $1,700 trash cans. Have you thought about partnering with any of the metal shop classes in the city to see if you can get high school kids or college kids to start breaking out some trash cans? I mean, if they can see that that's what their future looks like, then not only would they get a skill, but we'd get trash cans in the process. So it's a thought.

Thank you.

That looks like the end of questions. Thank you so much for the presentation. This was really, really helpful. And I do appreciate everything you were doing. And I realize this is a pilot program. We need to keep that frame of mind that we're in discovery. So I'm sure we've learned some things that we would do different for the next round. Of course we have. And I know for a fact that Pat is down there every day all day because I run into you early in the morning. I run into you in the evenings. And so I see it for myself, the work that's going on. So we really do appreciate the efforts. We look forward to the next round. But that does conclude the presentation today. So thank you so much. I'm sure you'll be getting more email questions. Thank you.

All right. Thank you for your time.

Thank you. Next up, we have item 7A. Will the clerk please read item 7A into the record?

Overview of the City Parking Enterprise.

Good morning. Good morning. Everybody? You're good. Okay, good. My name's Alyssa Ault and I am the Parking Enterprise Manager for the Division of Public Works. And I'm here just to chat about, I guess how do I, I've never done this before, do I have like a clicker? How do I move things forward? Thank you. Pat.

You've been downtown too long, Pat.

I know. Just to start, just a quick update or overview of what our mission is, which is to support the economic vitality of downtown Old Colorado City and surrounding activity centers by providing accessible, well-managed parking, public parking. Our division is about $10.5 million budget, which is all collected through fees and it has no tax money. We manage and maintain on and off street public parking assets. We administer many parking programs. We do parking enforcement and then we also have a capital project program.

Madam President, can I just clarify one thing?

Yes.

So is parking enforcement paid for out of your budget?

Parking enforcement is paid for out of our budget. So parking enforcement, just to be clear about that, is we only are enforcing in our areas that we have paid parking. So the on-street parking that we manage and the lots and garages that we manage is where we enforce right now.

Okay, but like Bernie Herpin, he's being paid by PD and not you.

What was that?

Bernie Herpin, the guys that go around and give tickets, they do it in Travis.

Oh, for the ADA parking? Yeah. That is out of PD and not through our program right now.

How many enforcement folks do you have?

We have, it's right here, I think seven total right now. Thank you. So we have 21 staff positions. We issue around 50,000 citations every year. Right now we're tracking right around that. So, you know, middle of the year, 26,000. We have about 27 monthly parkers in all of our facilities. And then we also do meter hood contracts. So that's those folks for special events and construction, primarily some food trucks, things like that, that we also issue out of our program. so right now we have our maintenance program which has uh joel small who's an amazing supervisor and he's got technicians that do manage all of our parking meters plus all of our garages we do everything in house and lots um and then we have a parking enforcement like i just mentioned which we have a supervisor mark palm which you might see out and about um and then his supervisor his his folks underneath him one senior person and then folks on the street And they are out doing really great work, talking to people, helping folks use the parking meters and the kiosks, and just helping them get to where they need to go. And then we have our administration team, which is really three folks who do all the internal things, all of our budgeting, everything. They're great. They're the folks that you talk to if you ever call our office. And then... Next, we have our off-street parking. So we have about 2,700 off-street parking spaces, and that's in three garages in downtown and in three lots in downtown, one including this building here, their parking lot, which is not open to the public, and then four lots in OCC. We're $1 an hour, 24-7 and free on Sundays, which is, to be honest with you, the best deal in town. So if you're ever looking to tell someone where to park, I would highly recommend any of our garages and lots. They are clean. relatively cheap um and they're free on sundays and we do have um security uh maintenance uh special event parking we manage some of those so some of the bigger events will um secure our parking for uh their needs and then we also have monthly parking so we have about 350 000 parkers that come and go throughout our our garages and lots throughout the year um and then on street again we have about 2700 it's a really similar amount of spaces that are on street and off street so these are paid parking spaces so that can be a single space meter or it could be a parking kiosk that you might see in on tejon or on colorado avenue now in occ we require payment eight to eight monday through saturday and then one to eight on sundays um and there's no time limits and it's progressive pricing Our pricing starts $1 an hour on the street. We don't have very many of those spaces. You won't find them. Most of them are around $1.50 an hour and then go up from there. But it is truly some of the cheapest parking that you can find in our state and around the country in a city in a similar size. Basically, we have several different ways you can pay for parking, which is something that's exciting. It doesn't sound exciting, but it's exciting to me. It's exciting to me. You can still use coins. 30% of our folks still use coins to pay for parking, which is a really large percentage, actually, throughout the country. Most places, it's below 10%. So for whatever reason, people like to use coins here in Colorado Springs. Credit cards, including Tap to Pay or Apple Pay or your Google Pay, that can also happen at the meter. That's around 41%. And then we also have ParkMobile at 29%. We've just introduced text-to-pay as well, which we don't really have great stats on that yet, because that's still within our, so we're just kind of figuring out how to track that. But the people are still starting to use that. So we have 2.5-ish million transactions per year. And then we also manage, again, special event, parking, meter hooding program, valet, parklets, loading, and then parking permits for some folks. From a budgetary standpoint, you can see where our money is coming from. Primarily our money comes from parking meters, so people paying for parking meters. Parking meters and hoods are all together because it's just the way that we budget for it, but really the vast majority of that is people paying at the meter. We also have a large amount of monthly parking and our hourly parking within our garages. So again, 10.6-ish, five-ish million dollars a year budget. We get a little bit extra money from our transit lease at the Kiowa Garage, the POC, so the Police Separation Center, they pay us a loan payment every month as well. And then we look at our occupancy, which is basically like how long or how many people are coming and going at our meters in our lot. So these are all from our off street. But you can kind of see that from the last two years, you'll see in January and February when it's a little bit colder, it's a little bit lower, and then it gets progressively more folks are coming downtown and using our facilities, and then it kind of tapers back off again into the end of the year. Except for December, oftentimes we'll bump back up for the holidays. So really what you're seeing is that our revenue is relatively flat this year from last year, but it's indicating that, but there's actually a little bit more folks that are coming downtown. They may just not be staying quite as long.

I have a question from Councilman Hanjum online.

Okay. Thank you Madam President. On the previous slide, please. And just, can you say a little bit more about the budget? Can I go back to this? Go backwards, yeah.

I don't know how to go backwards. What am I doing wrong? This one, sorry.

There you go. Can you just talk a little bit about why the, it seems like a relatively significant decrease in the 2026 budget, and I don't fully understand why. Actually, I guess I was thinking, never mind, if you could just speak to the decrease in the budget.

Yeah, I think one of the decreases is that we were, well, first of all, we had meters that were old, and we were replacing them, and that was a problem, and we weren't getting Much money out of them honestly, so we decreased it and as we were replacing them. That was one reason I Get a little bit because

Good morning, Richard Mullady. I'm the public works director for the city. So this has been here about a year, actually. A little over a year. And so the main decrease between the 25 and 26 was we changed the parking hours. So it used to be 7 to 10 downtown. And you also had to pay for off-street parking on Sunday. And one of the things that we did a few years ago when I took over the parking reprise, we did a study and looked at you know different sized cities and what their rates and what their times and their hours were and out of that study if i felt like it more aligned with other similar sized cities to go to eight to eight and then have uh off street parking free on sunday and that that decreased the revenue a significant amount i mean i think it was close to seven or eight hundred thousand dollars a year so that's that's the main um you know contributor to that funding yeah

Yeah, that's helpful. Do we happen to know, and I don't know if the downtown people are around anymore, but do we happen to know if that, which I would assume people have appreciated the no fee on Sunday, and I certainly do, if that has impacted positively experiences for the businesses and how the businesses feel about that?

I mean, from what I know, I think that it has been positive. I haven't heard anything negative about it really at all. I think that everybody has been very happy about it. I don't know if it's relating back to whether or not there's more people coming down and parking in our garages to utilize the businesses. I will say too, because of the morning on Sundays where it's open from earlier in the morning until 1 p.m. and it's free then, it is very busy. We actually just recently changed our hours for enforcement because we wanted to make sure people were safe. The thing about enforcement is we're not trying to get out there and get you. That's not the plan. The plan is for people to be utilizing our system, and we're hopefully making it as easy as possible. But we don't want people parking in crosswalks, on sidewalks. We don't want people parking and backing into spaces when they will be then going into traffic. We don't want folks being unsafe or parking in an ADA parking space when they don't have a placard appropriately and so want to make sure that those things are are free so we have had people coming downtown or we've changed our our hours for our enforcement that they come in earlier in the week early in the day on sunday so that they can get to some of the folks that maybe aren't following all the rules as they should be and maybe creating an unsafe um you know area for for our people so yeah

Okay. Well, thank you. And Alyssa, I just want to thank you. And as long as I have the floor, I just want to say, I have really appreciated the, the improvements that I've seen and experienced personally in our parking enterprise. I personally am a big fan of park mobile. I find that to be an incredibly valuable tool and whether it's downtown or in old Colorado city or, you know, wherever we have have our parking enterprise, I, I just feel like there's definitely been improvements. Replacing those meters has been great. I'm curious to hear more about this new kiosk ask program that you have going on right now. But anyway, I will try not to ask any more questions. I haven't seen the rest of the slides, but I just wanted to thank you. I think you guys are doing a great job.

Yeah, thank you. We also too, like we wanted to make sure that we're being reflective on our budget, that it was hard to say what was gonna happen in 2026 and whether or not people were gonna be spending money or moving around or changing the way that they do things. And so we wanted to be as conservative as possible so that we're not spending more money than we have this year. So that's another part of this.

I can see.

And then we have a CIP program, so a capital improvement program. So we spent about $250,000 on Mountain Metro route sponsorships. We helped sponsor the fare buy for Route 3. We did that. We reserved some money for capital projects, which is the transit center and parking garage. That's TBD when that happens, if that happens. Hopefully it will. Parking meter replacement, we completed that in June of this year, so an extra $650,000. That was around a little over $2 million project to completely replace all of our meters. And then ongoing maintenance of our garage, that's just anything that kind of happens. It's kind of amazing the things that can happen in garages. do interesting things in the parking garages. So we try to have some extra money and make sure that we can take care of it and make sure that they're safe for the rest of the folks. We have a parking structural maintenance program, so that's different than just the things that are happening on a regular basis in the garage. That's really like waterproofing, making sure that waterproofing the garage so when it rains, you're not getting rain done in the garage, which is much better now in the cab garage if you guys have been there lately. You don't usually get wet when you're inside, which is really nice. Waterproofing, structural repairs, making sure this concrete is good, elevators are working, things like that. Bigger ticket items that we're working on. It's a five-year program. We're coming up to the end of the year. It's actually been six years, but finishing that this year, and then we'll be doing another evaluation and then going on forward so that we're making sure that all of our garages are being maintained as well as they can. Parking improvements, new signage, wayfinding, updates, new technology for wayfinding is something that we're looking at as well. Streetscape projects is a big one. We have about 1.5 million every year. This is an ongoing coordination. We work really closely with a downtown partnership with Pat. Pat and I chat a lot. And also with Old Colorado City. And then surface lots, just general improvements, striping, landscaping, making sure that if we need to mill and pave them, then we have the ability to do that. So that's about $10 million this year. So some of the bigger projects, the take-home revitalization, so Parking Enterprise actually spent about 6.6 out of that $9.8 million project that came from us, so that was really exciting. We added two new ADA spaces on street at Tijuana-Vermahoe near the court, the county court, which was around $80,000. Colorado Avenue, Nevada, and Weber, the south side of the street, we're doing that in conjunction with 2C. That's a couple hundred thousand dollar project. That's just making sure the streetscape is updated. It's old, needs to be replaced, and it's a good time to do it. We're working with Paddock, too, again, on the brick maintenance in downtown. So really, you know, there's some areas of town where bricks are sinking or things are missing, and so we really want to make sure it's safe and people can move around appropriately, so working with them. Some of the other projects that we've had, Castillo between Nevada and Tejon and around there near White Pie, if you guys are familiar. That was done, finished right before I got here, but that was another million-ish plus program to update the streetscapes there. We did in OCC at our Pikes Peak lot, we updated a wall retaining wall that was over a million dollars there that we did to make sure that it was safe. and can continue to be utilized. And we added some benches and trash cans and some sign replacement in the OCC area as well. Again, so five-year maintenance plan. We've also started some, truly trying to get out into the community. I actually ended up starting a Pikes Peak Parking Roundtable, which is all of our neighbors in the area. We get together quarterly to talk about what everyone is doing, so the Manitou, the different colleges, the county, and we talk with each other about what's going on and how things are going, any projects that could be impacting us. So that's been really great. So yeah, some other things too is we're really, really trying to work on our policy and procedures and updating the APWA, the accreditation that happened with that really helped kick that off. But we have a lot of things and I wanna make sure that our programs are as consistent across as we go and making sure that if I leave or somebody else leaves that we have ways to, or we get new people who come in that they know what's going on and how we manage our programs. The residential parking permit program update is something that we're working on as well. And then we just launched our Now You Know parking marketing campaign, which was very exciting. And so hopefully you've seen some of the branding. I brought you guys some brochures as well, and I'm happy to get more if you guys want them for your constituents or anything. But really it's just getting to know us, you know, There's a lot of social media that's out there. We had a lot of really great press recently, which was good. You'll see banners at our garages and our lots. Park here, dollar an hour. How you pay the meters, what that looks like, how you use the apps. Text to pay, which is a new option for folks. It's really easy. You don't have to download anything. You just text this number in the zone you're in, enter in some information, and away you go. So this is something that's been exciting for us and one of the fun things that we get to do in the parking world. It also helps us really explain, too, how do you use a kiosk? What does it look like? Why are we using kiosks? One of the main reasons is really just to avoid the amount of clutter on the street. So the less, single space meters just take up a lot of space. Where the kiosks, you put them in one spot, people can use all these different options to pay. They don't take up as much streetscape. Now you have a space for maybe a new tree or a bench or something like that, or maybe easier access for the folks who might need to wheel up to it and use it. So that is all I got.

Councilman Leinweber.

So you've updated the parking meters and I can't read the number from my car. You have to change the print so that I can see what the number is so I can type it into my phone.

We're going to be adding signs on the streets as well above overhead signs.

The GPS seems to be working better, but I'm kind of guessing. I think this is where I'm at. I'm looking at the meter, and it's the same color, and it's just hard to read from sitting in your car. And if the weather's bad, you kind of want to do it in your car. Yeah. so that's my one that's one of my comments the other one is earlier this year i used a kiosk at the olympic center and um i got a printout everything's great and then a month later i got a fine in the mail for not part for um not paying unfortunately that is not our kiosk

privately managed and this is not the first time not for that one but i've had i just had a really lovely conversation with a woman recently that's had a similar experience it's a private lot it's open to the public but we don't manage it we actually don't really have much control over what happens to it so um and that's what i was told and i was frustrated it is frustrating because it's like wait i and you know trying to find who saves a parking kiosk receipt i mean

No, it didn't happen. So anyway, if you park at a kiosk, make sure you save the receipt.

If you park on street though, you're not gonna get a paper receipt with a kiosk. So that is a difference.

But I can only see that on my phone. You can, yeah. So, okay, thank you.

I think Chief of Staff wants to weigh in on that.

Just real quick, one of the first things I did when I stepped into this role was to move the parking enterprise under public works. And so you heard through Alyssa's presentation some threads into public works. I wanna thank Rich for making sure that that is incorporated well into public works. And I also wanted to thank Alyssa. She's definitely elevated the parking enterprise up several notches in just a little over a year that she's been here. So I just wanted to commend both of them.

Thank you. Councilman Donaldson.

Yep, thanks, Madam President. Good morning, Alyssa. Any plans or considerations to change the hours or the pricing in the rest of this year or next year?

We don't have any plan on changing the pricing this year. I can't say about next year yet. I know that we'll have to go through the budget process when it comes to the city council for sure. But what we're trying to do, and one of the main reasons too that we wanted to have new meters on the street, so something in the ways that we collect information is so that we know when people are parking. where they're parking and there's certain areas of town that i actually think that we're likely spending more money on the infrastructure there than we are making on the payments from folks parking so that to me that says maybe we need to you know bring that in get rid of the paid parking possibly change it to something different so it's maybe a four hour parking limit or something else that isn't a paid parking there's different ways to manage parking besides free or paid, there are other options. And so that is what we're looking at right now. So we're collecting information, we're collecting data. I wanna give it a little bit of time and see what it looks like, and then we'll make some better decisions about do we change time? It doesn't make sense. Maybe there are some areas in downtown that we should increase, like say that it's 10 to 10 instead of eight to eight or something like that. It doesn't have to be a one size fit all also.

And just anecdotally, I've had people tell me how much they appreciate that after 8 p.m., they don't have to worry about what's going on at the meter. I think it had to do maybe with the concerts at the Pikes Peak Center. They're just good for the rest of the night. Is the occupancy in the parking garages increasing, decreasing, just staying flat over the last five years, ten years?

I don't know, over the last five, 10 years, we only, so basically we've got, about five years ago, six years ago now, I think, is when they put in the SCIDATA system, which is like the gate arm system, which gives us more information. So we could probably go back a little bit to find out more about that. But I would say in the last few years, it has stayed relatively flat. There are certain people who will be doing monthly parking, and then they decide, no, I don't want to do monthly parking because I'm only down here a couple days a week. I'll just do daily parking. That kind of thing has changed. But really, it... If there's a big event, then we get more parkers in the garages on the weekends, but oftentimes the weekends are actually less full than the weekdays.

How much is it for a monthly pass downtown?

$95, I think. For the whole month? Yeah. Good deal.

And then this last one, you didn't have labor costs in your slides, or did you?

labor costs for just in general?

Yeah, for the parking enterprise?

I did not, no.

Okay, so really like the budget was really just a slide of revenue and a slide of like CIP, but not,

If we have that, we absolutely can get that.

Because one thing, I mean, that I kind of worry about is that the parking enterprise gets used as a cash cow for the, hey, let's make the streets pretty. But are we putting money aside to replace these parking garages? Is that a concern of yours? And maybe this is an awkward question for you to have to answer. but that the parking enterprise, because it generates cash, can be used, hey, let's fund the Tejon makeover out of parking enterprise. And if you'd rather have this guy over here address it.

Can I answer that one?

Whoever, yeah.

Yeah, that's a great question. So what's great about the enterprise, I mean, it's why I love the enterprise structure in general, is that the revenues from an enterprise can only be spent on the function of that enterprise and the operation of that enterprise and its stated mission. And so, the one area where the parking enterprise puts a significant amount of money in that I think you're kind of thinking about is the streetscapes. And that's been a wonderful relationship that we've worked on, but we actually have an agreement in place with the downtown partnership on how we're going to communicate with them, what projects we're gonna do, how we're gonna pick those projects with them, and then the amount of money that we're gonna spend. And we have the, well, alyssa and public works has the final say on those funding mounts so um i'll give you a good example when we change or when i sorry elissa wasn't there but when i changed the parking times and it decreased the revenue by a significant amount that came nothing else changed in parking but the amount that we're funding towards street escapes And so it was clear that we're gonna change these times. It's gonna decrease the revenue. The line item is gonna decrease is the streetscape. So I guess that's a long-winded way of saying that we have the final say in where that money goes and we do it with the health of the parking enterprise in mind before we make those investments.

But just to be clear, Richard, so you decided on the hours, not the parking enterprise director?

Well, at the time I was the parking enterprise director, I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah, sorry.

And the decrease in revenue was just taken out of what had been allocated for streetscapes?

Yep, it was taken out of kind of the future bucket. Right now it's one and a half million. I think at the time it was a little bit over two that was budgeted the previous year. And so the great advantage of an enterprise is The disadvantage is it's a business, so you don't create revenue, you have to decrease.

Did I hear right that the enterprise paid 6.6 out of the 9.8 million for Tejon?

It did, but I'll tell you that was a plan that was in place for many years, and so the parking enterprise had been collecting money in anticipation of that project for many years. I think about four, probably.

And as far as the parking garages, what's the life expectancy on our parking garages, the bus terminal being maybe the first one that's And what is the, and I don't expect a detailed plan, but what is the thought on that? How are we gonna fund that?

Yeah, so there was some pretty good planning for some years there in the parking enterprise. And so over a number of years, the parking enterprise had been putting money away. It was probably around $2 million a year. They were putting a million this year into a fund, basically carried revenue. If you had a business perspective, carried revenue. with the anticipation of either building a new garage somewhere down in the south part of downtown, because they felt like at the time it would eventually need that, or a new garage as part of a new downtown transit center, if that happened, or possibly the replacement of the Kiowa garage. When we looked at the parking analysis, and I think Alyssa, you could chime in on this, but when we looked at the analysis we had done, there was an enormous amount of available parking downtown. So building a new garage, doesn't make a lot of sense right now. There's a lot of spots, and so we didn't need that. So right now, probably our biggest goal, so the parking enterprise has a significant amount of money. It's probably around 14 million right now, I think, somewhere around there in carryover, and we're holding that. in anticipation of either replacing the Kiowa garage at some point or building a downtown transit center as part of a coordination with the transit department or if there are opportunities in the future and there are areas that grow and there's a private public partnership that is proposed and it makes revenue and it makes sense for the parking enterprise and that developer and the city in general than possibly that. So we kind of just have our options open for that. The Kiowa garage is certainly the oldest garage. I was just talking to someone the other day about that garage because we've had a hard time fixing one of the elevators and we've had some other challenges. It's actually in a little bit better shape than I thought. I would say the useful life of a building that when they built that, I would suspect the engineer probably said something like 50 years. It's about... at that time.

What year was the bill, or how old is it?

I don't remember exactly, but it is around then.

It's around, yeah, it's around 40, 50 years old. So, but it is in good shape, and that's one of the reasons that that program, we started that program, was to put money into the capital, put capital money into the maintenance of the garages, I would say for many years, and I don't wanna dwell on the past, for many years there was not investment put into maintenance of garages. so we've really caught that up we've it's a lot like 2c to be honest with you there was a lot not done and we slowed that train and we've kind of just now i think got to the point where we're making progress in making those garages better and that's my opinion so what's the what's a ballpark for a new garage like if you were to replace that kiowa I would say about $40 million is a decent estimate for that.

And how much are we putting into that fund this year?

This year we're putting a million and a half into the maintenance. That was part of a $10 million plan. And so I think it's good. The Kiowa garage has some life. I think it has some life.

Yeah, that's good and I'm not, you know, I don't believe in replacing things that are functional. It's not the prettiest garage. Okay, I think that's it for me, thank you.

Councilman Gold. Thank you, Madam President. The Kiowa and Cab have the EV chargers there. I was just curious, do those companies like lease or rent space from us for those charging stations?

So the cab garage has a fast charger, which is through CSU, through utilities, that is theirs. And then the others, the ones in the other, like the level two or the slower chargers, we actually installed, I think, like four or five years ago. Um, and so those are ours that we maintain.

Okay. Thank you. And then I just also just wanted to say thank you. I think, um, a lot of time, the parking enforcement, especially, um, they get painted as bad guys sometimes. Um, but every time I've interacted with, um, with anyone, they've been really delightful. Um, even, you know, noting that like, if it's a few minutes past, they're not going to like run to your car to try and to try and give you a ticket. They've been really delightful. So I just want to say thank you to the team.

Thank you.

Thank you. Councilman Hanjum.

Thank you, Madam President. Alyssa, in terms of going back to the setting aside funds for capital improvements and or actually building in the future and thinking particularly about the transit center, was it was it 6 million that we have right now in reserves for the transit center? Okay. Yes. And I don't know exactly where that project is at, but I do know there's a lot of moving parts right now, certainly supportive of a modern transit center at some point here in the hopefully not too far future. But I guess the question I have broadly is, What's an appropriate percentage for a parking enterprise to contribute to that kind of construction of a new transit center for downtown?

Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah. Yeah.

This is Richard Milady again from Public Works Director. Thank you. Thank you, Nancy. So I think for the parking enterprise to enter into a cooperative situation with either a private developer or the transit, or transit, Mount Metro Transit, the garage itself and the parking has to be financially sound for the parking enterprise. So it has to make money. you know, it just, it would be, it has a producer responsibility to make sure its investment is sound. And so that to answer your question, we would make, and I can listen, I would talk about that, but we would make a investment in something that only if it broke even for the parking enterprise. And so to do that, it would depend on the size of the building and the size of the garage and the amount of parking necessary, but, I think what we've really looked at over the last couple years is if there was a cooperative agreement to build something like that, specifically a transit center, it's probably somewhere around $20 million for parking. Because if you look at those, and we've looked at different options and kind of schematics, if you look at the building sizes that would be necessary and the facilities itself and the amount of parking needed, that's about in the range. I could, you know, that could vary, but I would say it's about $20 million. That would be my...

Okay. Okay. Well, I certainly support that setting the funds aside. And it's, I guess the question is, how much do you do? And like, we want to have enough when we're ready. And I'll leave that to you all.

But yeah, I appreciate the answer.

Councilman Donelson.

Yeah, thank you, Madam President. Sorry to double back, but I was just thinking about something that Richard said earlier. We have plenty of parking downtown. There's like much excess parking. Do we have data on that? Do we know how full the Kiowa parking garage is on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, on monthly, so that we can say, yeah, it's always half empty? Or are we just, is that sort of a gut feeling? And what is the right way to do that? Should we have that data if we don't?

Yeah, and we do have the data. What we don't have really great right now is how to analyze the data. So we have it. And so we're working on that right now to figure out whether or not what we think is happening is actually truly happening. Because the other thing we have is we have monthly parkers. We have big contracts with different companies downtown. We know how many people that they, either they have some fleet cars that are there all the time or they have, folks that are coming and going to work every day, how much do we oversell a garage? Because not everyone's here every single day. So do you oversell it by 10%? Do you oversell it by 15? Do you oversell it by five? Because it depends on the needs in the different days of the week. The Kiowa garage particularly is really busy on the weekends overnight, Friday, Saturday, Sunday nights, because it's close to the bars, people understand it. and you'll we do a really good job cleaning on monday mornings also so we try really hard to get make sure it's clean but um so that's more utilized then but it's not uh necessarily utilized during the daytime but the you know the cab garage is pretty empty on the weekends unless there's a really a big vent at um the park or or something else that's happening downtown so we look at how that works um so we are working on getting that information and making sure that we can analyze it and when we talk about parking in general we can look at what we have what i would love to do too is really look at a bigger understanding of what is happening in the entirety of downtown because there's not just our parking that's open to the public there's also lot of different lots and garages that are open to the public but are privately owned and so what do those look like how are those being managed and are they being used and then we also have our on-street spark parking spaces which um we have a lot more than most cities which is really like it's a benefit for us we have really wide streets angled parking on all of them some of them we have three rows of angle parking that's like unheard of most places um and so we look at that too and whether or not that's open so really i mean honestly we're like in the best case scenario where we have access we have management of a pretty large portion of off-street parking plus all of the on-street so you can kind of see what's happening in the different areas. And so that is like absolutely my plan to make sure that we understand it. We're pulling that data, getting that data and analyzing it so we can make better decisions as we move forward.

You know, my final thoughts are that the simple signs, like you showed some of your advertising, like four different ones, simple is better because people come down and they're not familiar, they're kind of confused, and you need something like dollar an hour, you know, here, and a way to get in. And then it needs to be simple on the inside, too. because I'm still told by citizens that, yeah, I don't go downtown because there's no parking. I can't find parking. And I think a lot of them don't really know about the garages. They're looking on the street and only looking on the street. So I don't know if there's a way to have signs that help with that downtown or a media thing where the news reports it, although how many people watch the news anymore, I don't know.

that's our plan and really to like trying to get to the businesses so that we get information to all the different businesses so they can help inform their customers too, which again, chicken egg, but.

What is some rough information? Like, hey, on a weekday business day, our garages are 50% full or is it 80% full? And that's counting the sold, the monthly passes, plus then we usually get an additional, you know, 25% fill of daily users.

Yeah, our garages are generally during the day, like during a normal, like, you know, Mondays and Fridays are always a little bit less full just because people often are working from home on those days. But like Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, the Kiowa garage and the cab garage are probably around 80% full. Okay. Yeah. I've never seen it 100% full. I'm not sure if it's ever been 100% full. Yeah.

What's the goal or is there a goal for cities our size in their parking downtown? Do they have a goal?

It really depends on the different, what the reason for the garage is. So if the primary, I mean, I would say the cab garage, one of the primary reasons is so that the city employees have places to park and other people who work nearby have a place to park. That's like the primary goal. Like our cascade garage that's up here, right on Bijou, that gets really busy, full, 100% full on Sunday mornings now because there's a park, there's an event in the park and people know about it, it's free, it's full.

Yeah.

So full that people have to like drive around and we're even, we're creating signs that say open and close so people like don't waste their time balling in. So that kind of thing. But during the week, not as full, there's not as many businesses that they are using, that are there that are using it. So that's really dependent, highly dependent on the businesses that are nearby. Yeah, it really depends. I can't say that I don't think that there's any one percentage that people want. People want things to be as full as possible. That's what they want. But you also don't want it to be so full that it takes forever to get out, which is another thing that causes problems.

Or you get there and you can't find a place. Or you can't find a place. That's very frustrating. But I think this is a very useful presentation for council, just to have a sense of what's going on with parking. So I would encourage this, at least annually, like come and give us the data, the numbers, the budget, What is the situation on the fund for replacing the garage? Is it still increasing by how much? Any research you've done on changing direction or trends, all that? It's really an important part of the city. We kind of take it for granted or forget about it. If we want people to come downtown, they're kind of their first, except for the vagrants they meet on the street as they're driving downtown, this is it. Trying to find a place to park is the next, so thank you.

Councilman Casey.

Thank you, Madam President. Just a quick question on, so in the cab parking lot, the Colorado Springs Utilities and City Spots there, are they paying into the enterprise or are you subsidizing? Okay, thank you.

That looks like that's the end of the questions. Thank you so much. This is very good information. It does close some loops for me. So I really appreciate it. We'll have you back in a year. Thanks.

Do you guys want some brochures? I have some if you guys want.

Sure.

Just pass them around here. Marketing.

Marketing. Next up, we have 7B. Will the clerk please read item 7B into the record?

Agenda plan or review.

Does anybody have any questions or changes to the upcoming agenda planner?

Thank you.

Seeing none for the record, there are no questions or changes to the up and coming agenda planner. Moving on to an item 9A, will the clerk please read item 9A and 9B into the record?

In Ordinance Submitting Part 5, Claims Management, Article 5, Finance Management Procedures, Chapter 1, Administration, Personnel, Finance, the Code of the City, Colorado Springs, 2001, as amended, pertaining to Claims Management 9b, Ordinance Submitting Part 6, Workers' Compensation, Article 5, Finance Management Procedures, Chapter 1, Administration, Personnel, Finance, the Code of the City, Colorado Springs, 2001, as amended, pertaining to Workers' Compensation Claims Management.

Good morning, John and Tristan.

Good morning, Council President Crowe-Iverson, Pro Temp Risley, and members of the City Council. John Hunter, Manager of Financial Planning and Risk at Colorado Springs Utilities. And the purpose of my being here today is to present some proposed city code changes that really pertain to the workers comp and claims reserve funds for both the city and utilities. To summarize what these two changes are really asking for are to do a more formal separation of the two funds. They currently are held separate. This would just kind of formalize how the separation would be. And secondly, we're seeking that the management of these funds for the utilities are transferred from the city CFO, who currently manages them, to the utility CFO, which is be more consistent with how most other items between the city and the utilities are managed. We are doing this here at this work session. And I think our next steps would be based on what Council Member Donaldson said earlier, we would either bring this to City Council for the first vote at the 11th meeting or at the 11th of August meeting or at the 25th of August meeting. And then whatever meeting that one was presented at, we would bring it back for a second vote at the meeting right after that. um if you have any questions i would like to mention i do have some support here today uh tristan gerhart uh cfo of utilities is here tim schreiderer the city attorney who drafted the red lines and then we have ryan talmadge from city risk also here if you have any questions for any of us councilman donaldson

Yeah, I don't have any questions for John. I support this. My preference is that we don't go back to back on this when there's not a, you know, a pressing need to do so, that we just follow our normal sequence. There's concern in the community with, is, city government in general, utilities that we sneak things through or we do things fast on purpose, I don't see any reason to provide a reason to have that kind of thought unless we really need to and then we better damn well explain it. Otherwise, I say just put it on the normal sequence.

Yeah, and I believe we would support that. The reason this happened to fall back to back was we were gonna originally present this at the working session at the end of July and that got pushed and we just didn't push back the readings.

If there are no, oh, Councilman Rainey.

Thank you, Madam President. Actually, I just was going to say, and I think you were going on the path of saying what I was getting ready to say, but I also support my colleague, Council Member Donaldson's comments there. Let's just follow the process on this one.

So it looks like it'll be on August 25th?

Yes.

Okay.

Okay, so we will be back on the 25th to present this. Before I leave, I just wanted to make sure, is there any other materials that you would be interested in seeing before we take this to a vote?

So I will need a motion to postpone in a second.

So moved.

So tomorrow during your preference, you can wait until it comes up in utilities or you can do it under postponements, which is item three tomorrow. You can postpone, they need individual votes, each item to the 25th, but it procedurally has to happen tomorrow.

Yeah, that's what I was asking. We can't vote today, but we will put on the item for tomorrow to postpone it.

I withdraw my soul moved. I'll hold it till tomorrow.

Yeah, I was clarifying that's what we needed for tomorrow because Sarah and I were talking in code. Sorry about that. For clarification, we will do it tomorrow. No more code, Sarah. Okay, we'll take care of that item tomorrow. Okay, thank you very much. Moving on to council reports and open discussion. If there are any council members with reports. Councilman Rainey.

Thank you, Madam President. Just a couple of items just to emphasize and highlight. The first couple is last week had the opportunity to conduct a couple of interviews and a few of those are gonna be coming to council's direction. We did interviews for the new municipal court administrator position. Council member Ken Casey and I participated in those interviews, so that will be coming our direction once the mayor conducts his parts of the interviews and makes a recommendation. Also conducted some interviews for some open PPACG CAC positions. And I just wanna say how excited I was to see that many people actually apply. We had well over 13 applicants. So I had the honor of interviewing those individuals and some announcements will be coming out shortly on that. And I think today at lunch, council will be hearing about the public safety working group initiative. and getting more details on that. And once we get past certain parts, I know some members of the public are quite interested to see some of the efforts that we're putting forward. So looking forward for that to come out. Also had the opportunity, Pretty exciting opportunity to represent the city of Colorado Springs, along with the mayor and meeting the CU coach during their visit and training camp here in Colorado Springs, along with the chancellor of CU. So what a great opportunity for them to see some of the best parts of Colorado Springs and engage in some meaningful, not just athletic opportunities, but they also had some opportunities to engage with city leaders and learn more about Colorado Springs and the leadership here in the city. I want to take the opportunity once again in an effort to continue to fuse and grow closer relationships with our military community. We had two new changes of commands that are very important to our region. We have a new superintendent of the Air Force Academy. That change of command took place last week. So congrats to Lieutenant General Moga and welcome to Colorado Springs and leading our fine institute there. And also at Peterson Space Force Base, we now have a new Space Base Delta One commander who has replaced Colonel Clock, who is Colonel Cooper. So congrats to Colonel Cooper. Cooper had the opportunity in a past life of serving with him. So I know the folks out there at Peterson, you definitely have a good one and glad to see him leading the efforts out there. And last but not least, I just wanna highlight a new endeavor and I'm very honored and thrilled to be the special guest representative for the Pikes Peak Athletic Foundation. that's going to be putting on an event on 28 august at widener field that is going to be a regional event extending beyond the borders of colorado into new mexico arizona and some other areas more details to come about that but just want to thank that foundation for having me as their special guests for that event i think it's going to be a great shining light for the city of colorado springs And once again, just bringing a lot more unity to that community. So that's all I have. Thank you very much.

Councilman Casey.

Thank you, Madam President. Last Friday night, I joined Deputy Chief Treanor and a task force led by the Colorado Springs Police Department that was focused on combating illegal street racing and parking lot takeovers of private property. Colorado State Patrol also participated with a fixed wing aircraft crew and several officers. It was very helpful to see the challenges of enforcing trespass and other laws firsthand. It was informative to see the effective use of the grappler device to stop fleeing cars and felony eluding suspects without having to use the riskier pit maneuver. Likewise, it was instructed to see the integration of CSP drones and operations to enhance situational awareness for individual officers who could watch the drone footage from their cell phones. On 13 of August, the Joint Appointment Committee for the Pikes Peak Library District will be meeting to discuss upcoming appointment for a vacancy. And on 18 August, I'll be participating in the City County Drainage Board interviews. Thank you.

Councilman Hingem.

Thank you very much, Madam President. First, I want to, well, I didn't ask if it's okay, but I think it's all right to congratulate Council Member Lineweber on becoming a grandfather. Maybe he's going to say something. I hope it's okay that I said that, Dave. You'll let me know if it wasn't. And Councilmember Casey, actually learning about the specific focus you got with CSPD is very intriguing. I'd like to hear more about that from you and maybe ask for that particular experience myself. So thanks for sharing that. And I'll be joining you with a joint appointment committee virtually on Thursday. I want to just share I've had a successful hip replacement and am very grateful for what medical science can do. So I'm very happy for that and the opportunity to be able to participate virtually today.

Thank you for that.

I also want to say that on our sesquicentennial of Colorado, participated in a couple of cool experiences on Friday night at the Pioneer Museum, the Freedom to Thrive, the American Experiment exhibit was opened and it was really powerful and encourage people to go see that. It's our cities, one of the many things our city's done to acknowledge our contributions in history. And not only does it have historical figures, but does something I think that's really very profound and cool, which is highlight people who are alive in our community today and have made a difference in the American dream in Colorado Springs and really appreciated the work that the Pioneer Museum did on that exhibit. And then on Saturday, I did go to the top of Pikes Peak. And that was, it's always a great, great experience to do that. But I did participate in that world record dunking of donut experience, which was pretty wild. Yeah. Was next to Shekinah, who works in the mayor's office as an assistant with her four grandkids and a bunch of other folks. And it was pretty amazing, actually, quite an experience. So it's the second Guinness World Record record. that I have participated in. And you all can ask me later about the first. And then the last thing I want to say is actually there was a column in the Gazette Telegraph yesterday. If my fellow city council members haven't already gotten email about this, you probably will. It was a column by Bob Levy that is an opinion column. It's often presented as news. And it was highly inaccurate. I would say 80% of the information in that column was completely inaccurate. And we are working on addressing that with the Gazette. But I just want to say for the record that the opening and continuing of Constitution Avenue is not back on the table and the City Council is not voting on anything related to that in September. as the column suggests. So I just wanted that on the record for anybody listening. And that's all I have. Thanks very much.

Councilman Lineweber, who's in a lot of trouble.

Yeah, I just have a couple of things. One is I too got to participate with the American Mountains 150th anniversary, but I was there for sunrise. So me and Becky got up at 4.30 a.m., actually at 4 a.m. and was at the gate at 4.30 and drove up and we got to watch sunrise come up for that day. So that was pretty exciting. But we didn't stick around for donuts. It was kind of a long wait for a donut. But we came down because we had several other events that we wanted to participate in that we did kind of throughout the day. The other thing that we did last Thursday, I was able to participate in a tour with the Colorado Springs wildfire mitigation effort. And it was quite extraordinary. The things that are being done strategically to combat the next fire that comes is really very, very impressive. They've really put together quite an elaborate plan in terms of where they're doing fire mitigation and what types. The particular area that we were up on was Old Stage Road. And we got to drive in on some areas and kind of see kind of the work they're doing. And they're actually working up there right now, clearing a bunch of ways. But the different techniques they use, depending on the slope of the terrain and and other things, and that's kind of the thing. So if you see stuff, say you're up on Stage Road, if it's flat, they can actually grind it all up because they can go in there with a special device that they have. But if there's any kind of hillside, then they can only use other kinds of devices, and they end up having to just stack that wood. And then if it gets really... they can't even do that, so they just kind of let it fall, and they try to get it to fall in a way that it's perpendicular to the slope, so they can kind of slow down erosion and that sort of thing, but it's kind of like a three-tier kind of effort, because we have a lot of steep terrain in Colorado. But anyway, it was a very impressive tour, and I just am here to say that it's not... What I want to say, it's not 100% for sure, but I think it is an effort to slow down a fire that could be coming our way. And we've certainly seen those. I'm still a little bit taken back by Spokane and just how devastating that is and certainly want to be thinking about the citizens there and stuff like that. to have a community where you get a heat so great that it goes from one house to the next to the next to the next is pretty tough. And we need to look at good practices that kind of prevent that and work that way. The last thing, we are in the process of doing interviews for our next CEO for the Visit COS. We have it down to seven candidates, and we are interviewing one right now, and we've interviewed another. We're going to be interviewing today and then also on Wednesday, and we'll get those seven down to, I believe, two or three. and then we'll be bringing them in-house. So these are all video interviews. So the process is taking place. I can tell you that from what I've seen already, we're gonna be in good shape. We got some excellent candidates. So I'm really, really excited. If anything, it's gonna be hard to pick because we've got some really good people. So anyway, really good, exciting news for our tourism industry.

Councilman Gold. Thank you, Madam President. I just wanted to let everyone know that I will be having a town hall on August 20th from 530 to 8 at Deerfield Hills. That's it. Thank you.

And that is the end of Council Member Reports and Discussions, and we are now adjourned. We're starting our meeting immediately downstairs as soon as you can get there. Lunch is already ready to go, or brunch, or whatever you wanna call it, but we do have that starting immediately, not at 12 o'clock.

Thank you.