Governance & Charter Review Committee - Regular Meeting

Welcome back to this monthly meeting of the Governance and Intergovernmental Relations Committee of Denver City Council. Thanks for joining us for the discussion. The Governance and Intergovernmental Relations Committee starts now.

Alright. Good morning, everyone. Apologies for starting a little late. It is Tuesday, January 20. This is the governance committee of Denver City Council. I'm Amanda Sawyer with the honor of representing the residents of District 5 and to request. Before we get started today, just want to let everyone know that we logged on the auction item for Motorola contact in the first. Not discussing that today. And so we'll just go ahead straight into our briefing. But before we get started, let's do let's start with you, Councilmember Parity.

Parity, one of your council members at large.

Darryl Watson, serving the fine District 9. Good morning. Kevin Flynn, Southwest Denver's District 2.

Jamie Torres, West Denver District Three.

Right, Councilmember Gonzalez Gutierrez is walking in. I'll welcome her to the meeting. Thanks for joining us. And do we have anyone online? Great, let's go online to welcome Councilmember Gilmore.

Good morning. Stacy Gilmore, District eleven.

Great. Thanks so much for joining us. So we have a briefing today from OHR, from our Office of Human Resources. If want introduce yourselves and

take it away. Sure. I'm Heather Britton. I'm the director of benefits and wellness and leave for the Office of Human Resources.

I'm Marilyn Carroll, and I'm the manager of leave and accommodations.

And then I can take it away? Take it Awesome. Okay. So, OHR was asked to make a presentation about some changes we made to I've I'm assuming it's rule 10, that we presented to the Career Service Board in August 2025. So all I'll do today is just provide you all with an overview of the changes that we made to rule 10.

As a reminder, rule 10 is paid leave under Career Service Rule. A lot of these changes that we made were a result of changes to state law, so we just, may matched state law for rule 10. So the first change we made was to a domestic partner under ten eleven b. We removed the requirement that a domestic partner should have a shared living expense, and the reason we removed this is because, it matches the Colorado Healthy Families and Workplaces Act. Also, under relationship definitions, we changed immediate family.

Previously, our rule said that we covered child in law, parent in law, and sibling in law. What we discovered is that this was duplicative of already existing language that also said that immediate family includes the child, parent, or sibling of the partner or spouse. So we just removed those from definition. We also, under immediate family, added siblings' child because we wanted to make sure that under immediate family, we considered nieces and nephews. And then we did add under immediate family miscarriage.

And the reason that we added miscarriage is because it previously said stillbirth birth. The reason this was important is because our bereavement leave allows you to take time off if there is an immediate family that passes away. And previously, immediate family didn't include all of these. So it didn't include siblings, child, or also miscarriage. So now it's clear, in current service rule, if you have a miscarriage or if your sibling's child dies, you can use bereavement leave for that. And I should say, if you have questions, you can stop me.

Questions at the end.

Okay. Okay. Under PTO, we clarified that if an employee would like to use PTO, they can do so, to care for a family member whose school or place of care has been closed due to inclement weather, loss of power, loss of heating, loss of weather, or other unexpected occurrence. This exactly matches Colorado Healthy Families and Workplaces Act, so we added it to match that. We also added eight employees can now use PTO if they need to evacuate their place of residence due to inclement weather, loss of power, loss of heating, loss of water.

Again, it exactly matches CHFWA. So now employees under career service rules can use their PTO for these reasons. Technically, they always could because CHFWA, Colorado Healthy Families and Workplaces Act, ruled over career service rules. Under sick leave, and remember, employees no longer can be hired into a sicker vacation plan. Most employees are hired into PTO, so there's a few of us remaining that still earn sick in vacation.

So this doesn't apply to every employee. But we removed some language because it was duplicative with another rule. So we just cleaned up that rule. And then we also replaced a certain replaced ten thirty four f with if an employee needs to grieve to attend a funeral service or memorial, so on and so forth, they can use their sick time. And so that wasn't there before.

There's a lot of bat behind the scenes. A PTO employee, every employee is hired into PTO, gets a bereavement bank, so it's separate. Those of us who earn sick in vacation do not get a bereavement bank. We have to use our sick time if there's a bereavement leave, but it is a much more generous leave bank. So that's why we changed that.

Again, we added more language under sick leave. We added g and h, and this exactly matches the PTO changes just to match the Colorado Healthy Families and Workplaces Act. So now if there's inclement weather or schools close, loss of heating, employees can also use their sick time for that. Donating leave, we will talk a lot about Care Bank later, but we added under depleted leave that an employee needs to deplete all of their leave before receiving donated leave, even care hours or care bank. And then we just made a small change about who donated leave requests should be requested to, and that should be the Department of Finance.

Thanks to you all. We also changed rule 10 to add indigenous people's day so that curse service employees, under curse service rule, it matched, ordinance, and and curse service employees can also have indigenous people's day as a day off paid day off. We also changed comp time. So comp time used to be earned in the year and then paid out the previous year in April. Now it's earned during the year and paid out in the previous year during January.

It's just paid out a little bit earlier. And that also this language also changes that. We made a few changes to paid military leave. This is just to match USERRA. So our paid military leave changes, again, were already in federal law.

This is just us changing them. There were quite a few changes to care hours. So what I'd like to do is just give you an overview of what care hours is, and then I will walk through the changes that we made to care hours. So as you will all recall, the city opted out of the state's paid family leave, also called family, and in its place, we added a benefit called care hours. Care hours is really a form of pay.

It's not a leave type. The what it does is grant employees with three hundred and twenty hours or eight weeks annually of paid family leave. And generally, if an employee would like to use care hours, they need to qualify for FMLA, the state the Federal Family Medical Leave Act. When we first set up care hours, we did allow employees to also get care hours if they passed probation. The problem is is that probations vary at the city from zero to six to nine to twelve months.

So there was based on jobs, employees have different types of probationary statuses. And one quick change is we did try to make this more consistent. We did change the name of Care Bank to Care Hours. So that was one change. So it's a paid family leave.

Generally, you have to qualify for FMLA. Previously, employees could get it at end of probation. But our largest changes that we made is that we clarified that hours are only available annually, so we removed the probationary language. Now they have to get it at one year with qualifying for FMLA. So they have to qualify for the federal FMLA in order to use care hours.

So that again meant removing that probation eligibility. We also aligned some dependent relationships. I wouldn't say we changed anything, but, our language was duplicative. So we we said that in order to use care hours, you have to either qualify for federal FMLA, the definition of dependence under there, or state FCA, Family Cares Act. And then we also clarified that use of care hours does not count toward overtime.

So those are the summary of our changes. I can walk through them, but with those summary of changes in mind, I'm just going to be I'm not going to read each slide. Again, our summary, we changed the name, we removed probation eligibility, and we aligned dependent relationships. So the first change that we made is to ten ninety, and with this change, we clarified that hours are available on the anniversary date, not annually, and that we clarified hours are available for use for approved legally required leaves after at least one year of service. So that was the first change.

This was just a administrative change. It previously said employees occupying on call positions weren't eligible for CareBank. We just to match the way we referenced on call employees in the rest of the rules, we added some language that it also includes temporary seasonal contract positions or positions in which the incumbent is paid according to the community rate scale. So just some administrative changes there. Again, one of the other changes that we made is we removed that probationary period where employees qualify for care hours.

So this change to ten ninety B does that. Now employee must work twelve months of service in order to qualify for care hours. Again, ten ninety C, I should say let me go back. Ten ninety c individually listed each type of dependent you could take care hours for. What we realized is that language is already in 12 rule 12.

So we removed each of these types of dependents and then replaced it with rule 12. So in an essentially, an employee has to qualify for FMLA or state FCA in order to use care hours. What's important to state here is what was previously in rule 10 individually listing those dependents overlaps with rule 12. So we did not remove any dependent eligibility. You can still take care hours for the same dependents.

We just cleaned up the rule. And then amount of care hours available. There was a rule previously that was interpreted to state that if an employee used care hours, they could no longer qualify. They could note their hours in that week could not be more than 40. So what was happening is we had employees, especially at nine one one, who were using care hours.

Maybe they used 12. But they had mandatory overtime. And if they used twelve hours of care hour, then the employee could only work twenty eight more hours in that week, and then they were no longer eligible for over time. So we tried to clarify that this rule to say, yes, if you use care hours in a week, you can work as many hours as you'd like. But previously, it said you could only work forty hours if you used care hours.

So we clarified it so they could work more hours in that week. So that was the last change that we made. I'd like to give you guys a quick overview of some stats. We did remove the ability for employees to use this benefit before a year of service, and so I know that question's gonna come up. I have data here, and I'll walk you through it for '22, 'twenty three, 'twenty four, and 'twenty five.

The reason I list 2022 data is because that was the year before care hours were implemented. 'twenty three was the year care hours were implemented. You will notice that in '23, we had 128 employees who used care hours who had less than one year of service. In 2024, we had 98. And as of the day we looked at this data, for the Career Service Board, we had 46 in 2025.

Now that is one benefit that employees will no longer be able to use. So if they had one less than one year of service, they will not have access to care hours until after a year of service. I do wanna highlight, though, the total leave cases so you guys can see how leave cases have increased. So you will notice that total leave cases in 2022 were at at about 2,800. In '23, the first year we had care hours, they went up to 32.

Now this year, we finished 2025 with 3,600 leave cases. So they have been trending up. I wanted to give you an idea of how many employees that impacted. So some employees do have more than one leave case. So for example, we had three 3,600 leave cases in 2025.

There were 37, almost 3,300 employees who took had a leave. So that impact impacted. Some employees had two, maybe more. The reasons they're taking self care or leave are predominantly for self care, so care for themselves. But they also second was care for family and then care for child. So that was it that I had. I'll open it up.

Great. Thank you. Before we get started with questions, I want to welcome Council President Sandovala and Council Pro Tem Romero Campbell to the meeting. And I also wanna acknowledge Kathy Nesbitt's amazing Broncos jacket. Can we just real quick have a conversation about this? There we go. Thank you, Kathy.

It's a little understated.

We have a couple council members in the queue. Council member Flynn, did you want to get in? Yes. Okay. Great. We have council member Parody first and followed by council member Torres and then Flynn.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate this. You briefed me on it once, and it was a lot to understand. So I appreciate you coming into committee today as well. The questions that I have are really around the change to the definition of how care hours may be used. So slide 17 actually, Tim, if you could put slide 17 back up or whoever's back There. Yeah. Then I guess it's the next one. Yeah. So I know we replaced this language to track FMLA.

But I'm not clear on this doesn't show the FMLA and state FCA language. So I'm just trying to understand if there are nuances that are different after the change. And that's what's been kind of important to me about that.

So it would probably yes, if we look at this one. So Colorado FCA, which was passed in 2013, expanded the reason that employees can take the federal FMLA. And so it was a state rule or law. And it essentially allowed for a domestic partner or anybody that the employee is related to by blood.

And So different than significant personal bond.

And I'll let Marilyn talk about significant personal bond. FMLA actually allows you to take a leave for significant personal bond if you have

From the FCA?

FCA, yes. FCA does. Yes. Do you want to clarify that?

We still do leaves for a personal bond even under Colorado FCA. So we do gather that paperwork and review it and determine whether somebody can have a personal bond. And really, for the most part, we approve them. If they're coming from, you know, a doctor who's vouching for that person needing to care for somebody in in, quote, unquote, family.

Could we see the actual language, though? Because I just I it was important to I when this passed originally this rule, in Denver, I know the significant personal bond standard was really important. And I just am worried that we may be unintentionally narrowing that a little bit or that it could narrow depending on who all is in your positions and interpreting it if that language is gone. And I don't can we go down a slide again? Sorry.

Right. So FCA just referring to federal state and local law also feels pretty vague to me because different laws have different definitions. So, yeah, this is what this is what I've been concerned about with this change and and really seeking to understand.

Okay. So Colorado FCA is is a state law. So we just followed that law. And so we did not add the language of Colorado FCA to our rules. And it's broad.

Does rule 12 say Colorado FCA? It does.

Yes. Yes.

It does. Got it. Mhmm.

And and off the top of your head, what I'm asking is do we know exactly what that that Colorado CA language is?

Yes. Yeah. I have it on my computer,

but I didn't have any We do. But we just don't have it here, but, yes, we do. And it's it's very broad.

I'm pulling it up now. It's just Okay.

Okay. Think down one more slide. That's the other thing. Oh, no. The amount of caros, I'm not concerned about. Yeah, so they overlap in those definitions is really what I've been curious about. Thank you. That's all I had, madam chair.

Great. Thank you. Councilman Matoras.

Thank you so much. The extension from six months to a year, I I'd always used six months as the probationary time. Is it discretionary when you're hiring to create a six month or a one year, or are there certain classifications? I'm just worried that some people would become full time employees at six months and won't have this at their disposal for another six months.

So it isn't discretionary. It is actually in the job description. Okay. And it varies from department to department. So DHS may have some employees that are six months and some that are a year. And it's based on how long it takes them to learn their job. A nine eleven operator is also a year. So it is inconsistent already to use a probationary status. So we felt like it was better to just align it with this federal FMLA, which was a year.

Do you know on the data chart that you provided at the end there, twenty twenty five, 46 people, had started using it under the year of service. Are they well, I guess they all qualify as having completed probationary at six months, so then they're taking advantage of it. Then what are you seeing in terms of that downward trend of who's utilizing it under a year and why it's dropping off by so much? I mean, maybe it's a great thing. We don't need it for that period of time. It's dropped from one twenty eight to 98 to 46. There's a pretty steady drop down.

I don't know. Do you know? Oh, hiring. You I mean It could be hiring.

Yes. No. That's literally, I think, what I'm wondering is what was happening that created some of those drops. That's the only thing that I worry about, I guess, is a benefit not being available to somebody who is technically a full time employee at six months having completed their probation.

The only benefit that's not available is the paid leave or the paid care hours. However, we do still qualify somebody who needs the leave for themselves under the ADA. So we still do provide that job protected leave for somebody who might need. It's just not available for other family Right. So it's other family members.

For that. Okay.

And they also do qualify for donated leave? Yeah. Donated leave has been obviously decreasing ex the use of it because we have care hours, so they they would qualify there.

Okay. The only other question I have, there was a section that added language to include temporary seasonal contract positions. Those are adding them to the list

of people excluded from who could use care hours. Technically already are excluded because ordinance that you guys passed excludes them. So our language just we tried to just match. Marriage it. Yeah. Alright.

Okay. Thank you. Mhmm.

Thanks. Great. Thank you. Council member Flynn.

Thank you, madam chair. The chart on the last page that we're just talking about. Can you add to that later and give us the average number of hours involved?

We can give you anything.

The shortest and what's the range and what's the high point? That'd helpful.

Yes. Absolutely. Do you want

In both hand, how what are the average Hand off hand.

I can

tell you there are lot. Yeah.

They're out there. That'd be very helpful to add to this.

Sure. Absolutely.

That's all.

Great. Any other questions? Go ahead, councilor. Thank you.

I remember the other thing. Was there any concern, like, making the language track state and federal law? Was there a concern that our prior language was, like, sort of too mushy or allowing for overuse? Was that part of the rationale?

For sure, the problem with giving employees the leave at six months or nine months

Yeah. The language change. I'm not gonna lie. The change from cutting out our own definition that I was just pointing to since 1919.

Can you repeat your question?

Yeah. Was that change intended to tighten up the language a little bit to prevent sort of any abuse or overuse?

Not that part. No. Okay. Thank you. That was all.

Great. All right. Well, with that, we I don't see any other questions. Going once, going twice. Then we have a few items on consent, so please take a look at those. None of them have been called off, and we are adjourned. Nobody gets a little extra time back in their day.

Thank you. I

haven't even made it to my office yet. So