Governance & Charter Review Committee - Regular Meeting

Governance and Intergovernmental Relations Committee of Denver City Council. Thanks for joining us for the discussion. Starts now.

Tuesday, March 17, I'm wearing my green for Saint Patrick's Day. Think I might be the only Catholic member wearing green. Oh, hey. No. I take that back. Santa Oliver, Romero Campbell. Good job. This is the our monthly governance committee. I'm Amanda Sawyer. I have the honor of representing the residents of District 5 and chairing this committee. We have a lot to do today. First, we'll start with an action item and then our state legislative briefing. Before we get started, why don't we do a round of introductions? I'm gonna start to my lift.

Hi, everybody. Serena Gonzalez Gutierrez, one of your council members at large.

Good morning, Darryl Watson, Flying District nine. Good morning. Paul Cashman, South Denver District six, and I'm green with envy.

Good morning, Kevin Flynn, South West Denver district two. I'm Irish, and I'm not wearing gray. I wore it yesterday, and so somebody on the street as I came in said told me poke my home. So I have to I have to look that up and see what that means.

Good morning. Amanda Sandoval, Northwest Denver district one.

Good morning. Diana Romero Campbell, Southeast Denver, district four.

Morning. Chantel Lewis, district eight.

Alright. Fantastic. Well, we'll start with our action item first. And this is actually two action items that are gonna go in a block, three twenty seven and three twenty nine. Council members, why don't you take it away?

You, madam chair. This is something that, I think has been wanting to happen for a long time, and it came to a head, with a couple of actions in the last year or so, particularly the the women's soccer stadium. And under three point two point six in the charter, we review and vote on contracts, leases, and certain other instruments. And typically, because we have thirty days to review them, we haven't received the actual documents until the Thursday filing for the Monday action. And so this is these these are two changes.

One to the revised municipal code to specify in the code when that thirty day starts, which has always been agreed on that it starts the Thursday filing for Monday. But then a rules of procedure change to require that we actually have the contracts or drafts of the contracts available to members at the time of the committee meetings where they'll be approved to the floor. And so we are sponsoring this together. There's council president Sandoval, councilwoman Maparady who is not available today, and and I. So I I well, I just said that.

I should

have changed the slide. Under current practice, we don't receive them until the Thursday afternoon. I can't speak for other members, but I assume it's the same. But I spend most of my weekends not out having fun and recreating, but reading contracts and other other things. And some weeks are tougher than others.

We in one week in December, we had 27 contracts in one meeting that most of which we didn't have much time to review. So in 2015, the council we used to have extra time. We used to approve all these things through a council bill, two reading bill. And in 2015, before the class of 2015, in which councilman Cashman and currently councilwoman Gilmore and I were part, Prior to us taking office, that council changed that to a one reading resolution, which left only four days to review contracts. We did add rule 3.6 that allowed us to postpone one if we needed more time.

So the proposal here is that we clarify the thirty day shot clock starts with the noon Thursday filing for Monday's legislative meeting. And then we amend our rules of procedure to specify the contracts and other items that are scheduled for committee action or consent must be accompanied by the current draft of the contract or other documents by the time of the committee meeting. The council president and by delegation, the chairs of committees have the discretion to waive this requirement. And we did talk with we met with the mayor's office. It says in the presentation that it may be waived.

It will cause unnecessary delay. We've agreed to remove that and and basically grant discretion for other reasons. It doesn't necessarily have to be an unnecessary delay, but there might be another good reason to waive the to waive the requirement at the time of committee. Certainly, we would have it we would have the the instruments before we vote on them regardless. I we went over this in budget and policy.

I don't know how much more detail we can add to it, but there was some ambiguity in the way the Charter amendment was passed in 1982 that says that the thirty day review period starts when the item is submitted for counsel's approval. And nowhere else in the Charter is the word submitted used, so we don't know what that exactly means. So what in the code, we are defining it as the current practice, and the practice always has been noon Thursday. That's when the clock starts. And the rationale for that is when an item is presented to a committee, it's not being submitted to the council for its approval.

It's being submitted to a committee to determine if it's ready to submit to the council for approval. So that's the that's the legal rationale for that. And so the action requested is to approve the filing of the of the code amendment, the bill, and then the resolution. And we would ask that the resolution be delayed a week so it's on the same agenda as final reading of the bill itself. Just to add to what we talked about in budget and policy, council president and I and council Wimperardi's office participated in a meeting with the mayor's office.

And we agreed and and disagreed with some of the requests from the administration. One in particular that was very important to me and I hope to everybody else was, would this apply only to action contracts up on action items and those on consent could just go through? And and my response was, I spent more time on the consent contracts because my first time to see them is Thursday night before Monday. The action items were we usually are fully briefed and have a lot of background on them to begin with. We did agree

I also said the reason why is because anyone can pull anything off consent.

Yes. It

doesn't makes doesn't make sense to have a consent agenda where those could go through when in reality, anyone of us can pull it off consent and say it has to come to committee. So it feels like there shouldn't be any discrepancy between them. There should always just be the contracts coming to us no matter what.

The other key change that we made, and I think it's very reasonable, was we've added an effective date of ten weeks beyond the passage of the new rule to give agencies time to adjust their workflow. Otherwise, if it were effective immediately, any contracts that are coming to us now would necessarily be held up. And then we would face a logjam in all of our committees within ten weeks. We'd have an an inordinate number of of contracts to deal with. And that's with the understanding that as agencies are able to adjust their workflows, if they don't do that many contracts to begin with, that in that within those ten weeks, they could start to comply.

But the ten weeks, we thought was very reasonable.

And it's important to note that also with agencies who are watching that ten weeks might feel overwhelming because a lot of several our city attorney's office is short staffed, and so lots of contracts throughout the city are that has hampered a lot of the contracts. So once again, committee chairs, it's gonna be up to you to work with the agencies that come to your committee, and they might have to you might have to use this discretion after the ten weeks to say, hey. We're short staffed. Our compliance contractor, we don't have one. We lost it in the reduction.

You're gonna really have to start working as the committee chairs with all of the agencies that come to you for action, and they might have to use this discretion in your waiver as committee chair or I might have to use a waiver as council president in the meantime after the ten weeks effective date.

One operational aspect is still unsettled, and that is how will we receive these? Excuse me. The administration said, for instance, would it be would we deliver all these contracts noon Thursday before the consent agenda, you know, before they come to committee? Should we email them all to members? I said, oh, lord, no, my inbox would would be flooded on that week where we had 27, for instance, and these are contracts that are, you know, 20 megabytes each, blah blah blah.

They'll get lost in my inbox. So I've reached out to technical services to try to set up a system where there would be a restricted access folder on SharePoint, city council SharePoint, where at our leisure, during dependency of these contracts, we could go into that folder and read them all when we have the time. But they'd have to be uploaded only once into one location available to all 13 of us. So I I will know, I hope, before this comes to the floor if if that's gonna be the workable solution.

Alright. Before we get to council member questions, wanted to just let everyone know this is a change to the Denver revised municipal code, so it is required to have fifteen minutes of public comment. We did not have anyone sign up for public comment. So I just wanna check the room to see if there's anyone who tried to sign up for public comment and technology got the best of you. Just no judgment. Okay. Great. With that, we'll go to council member questions, and we've only got council member Lewis in the queue.

The only motion on the committee. I just had one clarifying question for you, councilman Flynn, regarding the SharePoint. Would that be organized by committee, or is it just one drive with all of the contracts in order to be able to review?

Great question. I'll we'll talk to TS about that, but I I I don't see any reason why it couldn't be organized by by committee folders.

Yeah. Okay.

That'd proved.

Thank you. Okay.

Thank you for doing this work, both of you.

That's a great idea.

Yeah.

We had one more council member jump in the queue. Council member Gonzalez Gutierrez.

Just one quick question. Council president, can you repeat what you said about the committee chairs and what would be kind of within our responsibility with the agencies?

Yes. So after ten weeks so after ten weeks so this will be implemented in ten weeks, and then you might have an agency that is under your under your purview as a council as a chair or any of you who are chairs that might say, hey. We can't get that contract to you within this time frame. Here's the reason why. And so if you feel like that is a sufficient reason why, say it's stuck in jagger, say the attorney who was supposed to be working on it is out for leave and they don't have somebody who can fill them in.

You can say, okay. I will grant you the waiver of not having to get it to us in this time frame. When can you get it to us in this time frame? And then you can let everyone on the committee know. But there are certain agencies who have more heavier contracts that are being worked on and negotiated right now that might actually you might have to use that waiver. So as a committee chair, whatever agency your reports up to you, you might want to start having recurring meetings with them once this goes into effect after ten weeks and say, where are you on your contracting processes so that we can understand because now we need to make sure that we get those to the council members so that we could see them. Does that make sense? Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Barbara. Yep. You're welcome. That's

it. Great.

Alright. Seeing no one else in the queue, I just wanna thank you both. This is a conversation we've been having for the seven years I've been here, so really appreciate the clarification here. I think it's really important. We've got these will move forward in a block, and this is an action item, so I'll need a motion and a second.

So move. Second.

Fantastic. Do we need a roll call vote? Alright. Thumbs up. This will move forward. Thank you very much. We'll go to the floor. And then with that, we are gonna switch to our state legislative update. Just to sort of let everyone know while we're transitioning here what this is gonna how this cadence is gonna work. We have two very special guests with us today who are going to do a presentation from the RTD accountability committee.

This is a committee, that was put together by the state last year, to look at potential changes to RTD, and so really appreciate them being here. But before we get to that, because I wanna leave a lot of time for that and a lot of time for conversation around that, we are gonna have our state lobbyists, and the mayor's office come, and we're gonna have a a a conversation about a couple of different, bills that are coming through. So we'll do both parts of the state update, but we do have a special presentation today. So we're gonna we're gonna do this part of the conversation first, just going through an update on some of the state bills, and do q and a. Happy Saint Pat's

for all

of you and some stickers.

You rock. Thank you. That's from our team. So if you guys wanna start by introducing yourselves, that would be great.

Well, good morning, madam chair, council members. It's great to be with you. I'm Adam Paul, government affairs in the mayor's office. And with me today, I have the policy matters team who are our state lobbyists. And, Katie, you wanna do a quick round of introductions?

Yeah. Absolutely. Katie Hancock with Policy Matters. Tanya Kelly Bowery, Policy Matters. Heather Retzko, Policy Matters. Kim and Alumna, Policy Matters.

Awesome. And just for reference, for people who may be tuning in, the city's legislative committee has two sides to it, the mayor's office, which is myself and Tim Hoffman, as well as Becky Studemeyer, who really does a a great job. And the council members, councilor Gonzales Gutierrez, and the the sitting chair, councilor Sawyer, as well as their great team. So we've really appreciated working with you this year. I think to date, we've gone through over let me get my notes here.

Over 500 bills have been introduced. We reviewed a 143. And just to give you a flavor of that, that's the the total that we've really engaged in. And so this is gives you a little bit of an update of of the support side, the monitor side, and there's a couple additions to the support, which I'll go through. But as of yesterday, we moved into support on HP ten fifty four, which is protections for worker safety. And so we'll get that registered. Registered. When you see the monitors, these are when you send things to the agencies. Technically, maybe not something that we're wanting to oppose or amend, but there could be some agency impacts. So we want to keep an eye on that.

So that lists where we're at on our monitor side at this point. And then we have quite a few in the amend, and this is where we really rely on our agencies to engage and do a great job in trying to work the different bills that you see. We'll come back to 1,001 in a little bit, but that is one that was flying through and and actually did pass, but we were able to get some amendments into it by being able to have that flexibility to work on it. Also, I think two others that we have now moved into support is ten sixty five, which is the transit housing investment zones. And then criminal offenses related to critical infrastructure metals, we moved into support on that yesterday.

If you look at our opposed side, we've had two that we have opposed that have fed in the consumer protections to promote fair market pricing. And the second one was state and local unmanned aircraft. There were quite a few issues with that, especially as they related to DEN. So we try to be pretty judicious and really look at operational impacts when engaging on these bills. And I think we've so far found a pretty good balance and also reflective of what's been opposed, two of them already not passing. I'll turn it over to madam chair if you wanna talk a little bit about the council only positions.

Council member Gonzalez Geshe is gonna do it today.

Alrighty. So we have a slide here that's indicating the positions that council as a body has taken positions on only. As you all know, you know, we only, take official city positions if the mayor's office and council can agree on on said position. There are, as you can see, four bills, that council is on their own kind of flying solo here, taking positions on these bills, everything from worker protections, eviction protections, issues around law enforcement identification and immigration training requirements, and then also as it relates to TABOR. And these are all areas that we've identified, I think, over the last couple of years, at least in our goal setting, as areas of interest for council members.

And so, you know, it's great to see our colleagues getting involved and wanting to take these positions, and we do share this information with the Denver Delegation at the very least. And, our staff, Matt and and Mead, do a great job putting an email together that goes out weekly to the Denver Delegation indicating what council positions are being taken on and, of course, keeping them updated on the city positions as well just so that we're all kind of catching getting getting them the information as much as possible. But if there are any questions specifically to this list here from our colleagues, we can definitely have conversations at maybe another time because I know we have limited time here.

And I might just add to that. So the mayor's office, we're monitoring 01/05/1275. And then 11 o six, we're actually trying to work on some amendments. And so those I think were submitted to you as a whole and trying to work on some amendments to hopefully get to a

spot where we could also support.

All right. We're going to come back to RTD, and we'll start with some of these of interest, which is the home formerly known as Yigbee last year, kind of timed out last year, came back, made some exclusions to, I think, make it more palatable. Community planning and development is is here with us today. We did get some of our amendments in, not all of them. I think there's a a handout if you'd like to see or if you already have that of what the governor's office was willing to accept and work.

And I will just mention this faced great opposition from just about probably every city maybe other than Denver and Boulder. But I think being in an amend position at least got us more of what I think was important. And so I wanna open that up to any sort of questions, madam chair, if that's okay. And certainly we have our experts here who can maybe give a a more in-depth overview of the bill and its passage.

Yep. Go ahead.

Just a quick just an update on the slide, and I didn't realize this when I had first looked at it, but I think senator Gonzales was also on this bill just for point of that's

all.

Okay. Great questions Questions on on this this one? One. We've talked about this one before. This is a a tough one, and I think we you know, I wanna just give our lobbyists a huge shout out.

This bill was always gonna pass this year, and most cities across the state took an opposed position on this, which it's its own strategy, right, to just say no. But their recommendation and and discussion with the mayor's office was not to just say no, but to try and make this better because it was gonna pass and so make it workable for the city of Denver. So huge shout out to CPD as well for providing realistic amendments that could be incorporated. It's a little frustrating that they weren't all incorporated. But the fact that we were able to get amendments into this bill before it passed is a really big deal. So great job on that. Council member Flynn.

Thank you. Thank you, madam chair. If I could ask, maybe CPD and Maxwell Sarah just walked in. What is different about administrative approval? What does that take away from our other normal processes in the development of these projects? In other words, what do we lose? Dave?

I'll just

take the mic.

Sure you can grab a chair, Kyle.

I'm Kyle Dalton. I'm the regulatory planning manager with CPD. So this bill would require us to administratively approve multi unit residential developments that are proposed by qualifying entities in certain locations with some exceptions. What that would take away would be the requirement that they first get rezoning to change to a district that would allow a building of that height or of that use. For example, a property that's currently zoned single unit residential, we would now have to administratively approve a multi unit development of up to three storeys for those qualifying properties.

Other questions on this one? I will say I suspect this is not the last conversation we're going to have about this. All right. Moving on.

Thanks. So this one is listed as 1308, which is lot splitting approval by subject jurisdiction. And as you can see, requires local governments to approve administrative lot splits. Smaller lots must be at least 40% of the original lot. And the property, if it has a residential mortgage, the lender must receive notice. This is something that coincides with another bill that's just not on here, but it's HB26-eleven 14, which prohibits jurisdictions from requiring single family lot sizes of greater than 2,000 square feet. So these two, we want to talk a little bit about that. And we have our community planning and development folks if you want to give an overview of these two or if we want to start with questions again.

I think

we're in oppose on both of these.

We are oppose we are in official oppose position on both of these. I think it would be helpful to hear from CPD just what both of these do briefly, and why we are why our strategy for these two was oppose as opposed to amend. So I'm gonna let you guys fight out who gets to come up and talk about this one. Yeah. There's two These two. Okay.

Why don't I start with a high level overview? Am Sarah Showalter and I am the Deputy Executive Director of CPD. And then both Jeff and Kyle are here subject matter experts that can add a little more detail. So well, let's actually start with the bill that wasn't up on the screen, which is just about setting a maximum lot size of 2,000 square feet. So just a lot of concerns with the bill which felt a little one size fits all.

Certainly the intent behind it, I think, is one of the reasons why we're doing Unlocking Housing Choices, for example, and we do share that common goal with the intent of the bill, I think, which is how do we look for opportunities to get more kind of gentle density into single unit neighborhoods. But our concern is that the 2,000 square foot lot size would apply across the entire city, so even like suburban context, and feels like we would want something that's much more context based, like our own zoning code. So if we want to look at reducing lot sizes, then let's do that a little more holistically and contextually. And the premise of the bill, it just felt like why it would take a lot of work and a lot of effort in a short amount of time to figure out what that would look like. Not to mention, obviously, this would be across the entire state, not just like how does it make sense in Denver.

So that was our concern there. And then with the bill that was up on the screen, that's more about requiring us to administratively approve lots but at a certain time, it creates a lot of complications and Jeff's probably best to speak to some of those, our zoning administrator. And we felt like even some amendments or things would still, just the whole premise of the bill, there's a lot of challenges with. I will say that for both bills, obviously we don't know for sure yet what the solutions are going to be with unlocking housing choices, and I'll put in a plug for the work session we have with you this afternoon on that very topic. But it will get to solutions that in some ways or eventually over time, especially once we do phase two of unlocking housing choices, would make a lot of what the bill is trying to accomplish like not even needed in some ways because we will allow more units on lot anyway.

So you don't need to split the lot, you can just build more units on it, for example. So we think there are like, that's an example of a way that we might be able to get at a similar outcome through our own work that we're already doing with our own zoning code. But in the meantime, feel like these bills would just create a lot of challenges for our work. And if you're interested, I do think Jeff can share some of the challenges in particular with the lot split bill. If it were to move forward, there would definitely be some amendments that we would want to get in there, so it doesn't create a lot of challenges for us and we have to administer it.

Jeff, do you have anything you want to add?

Yeah. There's a couple of things. I'm Jeff Frazo. I'm the the zoning administrator in in CPD. So it it's kinda like it's taking one aspect of development and just it's it's a solution that is not holistic in nature. It's too prescriptive. And so lot splits are generally an outcome of something. And the enabling the enabling ordinances in in the city of County in Denver are zoning ordinances. So you basically have the state prescribing a lot split without any relation to what the zoning allows. So, a big concern is is that people will start splitting lots that are not buildable within the city.

And zoning is just one piece of the puzzle. We have our engineering standards, how do you get water and sewer to that to that structure, how do you access the lot that's created. And also, the city already has an administrative process for for lot splitting, so it's like we already have that, and we we already make it easy to do these things. So I will just say, it's just like Sarah said, it's incredibly one size fits all. It doesn't take into account context and other regulations that have to be updated to be able to accommodate these things.

It's so prescriptive that it boxes us in where there's better solutions that we're trying to tackle at a systemic level with housing choices and regulatory reform. And so we just don't need this as a city, and and technically, it's just very it's very simplistic with a lot of of unintended consequences that will happen if we're if we're if we're mandated to do this anyways without updating everything else in our regulatory toolkit.

I would just add politically too. We're in very good company with our colleagues at the other counties. We've connected with them and are working on kind of a vote count split up. It's in the lot splitting bill is up in committee today and is anticipated to pass. But I think now that we are officially opposed, we can really hit the ground running and are already working on some of our assignments.

Awesome. Questions on the Adam, did you have something you

want to I just had a question, and it's really for the group. If we see, like, this is going like home, do we need to be ready to be in a position to try to amend?

I think so.

And I will just say for in the answer to that question on the city council side, when, you know, we, as the chairs of the legislative council side of things, can make that decision and and have that conversation because but if we are all in support, we're not gonna go to oppose. Right? But if we are all in oppose and there are amendments that our agencies are saying we have to have because this is gonna pass, we have the ability to be flexible with that for you. So Thank you. Questions, comments, concerns?

Too many. Lots of concerns.

Yeah. Lots of concerns on these ones. This is why we wanted to bring it to you. And again, I suspect this is the last not the last time we are going to have a conversation about these. Alright. Moving on.

Alright. We'll move on to something I don't think this might be new for a lot of people. Data centers.

It was the joke.

But right now, there's there's these two bills and they they do different things. One's more on the kind of incentive side and then the large load data center piece. They're not moving right now. They're just kinda sitting there in limbo since their introductions. And we have a host of subject matter experts from DOF to Ditto to CASR, DDPHE. Everybody is here to kinda answer your questions. And you can see just from this quick summary a little bit of what they do. The large load data center really digs deep. It's quite a long bill, but these are the highlights of that. And then, of course, this incentive piece.

And we have mixed feedback from monitor amend to no impacts, and then we also have an oppose. And DPO is the permitting office really was the opposition piece to say, since Denver's doing a time out, it might make sense just to say no to both of these and figure out our internal processes through the moratorium and then look at something moving on. So, you know, it's kind of a potpourri of of folks who are engaged on this and have a lot of great background and knowledge if we wanna just kick it off to to you all with questions for the

Yeah. I think that's right. I will say two things. So so we've got two bills here. One of them is like a an omnibus data center bill. The other one is financial incentives. Right? We, as the city council, have taken a position of oppose on the financial incentives piece. In terms of the sort of omnibus bill, we have not sent it to council yet. And the reason for that is because there's lots of negotiating going on in the background, and we don't wanna waste your time.

So we're not a 100% sure what this is gonna look like, or when we send it to you, what exactly we are sending to you because we don't know what the resolution is gonna be yet. So we have paused on sending it to you at this moment. Do you wanna add something? Yeah. Yeah.

Can I oh, I'm sorry? Go no. Go ahead. We were able to have conversation with representative Brown, who is one of the sponsors of the bill. The other sponsor of the bill is his majority leader, Monica Duran, doing the incentive bill. He let us know that behind the scenes, they're looking at potentially combining the bills right now. That's some of the negotiations that are going on, but they also are meeting resistance because of some of the sales tax exemption that is in the Duran bill on as to whether the state can afford it given the budget situation that we're currently in on some of those exemptions. And so as we get more of that intel, we're very happy to share as this evolves.

Great. Thank you. Council member Flynn.

Joseph, if you know the sales tax exemption, they can only exempt the state sales tax. Correct? They can't exempt from our

That is correct.

Thank you.

Thank you

for that. Great clarifying question. So I think this these two bills we wanted to flag for you all because because we are having this conversation as a city within CPD with two council sponsors who are both here. Is there anything that you would like to share at at this point? And it's okay if the answer to this is no. Sorry to put you on the spot. But because there is conversation there the the mayor's office has announced a moratorium, and there's conversation about what comes next within the city and county of Denver as it relates to data centers. Wanted to see if you had anything to share. Just

that the conversation is now putting together a task force, a committee to look at what it what does Denver wanna do. And just related to something that we just said, I'm trying to imagine how these radically opposing bills get combined into one. So we'll see.

That's why we haven't sent it to you yet, council president Sandoval. Just for clarity,

the moratorium has to come through city council for action.

Right? There's no moratorium. That's talk about language of a moratorium. We need that scheduled for March 31.

Yeah. And and I think we need a I don't know if we've we haven't shared language. I think that's coming forward soon for folks to to cross border to see language. Is close to adding the language. Yeah.

That So

that's coming quick.

But I just there's been confuse I've gotten calls and there's been confusion because we did this press announcement that there's a moratorium and I'm like, well, the only people who can act in enact in moratorium is Denver City Council and it hasn't gone for an action item yet. And I didn't know when the dates are so that's great to know that I can convey that out March 30.

I think it's thirty first.

Thirty first. Thirtieth we're closed.

Oh, thirtieth. We're close.

So it's thirty first.

And we can tell you for sure after. We'll go back and we'll check and make sure.

We'll we'll make

sure we got the correct dates and and the steps. I think it is a it's around the thirty first, but I

Would one of your staff members can just email us the dates? Yes. I'd love to see the language because people love zoning. Yes. So it it whenever it's ready, that would be great. Thank you.

Great. So I think the the two takeaways that we have for you on these ones are, number one, we don't know what we don't know, and we don't know a lot in this moment as it comes to these two bills and how they are going to meld, or not. And so stay tuned for that, but we just know that we haven't sent you that to take a look at yet because we don't know what it is. So that's number one. Number two, and I think this is really important, and it's not just for these bills, but sort of across the board, you have heard us say the same thing, which is the city of Denver is already doing most of this stuff.

Yep. We're already doing it ourselves. CPD has been amazing in leadership. Kasar has been amazing in leadership to have these conversations and address these issues, because they matter to the city and county of Denver. And as a home rule city and county, you know, having the state kind of come and and tell us that we have to split everything into 2,000 square foot lots across the city is, it's a little bit startling because we're already doing this work and having these conversations. So, just wanted to kind of flag that for you as well. Council member Cashman?

Just the moratorium is coming to committee on the thirty first. The vote will happen in May.

Okay. Oh, not till May? Okay.

Is it coming in briefing in committee?

I don't believe I don't believe it's it's pre I'm

Does the moratorium have to have, like, a four week notification?

Yes. I have no idea. Does it? Yeah. Yeah. Sarah? She's like, what? Let's phone a friend. Oh, yeah. Hi.

Sarah Showalter, deputy executive director of CPD. So my understanding is an action item at committee March 31 based on our schedule. And then yes, because it is related to the Denver zoning code, I don't know for sure about like all moratoria, if it's specifically about things that are in the zoning code that we have that four weeks that we have, that's partly why the vote's not until May. Yeah.

My hope is that there's a retroactive effective date like we had with the gas station bill. Awesome.

Okay. Looking forward to seeing that language. Any other questions or thoughts on this one?

Okay. Stay tuned for more.

We're just coming back to this because we we wanna make sure we had enough time to go through the RTD. So this will be coming back. And then jump into the budget real quick.

Yeah. We can just quickly so the JVC is still working on figure setting. They're taking votes as we speak, so I apologize for texting during the presentation. The revenue forecast, which is the big, dollar amount by which they seek to balance the budget, is gonna be announced on Thursday. And so I think we'll have a lot more information for you as to where the priorities end up. The JBC will work through Wednesday, we believe, to finalize those votes, and we'll just

keep you posted. They're really short. We saw Craig this morning, and they already have a long way to go to fill the budget. They have to have a balanced budget by the constitution. So it's gonna be a tough couple weeks, I think.

That's it. All that we have. Awesome.

Thank you. General questions or thoughts? Maybe just an overwhelming sense of panic about

what's going

on at the state. Hey. Adam, go ahead.

My life. Committee members and our lobby team and the agencies. I think, you know, coming into this second year, we've been trying to work together on new processes. I think we're getting better

at it,

and we're getting better feedback from you all, which is so helpful to then try to get down there and do strategic moves. So thank you for that. And I think we'll have some good progress moving forward.

We really appreciate it. Thank you guys for all of your work. And I will say, I think, as a city, we have been a lot more active and taken a lot more positions and done a lot more as it relates to the state level, and part of that is because there are a lot of proposed bills that are stepping on our toes right now and also because we are more engaged and more active. And so we can't do that without all of you guys filling out the form every week and our lobbyists running around at the capital and the mayor's office willing to, you know, work with us on some of our positions that we feel really strongly about. So really appreciate all of the partnership happening here.

You. Council member Loews, did you have something you wanna No. Okay. Sorry. Awesome. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Thank you.

And now, we have got forty five minutes for a special presentation and conversation about the RTD accountability study. So Maria and Jamie, if you guys wanna come on up, we'll get you

Can we have a chair?

Started. And just to let council members know level setting where we are with this, there is not a bill that has dropped at this time. However, there is one coming. And so we felt really strongly that in order to so you all got the RTD accountability report. It's a 100 pages long, and we knew that you were not going to read a 100 page report.

I'm not gonna read a 100 page report. So wanted to provide an opportunity for you all to sort of hear a conversation about what the RTD accountability found study found, and what this bill might look like when it drops because it is something that we're going to wanna have conversations about. I will tell you, when I asked what could we do to have someone come in and give us a and have a conversation, give us a briefing about the RTD accountability study, the governor's office said, we'll do it, and the sponsor of the bill said, we'll do it, and RTD director said, we'll do it, and I said, none of you are doing it. I want people who actually sat on the RTD accountability study team, to come in and brief us and give us a neutral briefing about, what the issues were, what the discussions looked like, what the process was, and then and then we will all see what the bill ends up looking like and what those conversations look like. But I wanted for us to level set first.

So thank you both so much for being here. I truly appreciate your time and your willingness to come and talk through this with us and just sort of level set with us. So I will let you do introductions and take it away.

So I'm Maria Garcia Berry, and I, in a moment of sheer insanity, volunteered to be on the accountability committee last May and got appointed. I've been chairman, to give you a little context, I'm old, Mr. Cashman and I are contemporaries. Councilman Cashman and I, I actually served on the original appointed RTD board in 1977 through '79. Most of you are not born.

Basically, yeah, alright, Councilman Flynn was. You guys were two or one or something. We I actually sat on the board that basically created the mall, the 16th Street Mall, and actually applied for the funding and got the funding and actually hired IMP to do them all. After that, my relationship with RTD has been on again, off again. Twenty two years ago, we put together the campaign to run fast tracks and to be able to do that.

Since I have a new life, a new era in my life, I decided that a good volunteer effort would be I feel very passionately about transportation and that we have to have a robust transit system in this region, or we can't do what we need to do on all counts, whether it's housing, whether it's workforce, whether it's economic development. So I took on I threw in my application and lo and behold, got appointed and then got elected chair. And then mister Lewis.

Thank you. So my name is Jamie Lewis, and I was also on the committee. I was the vice chair. My background is transportation. I am the transit advisor for the Colorado Cross Disability Coalition, and I also spent one year as an RTD director, thanks to this group because they appointed me.

My takeaway from the committee is that for RTD to be more successful and to add ridership, there has to be a really strong relationship between municipalities, state, and RTD. I call it the three legged stool. We'll ensure that the vision for great transportation will be equally represented with this partnership. Some of my takeaways from the committee was basically RTD's lack of urgency. You know, people ask us, why did we do this?

Why, you know, why change things? And we just felt I think we were all in agreement and it's actually, I think, in our executive summary. So there was a lack of urgency. There was and I'll give you two examples. The pace of which transit oriented development was not really at a speed that we thought was matching the needs, the housing needs of our region workforce and the governance structure, which is gonna be the challenging piece because I think everybody has questions about the governance piece. But has a short we're gonna go through Yeah. Short

through real quick.

Like a short review?

Yeah. Short review of what we did. So, you know, this bill was initiated by the late senator, Faith Winter, last year. It was senate bill one sixty one. It established the committee. It has 14 voting vote members and one ex officio. There's three major topics we were charged with. So there's a lot of things that as we went through the process, we thought we could have talked about, but our our legislative mandate was governance related topics, paratransit topics, and workforce retention and labor related topics. This is the second accountability committee. I think Councilwoman Serena Gonzalez Gutierrez may remember that about four years ago or whatever, the legislature did pass the first accountability committee.

I'm sure Councilwoman Lewis, since she was on the RTT board, remembered that. They chose not to go the governance route. They kind of folded and said, no, we're not going to touch that, And they created certain things. We were basically, the bill got passed in the legislature. We were stood up as a committee in August, and we had to report to the legislature by January 30.

So we spent a lot of time together from August to to September. Here are the appointments. The appointments were made by the governor, one ex official member by RTD, which was the chair, Julian Bouquet, and then eight voting members appointed by the legislature. So each leadership had an appointment on that. So it was an interesting there was not a lot of coordination, so it was very interesting to see how we all assembled ourselves.

We were staffed out of the Colorado Energy Office, and they brought in outside consultants and facilitators to be able to do that. We basically identified a lot of stakeholders. David Bragdon was brought on because obviously we had a lot to learn in a very short period of time between August and September in terms of just getting familiar with what was happening with RTD. So David did a lot of the outreach with a lot of groups. I personally went through and so did Jamie a lot of groups that once they learned that we were, you know, formed would ask us to go give presentations.

So I went to a lot of the TMOs, so did you, everything from business organizations to environmental organizations to different local entities throughout it. CML, CCI, we all presented to them at that piece. So we tried to do as best we could, but most of the committee time was really spent in committee. I think our in person meetings were at least six hours long at a time in order to get through as much information as we had. We had 12 public meetings.

All of our meetings, of course, were public. We had a lot of interaction with RTD board members. We had probably at every meeting at least six or seven RTD board members who would somehow cycle in and listen to it. And I would tell you that I don't think there's unanimity on the RTD board as to where they go next. We obviously spent four and a half months.

We had forty three hours of meeting time, and we had over 120 ideas for consideration generated, and we were at 31 recommendations approved by the majority of the committee. We had to have at least eight votes in order for a recommendation to make it into the report, and we did some of the recommendations actually had a superior majority. We do have two minority reports, if I recall correctly, Matt Larson and Miller Hudson, and be able to do that. So I think when you look at all of this, I think our biggest issue and the thing that we really found I think when I first got on the committee, and I think Jamie can chime in, I wasn't where I ended up in terms of making dramatic governance changes. Two is common about lack of urgency.

I was pretty astounded at the low ridership and that somehow that has not come back. If you look at transit systems around the country that are comparable to our size now, one of the problems RTT has is we are one of those most geographic one of the largest geographical districts in the country, okay? That becomes a challenge to meet that is that our ridership has now bounced I think probably the biggest peer who competes with us on a regular basis in terms of metrics is Salt Lake City, and if you look at Salt Lake City's recovery and our recovery, it's pretty dramatic as to what they've been able to do. To Jamie's point, the other thing that I think really as we went around the metropolitan area is the lack of trust and confidence in the RTD board. I think when I was at CCI, I think Commissioner Julie Molica, who's chair of the Board of Adams County, was so vigorous about her.

I like individually and personally, and keep in mind that all 15 members, I think, are hardworking and trying to do the best they can, but somehow that kind of partnership of working with local governments, particularly local governments, is clearly not there, okay, to be able to do that. And also, I think what we heard loud and clear, there is no vision. We know fast tracks is stressed. Whether this right now, the agency says they don't have enough money to to finish fast tracks. They don't have enough money to maintain the current system, and they're not quite sure what to do about ridership.

Those three components really led us to believe that the board needs more expertise and needs to be changed from the government's level. Also, what we heard loud and clear, there's no vision. If, in fact, you can't implement fast tracks the way it was meant to be twenty two years ago. I always like to say that fast tracks may have been dramatically different if we had done it post 2008, because in 2008, the iPhone was introduced, and iPhone has changed transportation and what you can do with transportation throughout the region. Right?

So what would that look like? There is no new vision as to what transit ought to look like in the Dimmer Metropolitan Area. So clearly, need for diversity and expertise and experience was very critical to us. Challenges with working and making decisions. I had a coffee with an RTD board member three months ago or two months ago who walked me through how they found out that they had a deficit, that they thought they had a billion dollar surplus, and in one month they learned that they have a deficit.

And RTD does have a deficit, and if you start use if you look at RTD trajectory and you start seeing what happens in the next two or three years, RTD will go through its surplus that they have, right, to be able to do that. I think one of our concerns, and Councilwoman Lewis, you can share your personal experience because you went through it, is the lack of competition and interest in running for the RTT board. If you look at what's happened, the comparable to now that this bill outlawed writing candidates for the RTD board when they created the accountability committee. I believe that there are four RTD Board members over the last couple of years who basically no one would run, so they had like 161 riders, I think one of them, Councilwoman Zanibala, is in your district to be able to do that and be able to do that. So that is of concern to us as to why it is that this is a critical agency with a critical budget, and somehow we can't get people to do that.

I'll just add on. There also is a lack of diversity on the board. One of the things we realized is we did our kind of like our research or findings is that there's only two other transit agencies with boards that size in the country. So we're an outlier. We're we're different.

We're a little large and it's really hard to menace those type of people. And that's why when we'll get into it later that we we were trying to find a balance between still respecting the electorate, but also getting some special skill sets. You as a city council person were elected because of your potential. Think about that. People trusted you that you're gonna be learning a lot of new things, really diverse subjects. Things are coming gonna come up during your tenure that you never even thought of. And legislators do the same thing. RTD isn't one subject. It's one subject. It's transportation.

So you don't want people coming in just saying, geez, I'd like to manage transportation, but I don't really know anything about it. I have a heart for it, but and that was the problem where we're getting people. And this learning curve was like a year or two before they were basically up to speed. And so that's why, and we'll get into it later, we we decided a five four split, five elected, four appointed, so we can get representation from the BIPOC community, the Latino community, the elderly community, the disabled community, and our youth. We want people that work in those sectors and have a connection with transportation to be on the board to represent those groups more appropriately.

Our recommendations are, number one, is obviously, as Jamie just said, to reduce first of all, I think almost everybody unanimously let the board size should be reduced. It's a 15 member board now. We thought the board should be smaller. To reduce the board size to nine and have five elected and four members appointed. We believe that the appointment should be made where we recommend let me be careful how I say this we recommend it because that's how we got to an agreement.

We had lots and lots of opinions. We had some people who thought the board should be totally appointed, which is the way it was before. I was appointed by the Board of County Commissioners in Adams County and basically confirmed by all 10 municipalities in Adams County when I was appointed. So it was a very local government appointed board. Denver used to have 10 members on the board appointed by the mayor of Denver, not confirmed by city council.

So, the mayor of the city and county of Denver really ran the RTD board in that aspect in the days. So, we think that they would be appointed by the governor and then confirmed by the Senate. We feel very strongly about Senate confirmation for those members who are not elected in that aspect. We want appointments to collectively have areas of expertise, land use, transportation, planning, financial. Financial is really a challenge in that board, and I think that was very important.

We believe, to some extent, we used you guys as an example. We actually think it's healthy to have a city council president sit for two years. There have been times, and I think when you were there, maybe Angie served all four years or maybe, but it's not been that often, and maybe because of the pandemic was part of it, that an RTD board chair succeeds itself. We think strongly that there needs to be continuity among the chair. The chair does have a lot of work to do, and I think the chair needs to have some continuity.

We think that the structure needs to be implemented as feasible. It's a little tricky because you obviously have people who are running who are termed out this year, and this is an election year for RTD. We do think that members should all be eligible for two full year terms so that if you if your term gets cut short because of this and you run again, you should go ahead and serve two more years. And then we do think that there ought to be an increased ballot signature for elected positions comparable to county commissioners or something like that. These districts are big, even the current districts, so I think is appointed.

You wanna take some of these? The labor and c d u there's some a lot of recommendations that do not require statutory change. I think one of the things that struck me the most when I learned this is that you, as an elected RTD board member, can't automatically request that something you put on the agenda. You have to have two other colleagues go along with you. My attitude is if you're elected and you're serving your constituents, why are you prevented from being able to have impact on the agenda? So there's a lot of those procedures that do not require regular statutory change. Right? We're just highlighting some of that.

So some of the limitations that RTD has been frustrated with, especially after the pandemic is the workforce. And there's been some good things happening. They did have a good CBA agreement. They're being, I think the salary is up to like $28 an hour, something like that. But there's so many other little things that make a driver more comfortable, and that's safety being recognized, having proper training. So a lot of the things that we talked about in the workforce are basically best practices that we pulled from other agencies across the country. So there's really nothing new under the sky on these recommendations. Again, it's about the urgency of implementing them.

The president of the union sat on our accountability committee and was very engaged, very helpful, and we learned a lot just about how RTD runs its workforce and the challenges that we had with it.

Paratransit, it's it's still growing. You know, paratransit is an old system, but yet we've started using new technologies and new models using TNCs, the transit network companies. We started using Uber and Lyft for sector of the paratransit community that didn't need a wheelchair lift. Know, you see the big, the kind of the little mini buses that take people around called AccessiRide. Well, that's a Ford four fifty and they have to be modified.

So those vehicles cost almost $200,000. So if we can take somebody off of there that does not need the use of the ramp, we've been putting them over to a TNC. The the rider pays the first four fifty, then they get 20, I think 20 miles is free service that RTD pays the TNC. So still going through some growing pains. One of the things I look at the I always try to look at the glass half full.

I I told the board that, you know, you already set it basically setting the standard for the rest of the country. The country looking at RTD, how are you gonna handle this new model of doing the traditional accessoride, which is required by federal law, and also have an optional piece that uses new technology like TNC? So we requested them to executive overview and do a really good operational analysis to make sure those two systems were complementing each other.

Okay. Anything additional Paratrasit recommendations? Jamie, you want to go through?

Let's see what we've got here.

Needs assessment, integration.

Yeah. So basically review monitoring, you know, program exploded. Think they did two zip codes in 2000 I think it was 2000. They found that it was very successful. And I think this was where RTD made the mistake as they opened it up to the entire district with one swell swoop. And all of a sudden, we were talking like growth of five to 6,000 riders, applicants a month for a year or two. It just shot up. In fact, right now, AOD transports more people than Accessory did. I think it's about 70,000 trips a year right now. So that's fantastic.

We've gotten so much positive feedback from people who are saying it really has changed their lives. Because if you don't if you don't know, when you use Accessoride, you have to plan the trip a day ahead of time. Where on demand is just like you using a Newber lift. You make the phone call and within three minutes you have a vehicle there. So it really has changed a lot of people's lives. We've had testimony that people took a job for the first time. Let's say our blind community, oh my God, they were really grateful. It really changed what they could do. But again, we're going to be monitoring that really close. We're going to try to do a needs assessment, service integration, collaboration, engagement with our paratransit users.

You know, sometimes when you have a new program, you have to be careful not to ignore your customer. You know, what are their needs? What's happening there? System vision, one of the problems is it exploded so fast it really took a big chunk out of their budget because, you know, obviously they're still, you know, still paying out. Not as much as Accessoride.

It is sad to say that an Accessoride trip one way because of the requirement that this the RTD has to own the vehicle and the driver is about a $100. So think about that, if you do a round trip, $200 out of the budget. With AOD, it's about $17. So you could definitely see this huge financial benefit. But what happened because the the program exploded so fast, the numbers outpaced the savings.

So all of a sudden, they were they were having to edit and add a million dollars at the end of the year because they were short a million dollars. And then the next year was $2,000,000. So but I think that's again, I think it's an opportunity for RTD to shine because they can set the standard for the rest of the company rest of the country, I should say. And of course, on all project innovation, pursuing new technologies. I just heard Doctor.

Cog, I was part of the fifty three ten distribution last month. I was on a panel of five that helped distribute older Americans' funds, 5,310, which is, for those that don't know, that's basically replacing vehicles for human services. So, you know, companies like Laredon who serve our DD community, they have 30 vehicles. So they're trying to replenish their vehicles, and they'll get money from the government to do that. But one of the projects that really stuck out to me was doctor Cog, and they're working on a project where they're collecting human service providers because there's a lot of mom and pop providers out there that have wheel a vehicle with a wheelchair lift, and they're trying to create a pool.

So if somebody were to come in or they couldn't get a ride immediately for a wheelchair accessible vehicle, they would go down the list. And to me, that's the future. Because the problem right now, if I, in a wheelchair, were to call up an access on demand trip, I want a trip three minutes, RTD is responsible for that. The problem is TNCs don't provide wheelchair accessible vehicles, which is something we're going to have to deal with in the next decade. But with this new program that Doctor. Cog is proposing is to create a one stop pool using different providers around the region, and I really think that's the future.

So then our final category that we needed to do is work for retention. This has been a challenge, not getting enough drivers. RTD has made some progress, but there's a lot more to be done in this in this case. You know, I think it's really difficult when you become because of the way that the structure is, transportation gets led the same way. Think the airlines bid when you're a pilot, you bid your routes just like bus drivers bid to routes.

Seniority matters, so what happens first is that the young ones coming in to just become a driver for the first time, they need mentorship, they need support, they need help, and it needs to happen institutionally. And we need to change that culture to make sure that you are mentoring and keeping those people that you have been able to do. I what our I don't have to look it up precisely, but while they do a good job of keeping somebody for about a year, and then all of a sudden the attrition starts happening again. Okay, in terms of I also think more compensation may be important. We recommended, particularly for some women who want to drive because they want to split their schedules, that we make some capacity available for childcare and be able to do that.

So I think what we found in Lance, as head of the union, is willing to look for all kinds of pieces. Mean, look, he wants to grow our TTE. The more routes he gets, the more membership he gets, but the issue is if we can't grow it because we can't provide the drivers.

There's no silver bullet.

There's there

is A

lot of little things that a driver

looks at.

Little things. I mean, he told us about the holiday train. That was actually a creation of the union. The union came in and said, hey. We need to get people back on. Let's call it something else. That kind of creativity is and fostering of partnership is important. So, anyway, I'm not gonna go through all of these. I think you have this this this document in front of you. And so we've delivered the report to the governor. Councilwoman Sawyer is correct. There is no bill yet. I believe that there's a draft floating, but I have not seen it. And again, our job was done come January 30 when we turned it over to the legislature. We'll see what happens. But more than happy. I think Jamie and I are more happy to answer all kinds of questions.

Fantastic. Well, again, really, really appreciate both of you taking time to come down here and brief us on all of the work that you did, and thank you for for participating in this and leading it and and recommending some changes that it'll be very interesting to see what the bill actually looks like when it when it drops. We have a couple council members in queue. Before we start, council member Lewis used to be an RTD director. So I wanna just give you an opportunity if you would like to add anything to the presentation before we go to council member questions.

Oh, I it's a lot to digest, but I I do have some thoughts. But I think I'll hold them off for some questions if that's okay.

Yep. Absolutely. I'll put you in the queue. We'll go to council member Flynn.

Oh, thank you. We had some discussion on this at the doctor Cotton board also. And so I wanna raise them here since we have the members of the of the committee on governance. First, I hear the ghost of Jack McCroskey in particular.

But Miller Hudson was on the committee, so he's representing Jack very well. Five

elected of the nine, those five districts would be among the largest electoral subdivisions in the state. Mhmm. Second only, maybe do congressional district. They'd be larger than any state senate district. Why did you think that that

comparable to county commissioner districts in the metropolitan area. If you run for Jefferson County, you have to live in a district, but you run countywide. If you live in Adams County Right. You live in a district, but you run countywide. So they are comparable in size to that, and that's where look. We haven't done the precise number, but that is where we came. They are they are they are comparable to that. Now Arapahoe has district only. Boulder also runs at large. Right.

Why did the group think that that could attract more qualified candidates as opposed to, at first blush, being too daunting to anybody who might be interested who says, I don't know how I could campaign in and for election in a district that has, let me pick a number, 500,000 people.

Well, let's be clear. You know, the the attitude of the electorate hasn't changed. People are really not that interested in our in transportation. If you look at the numbers and the elect electable numbers, what we were trying to do is get a balance. We saw certain districts around the country go to a very low number, like three or four. We've actually saw one that had three. Salt Lake. And it caused a problem because they were not only setting policy, they were bleeding over into operations. And their their their work was not defined as well. So we start we we started at five.

We then we went up to seven. And then we were trying to get to that nine. And I wanted to remind people that even though you have five elected, you still have four appointed. Then I consider them at large. So it's not like all the work is gonna be on five elected officials. You have four other ones. So I look at them holistically as one body, nine nine with the four being appointed. The problem that we were trying to solve was, again, going back to the part, we didn't see any diversity on the board, and we don't see the skill sets that are needed. Like Marie was saying, somebody who does land use, somebody who does, you know, really into finance, the geeks. You know what I mean?

Or somebody who just is a community organizer but represents low income people. Those are the people we want to attract To me, that four is more important than the elected five. Don't repeat that. But the thing is, we're we're just trying to find that balance because we saw a lot of other districts try and experiment with that number, and they failed. So that's the number we fell on.

And granted, these districts will be large, but there's a caveat in there is that we were recommending, and it's embedded in this report, that the board has its own staff. Right now, the board kinda shares a staff with the CEO, and the alliance of that staff sometimes you're not sure where it's at. So we're recommending, one, that the the board members get paid better. We think that's, you know, with the economy and inflation over the last twenty years, that definitely has to change. I think we're gonna attract better candidates if we raise the salary.

And second, they'll they'll almost have a full time staff working for them. So when people call in and say, I have a question, it's gonna go to a staff member. It's gonna get answered right away. So I agree they're take they're gonna be taking on much bigger, a bigger geographic area, but I think they're gonna have the resources to address that.

So one of the things

I'm thinking a little bit yeah.

Go ahead. I was just no.

I was

just gonna say that all the reasons we wanted a bigger district, one of the concerns we have is that there are some elected RTT board members who are very parochial about their districts and only care about that small terrain, a lot of them being in the suburban districts, which is if you do not if you take away my bus, okay, I'm gonna be very upset and, you know, even though your bus has no ridership or whatever. We were forcing this we believe that by making the biggest districts bigger and making them more diverse in terms of geographical components in it, that you're gonna have bigger parts of cities. If you look at it, you'll probably Denver's gonna probably have a role in every on just about every district just if you really start looking at it from that perspective, that you would then raise the elevation of the seat and also make sure that those electeds are looking at it. Yes, they represent a district, but what we really want is for them to look at the district holistically. Because if you do not get transportation doesn't stop at the county line.

Right? And people's work demands do not stop at the county line. And we really wanted to make sure that the elected officials were understanding. That's why the four at large, but basically really understand that they have more of a responsibility than they'd represent. I think it's 218,000 people right now that an RTD board member represents, something along that things. So that was we believe that that will elevate the status of

the of And it goes back

to the vision. You were saying that, you know, the lack of vision. Because of your parochialism, you're you're basically doing piecemeal projects. You're doing this. But if you have a group that believes in the 2,400 square miles and they set a vision, they're gonna work together better. So right now, like Maria said, the parochialism kinda makes it looks like you're just filling in the gaps instead of having a large vision.

I have a vote for all of Thank you.

Great. Well, I'll put you back in the queue at the end if we have time. Council member pro tem Romero Campbell.

Thank you. Had early on, you had said that there was a minority

The report. Report Yeah.

That came out. It that's so that's not part of what you

put out It's on our report. I could give it to you. There's a couple of them. One, Matt Larson has a different structure. He actually wants to grow the board. He wants to have 15 elected board members of three appointed. And then he also proposed that every local government official could nominate somebody for the ballot, and they would just automatically get on the ballot Oh. Which means that your ballot would be very big. You would I think you would then really diminish people. I mean, you would get even less participation potentially because you it's been like your judge's balance, right, where people sometimes drop off because they're so big.

And so be able to do that. Miller Hudson believes very strongly and was very upfront, and I've actually signed Miller's petition in 1980. Remember, the RTD board did not become an elected board until 1980. It was a statewide vote, so people in Grand Junction and Colorado Springs voted for RTD to make it elected. It was not done because RTD does not have the power of initiative and referendum, so it had to go statewide. Miller was on our committee. Miller Miller was actually very helpful in looking at some of the stuff, made it very clear from the beginning. I only believe in an elected board. And so and if he if you wanna change it, he believe believes it needs to go back to the ballot. Now the question is, do you send it back statewide, or do you make the legislature have the district vote on it?

I don't know. So that's so those are the two minority reports.

Thank you. And then my other question was I don't know if it's more of a comment. Things that were coming up in your overview for accessibility, I think about, very specifically in my district, a lot of older adults and that accessibility to be able to ride. I think that there's a lot of mobility issues for older adults in being able to navigate to doctor's appointments or just navigate outside of their of the community, go to the grocery store, etcetera, and there's a level of independence that seems to be embedded in there that I just really appreciate it.

There's a lot of options for seniors and people with disabilities beyond RTD. You know, the human services and local communities, get money, state and federal dollars, to to address elderly mobility. So, it's actually a benefit to have a disability or be elderly because there you have more options. Yeah.

I just wanted to highlight that, and I appreciate it that there was a lot of thought that went behind it. Thank you. Thank you, madam chair.

Great. Thank you. Councilmember Watson.

Thank you, committee chair. Thanks so much for the report. I wanted to ask a question that didn't come up that I was kinda shocked on the report that I wanna go specific to the report. What was the dialogue or discussion around municipalities that have their own transit departments like Denver has Department of Transportation Infrastructure? Were there any recommendations as far as collaborative approaches looking at augmenting services? I know OEDIT has grants that Doddy can apply for that can augment RTD. Share a little bit about what that process looked like.

Yeah. Good question. Thank you for bringing that up. I think one of the things that really concern us the most is at times not only the lack of cooperation, but at times almost being an impediment to developing a separate transit system. One of the concerns that you've had, for example, if you go to Longmont, Harold Dominguez was on our committee. He's the city manager of Longmont. He went through very specific things that sometimes he goes outside the boundaries of the district, Longmont is paying for it, to get services from another transit agency because RTD has been so difficult to work with. You have the same problem in Lone Tree. You've got they're they're creating a VIA program. Right?

And there are times what we want we want RTD to start focusing on how to be more creative to if a city brings in a program, I guess I'll think back up to Chariot way back when that went under in Denver or whatever, that RTD that you could enter into some sort of collaboration, whether maybe even some financial sharing of responsibility to be able to do that, to approve the services. I think that's an area Eunice Kokliga would just to tell me that he thought RTD should be the trunk and the city should be the branches. Right? Gives more creativity and innovation out to the cities to do because they know their communities best as to what is needed in terms of circulations within the city instead of always being you here's your cookie cutter approach that you're gonna you're gonna do this. Right?

So we were very concerned that there was a lack of creative partnering with those entities because there are some cities that have some pretty robust transportation. Boulder has one.

You know, on page 12, we have a a section called local government and state agencies collaboration, and then that was one of the subjects that came up was strengthening the subregional service councils. If you're not aware, we have different subregional areas. Doctor. Guess in the beginning, the conversation, the way that it was presented to us, it was like RTD going to community and then RTD telling them what they do. There just wasn't this like, you know, back and forth conversation.

So it's something we brought up that communication definitely has to improve. And we were also told by the researcher of the group that we really need to take advantage of Doctor. Cox because of the relationships they have with the regions and municipalities. And so we do have a page on better relationships with

every agent. I think the committee's attitude was RTD should do everything possible to look for any new idea that would increase ridership. At the end of the day, it's all about ridership. That is what they're tasked to do, to move people around the metropolitan area. And so we felt that there were times that they were becoming impediments to be able to do that.

So two quick questions and an invitation. I'll speak with the current chair of the Metairie County Commissioners who would love to invite you to attend.

One question. So we have five minutes left, council member Lewis is still on the queue.

So one quick question on on actually, a comment on fast tracks and the completion of fast tracks. We're having a next step study with it for the outline. We're one of three lines that has not been completed. I'm very curious as to the impacts of the next step study and the work that's being done within the state legislature on on governance, and look forward to having a longer dialogue with you, hopefully, when we bring you to the MAC.

That'd great. Alright.

Great. Thank you. Council member Lewis.

I I'm just curious. What is the percentage of the state budget that's that goes to RTD?

Almost none. That was also a recommendation that we talked about. I think right now they got, what, dollars 9,000,000 a couple of weeks ago. They're one of our recommendations is that we believe that at times, RTT has not gone after grants or some availability of dollars within the state. You know, once the bills that got passed a couple of years ago that have created new fees, right, primarily to deal with transit, etcetera.

There are some pockets of money that are available. I think one of the concerns we had is that RTD was not being as aggressive as pursuing those dollars. Now that may be because they're not they're hesitant to have the state impose some different guidelines right on the system. I'm not quite sure, but RTD is one of the very few systems in the country, I think you would recall that, that does not get substantial amount of money from the state of Colorado. I I think that that can change and that should change, but I think governance is gonna have to be part

of it.

One of the one of the issues is those two bills that were passed, the oil and gas, and then I think there was a rental car.

The rental car.

We were basically modeled for RTD use that money to finish the fast tracks. It wasn't really meant for the general fund or for the rubber on the road. And I think that's the problem where there's hesitancy to use those dollars because we knew the impetus of those bills was to finish the rail, not to provide RTD with general funding.

When you all are thinking about solving for the parochial mentality, how did you arrive at the nine five breakdown considering that the appointments would be at the whim of the governor. And I feel like that opens us to a bag of it depends on what the governor's transit policies, beliefs, values are. If the agency would still exist, our current governor would have bankrupted RTD in order to finish out fast tracks to the expense of folks who depend on services.

We looked at the the committee. They have a at the at the state level, they have a whole office that does appointees. I mean, they appoint, like, 1,600 people, I think, around the state, and they have a protocol. And the thing is we and this is where I'm still staying involved and Maria's staying involved with Matt Ball and those guys to make sure that the when they do this bill, it's written in a way where it kinda we're looking for those four. Remember all the things we mentioned, the BIPOC, the Latino, the disability community.

We need people with those skill sets who also have land use, finance. We're looking for a specific candidate, and only a short list would be given to the governor. So he can't he can't he can't go out and and and appoint his cousin. So he's gonna be given a very short list of people with those qualifications. And then it has to be verified by the by the house and senate. Correct?

No. Just the senate.

Just the senate.

But you've hit the nerve at the legislature right now. I think that's why the bill has now surfaced because local governments I I channel commissioner Molica in my ear when her comment was if all the appointments are gonna be made by the governor, then I'm not I'm not happy. I also would like to also point out that just having elected doesn't necessarily guarantee that you're gonna have somebody committed. I wanna remind you all that John Caldera was chairman of the board of RTD and served on the RTD board from Boulder for two year for eight years. So and he was about as anti transit as you could get.

Okay? But got himself elected for the purposes of trying to dismantle the RTD district, right, in that perspective. So I think you need to weigh that. Renee Chacon, who was on our committee and was incredibly good, would always say that election doesn't always guarantee representation because of depending on what what occurs happens. Of course, she just went through a tough race, and so she had, you know, prima face evidence of what happened with her.

But I think that your point is very clear. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out, because I served on the second judicial nominating commission for this district until December, how we could create a nominating process that would then guarantee that. It almost got into a committees assigning committees, creating committees. Right? But I think senator Ball is, from what I've known, is trying to look at that because I do think there are some legislators up there who say the governor can't local governments, this is our bread and butter. We are the ones that have to make sure that our people get to transportation or whatever. We need some guarantee that we're gonna be representative if you're gonna do appointed. So I do believe that that's the hot issue on the bill right now.

Great. Thank you. Well, I know that this is there's, like I said, a 100 page report. So, any additional follow-up? We've got a transportation committee that this would be a great place to have this conversation for a deeper dive on some of these things, but thank you again for joining us. And there are no items on consent, so we're adjourned. Thank you.