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 relations committee starts now.

Good morning. It is Tuesday, 04/21/2026. This is the governance and intergovernmental relations committee of Denver City Council. My name is Paul Cashman. I represent District 6 and, serve as vice chair of this committee. I'm in this seat because, our chair, Councilman Sawyer, will be presenting the first item on our agenda today. Before we get started, I believe we have a couple of folks online. Members Gilmore and Lewis, if you're there, please say hello. Alright. Hearing none, we'll welcome them they check-in.

And before we get started, I will start with introductions to my left. Councilwoman, Gonzalez

Thank you, mister chair. Good morning, everyone. Serena Gonzalez Gutierrez, one of your council members at large. Good morning. I'm to

Sanville, Northwest Denver District 1.

Good morning, Amanda Sargent, District 5. I was like, do I go yet? I don't know. Good morning. Diana Romero Campbell, Southeast Denver District 4.

Kevin Flynn, Southwest Denver's district two. Well, welcome everybody. As

I said, we'll start with the change to the DRMC regarding prevailing wage, followed up with a legislative update on, what's happening at the state house. We have a couple of items on consent that if they don't get pulled off during this meeting, we will move forward. With that, councilwoman Sora, the floor is yours.

Well, thank you very much.

So today, we're here to talk about a very straightforward change to the prevailing wage ordinance. So here's our agenda. Just as a little bit of background, the auditor's office has enforced the prevailing wage ordinance since 1950, so it's been around a long time. There were updates in 2001, 2008, and then significant updates in 02/2016 and 2023. What those updates did was clarify the scope, strengthen it, and then we in 2023, we moved enforcement from our office of human resources to Denver Labor in the auditor's office.

The goal of prevailing wage is to ensure that the government, because we're very large, very powerful, and have a lot of money, it doesn't feel like it sometimes, but that is perception. Right? We wanna make sure that we are not negatively influencing regional wages by requiring so we require that prevailing wages get paid on city invested projects because we wanna make sure that we're not sort of destabilizing the market. So that's kind of the purpose of the prevailing wage ordinance in general. A little bit of kind of 2016 background.

So the prevailing wage applies to work performed on city land, paid for by city funds, and is consistent with the federal Davis Bacon Act. So in 2016, and we have two council members who were here in 2016, so they can talk about this better than I can, it improved processes and kind of removed outdated references and then clarified the scope of the prevailing wage. And the auditor's office created a working group, had an entire conversation with industry experts, you know, trade union unions, etcetera, to make sure that stakeholders were at the table for this conversation. So a little aside here, over the last couple of weeks, I have been talking to former council members who were here in 2016 to sort of ask and a stab like, establish the a clear understanding for me of the legislative history of kind of what went on during that time. You can see the video.

It's on Legistar. You can go back and take a look at it. I did. It is it's really interesting. Every single council member I spoke to personally said exact almost exactly the same thing, which was I would I said, in 2016, when you had these conversations, you know, do you remember them and its specifics, and what was kind of your intention around what prevailing wage was meant to do and and whether city projects where the city was investing dollars on private land were meant to be included in the ordinance.

And every single one of them said, I don't really remember that far back, which is totally fair because if you asked me about what went down in 2020, I wouldn't be able to tell you that either. But every single one of them said, yes. That their intention was that for private projects where the city is investing dollars, prevailing wage should be paid. So you can see this is actually a slide from the sixteen auditor's office presentation where it also clearly shows, prevailing wage applies to work performed on city land or paid for by city funds consistent with the Davis Bacon Act. Then I talked a little bit about the 2023 update where we really wanted to make sure we were gonna streamline these processes because OHR is an independent agency of the city of Denver and has a lot of work on their plate in terms of job classifications and things like that, and prevailing wage is a really big area.

So what we decided to do was move prevailing wage to the auditor's office and and so that there could be an independent prevailing wage administrator in Denver Labor whose entire job it is is to focus on prevailing wage, make determinations. He has this person. It is a he in this role right now, but this person has the authority to, you know, make determinations, etcetera. And then there's a process that's very clear that's set in place for if there's a disagreement where a neutral third we can send we. The auditor's office, Denver Labor can send, the case to a neutral third party hearing officer to make a determination on it.

So, none of those processes kind of clearly existed before 2023, and we're really happy with the way that this has been working, so far. And I wanna just welcome Matt Fritzmauer, who I'm gonna ask to make any comments at the end of my presentation, but really appreciate you being here. So there is a kind of a dispute. There's a question that has arisen as to what is happening with Denver's prevailing wage. And this is actually there's, like, a very easy answer for how this happened.

Right? So since 2016, the ordinance has clearly applied to projects that are city owned or leased land and funded in whole or in part by the city. And since at least June 2018, the city's prevailing wage classification document, which you all have received, has made this clear. However, in June 2024, there there was a dispute that arose between the prevailing wage administrator administrator and and their their interpretation interpretation. Of whether it is private whether private projects on private lands that are receiving city dollars should have prevailing wage.

So this has been going on since June 2024. So we're just gonna clarify it. Several weeks ago, the city attorney's office issued a memo. You have all received that memo. And it says sort of two things. It says, number one, that the language of the ordinance isn't clear. So what we are doing here is we haven't added anything. We're just restructuring it so that in in the current ordinance, it's one long run on sentence, and we're just separating out the pieces of that sentence to make it more clear. So very straightforward. We haven't changed any of the language at all.

The second piece of the memo looks at the legislative history and talks a little bit about the legislative history. Based on the conversations I have had with council members who were here in 2016, the legislative history is pretty clear. But there is one space where this law did not apply because it didn't exist in 2016, and that is the affordable housing space because we didn't have a revenue stream that the city could invest in affordable housing until 2017. So that conversation was really never had, and that's really where this dispute is coming from, which is totally fair. Right?

It just we're a big city and things change over time, and this is one of those spaces where it changed, but we have to figure out what to do because we're a city and we have to treat everyone equally. So that's where kind of the dispute has come from and why we're here in front of you today to just clarify what is going on here. So with that, I am gonna open it up for questions, but I wanna just give Denver Labor thank you for being here, Matt. Will you introduce yourself? And then if you have any comments you wanna add?

Yes. Thank you, council member. Matt Fritzmauer, executive director of Denver Labor in the auditor's office. Thank you so much for that presentation. Think I the only thing I wanna add, it's it's a question I've gotten a few times in the last week or so, is is this going to make it vastly more difficult for nonprofits we wanna support to build affordable housing.

And something a lot of people don't know is that there is a residential classification for wages that applies in the Denver area set by the federal government for Davis Bacon. It applies to projects that we haven't done compliance on. I think you sent along one example, right? And we adopted that classification in 2018 specifically in response to this concern. Those rates in there are I mean, they're prevailing wage rates for the area and they are not enormously high.

15 of them are at Denver minimum wage or only a little bit above within a couple of dollars. And so we all wanna build affordable housing, and we and we want to fund that and make sure it happens. And this system that exists is already well suited to make that possible.

Thank you. So yeah. So we're here today to just send the ordinance back through with this clarification that we didn't change the language, but we've changed the structure of the language in the ordinance to clarify. And then we really, you know, just wanna be very clear that we do not it is not our intention to raise the cost of affordable housing. We do not want to raise the cost of of affordable housing.

There is a path forward where the cost of affordable housing is not raised. And so we, you know, we're comfortable and confident that we can move forward with this and that this is not an either or offer that we're putting on the table to you, that we can pay prevailing wage on private projects that our city invested, and we can build affordable housing in our city without raising the costs. And I do wanna just acknowledge Sue Powers who I'm so grateful for all of the conversation and ranting that she has listened to from me over the last few days because I I think she's really been a huge resource for me in terms of kind of talking through the potential options and how this could we could move forward with this path, and I think we're all in a really good place on it. So thank you very much for that. And with that, I think we have public comment before we open it up for questions.

Yes. We do. And before we get to public comment, we do have three people signed up. Welcome, councilwoman Gilmore is online. And let's see. We'll start public comment with the aforementioned Susan Powers. And if you step up to the mic and you'll have two minutes to speak.

Thank you. Susan Powers, I think this is exactly what Councilman Cashman said earlier, which is a clash in values. You want both. You want to pay prevailing wage and you want affordable housing, you want it to happen at the same time. So it shouldn't be an eitheror.

What we were talking about over the last couple of days was really looking at a project, one that was in the residential category, which is four stories or below, and there are a lot of them being built in the city. I took the one that we were most familiar with in the last year, which was the Warren Village project on Alameda. We had and we did not it wasn't a prevailing wage, this conversation never happened then it would have added 3%. I went back to the contractor who I think is the most knowledgeable about that particular band of construction, And he said it would cost 3% more. And when we broke it down, what he said is that it's true that there are some subcontractors that are paying above that now.

But what's happening is that when you impose the requirements of the documentation on contractors, a whole bunch of them walk away because they don't want to deal with it. And then you have a smaller group of people who are bidding on it and it gets more expensive. So that was kind of a real life experience for all of us to hear of what's going on in the market right now. So if you took Warren Village, which had a 32,000,000 construction cost and you added 3% of that, it's real money, it's $600,000 and so what we have talked about was looking at what other things can you look at in the development stack or the development budget and say where would the city money go to? The city money in this case is less than 10% of the total construction cost I mean the total development cost.

Still a really important piece of the stack, but it's not paying for 50% or 80% or I think it's 10%. So we looked at the soft costs and said, know, from this point forward, if all of the city money went towards the design, the financing costs, the permit fees, the long list, the lawyers, and then the lawyers, and then all of the consultants that are involved with it, they're not subject to prevailing wage, and you'd still be able to get an affordable housing project done without it costing any more.

Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Second up on our list is Maoith Basho. I do not see him in the room. Third, last but not least, Jonathan Capelli.

Hi, everyone. I actually thought I hadn't made it in time, so glad to be here. So I'm John Thiappelli, Neighborhood Development Collaborative. We're a coalition of affordable housing providers in Metro Denver. We haven't had too much time to respond or react to this and understand the point of what you guys are trying to accomplish with this.

I guess there's three things to keep in mind, some of which Sue spoke to. One is just that there is an increased cost. We're still working to calculate exactly how much it is depending on the size of the project. That increases the amount of subsidy needed per project. It does one of three things.

It either increases the subsidy needed per project which means more money requested from the city or it means increasing the incomes in the project in order to pay for that gap or it means fewer units. So that's one thing to consider. The other is just that there's also a bit of a comparative thing going on. I haven't been able to look into every single county around Denver, but it doesn't seem like any other communities are doing this. So there's a bit of a comparative cost for finding labor for folks that could work here in Denver and deal with a whole bunch of increased administrative costs, etc, versus working outside of Denver instead.

Folks, as my membership has said, that in the past when they've tried to contract labor for projects that needed Davis Bacon wages, which I'm using a shorthand for the prevailing wages the city would adopt, it's really difficult to find some of that labor because they don't want to do the administrative burden of of implementing those regulations. So there's a lot more we want to say on this. We've not had much time to look into it. We're just hoping that there's an opportunity to work with you guys to figure out a path that maybe does not go as far down this route because it is a cost. And as Sue said, it puts it puts two different values against each other when we'd like to find a way to make those values work together, labor equity and affordability. So sorry for going over time. Thank you.

Thank you, Jonathan. Appreciate that a lot. Before I do have several people in the queue, but before we get started with that, for our viewers, can you put a dollar sign to prevailing wage as opposed to minimum wage, etcetera?

Yes and no. So I think there are over a 180 different classifications under the prevailing wage ordinance, and how much somebody is entitled to be paid depends on the project and its classification. I mentioned residential earlier. We have three others building heavy and highway and also on the job they're doing. So a carpenter gets one rate, a common laborer gets another rate, a millwright gets another rate.

In general, prevailing wages are they're decent wages. I mean, I I think this law is really based on the idea that the people who are literally building the city with taxpayer dollars should be able to afford to live in the city and thrive in the city. And so minimum wage is a good first step, I think, for a lot of these classifications. Prevailing wage, it's a middle class wage.

So minimum wage right now hovers in the $20 an hour range. Give me a a ball park. Again, is this $50 an hour, $30 an hour? I understand it. It varies.

Yeah. Sure. I I can give you a little bit of information. The prevailing wage is based on a base rate of pay and then fringe benefits. And so we calculate the value, the hourly value of fringe benefits, sick leave, vacation, health care contributions, four zero one k, things like that.

And and all of that entitlement together is the total package. It's what's called the total package. There are more than a dozen classifications in the residential category that are between 18 pardon me, 1929 and I think $21 thereabouts. And then some of the more skilled positions are doing better. Electricians, for example, their base rate of pay under residential classification, $33 an hour.

And then the fringe benefits, they're entitled to 12 to 14 or 15. So as you get into the jobs that require something like a four year apprenticeship, the highly skilled work, The rates get higher, but many of them at this point on an annual basis rise because the minimum wage does.

So as as I heard you say before, minimum wage will help you get by. Prevailing wage may help you build a better life.

Yes. And I think that there's another important component to this, which is many, many, many contractors strive to do the right thing and follow the law. But we also know that construction is a very high risk industry, and so proactive government enforcement is good. My prevailing wage teams, they aren't just enforcing the prevailing wage. They're finding misclassification. They're finding overtime violations, no paid sick leave. We're investigating retaliation that came about on a prevailing wage job site visit. And so there's this whole slate of wage violations that happens, typically not from the general contractor or the first tier subcontractors, but further down that chain of contracting.

Thank you very much. We'll go to our queue. Councilwoman Gilmore, if you're there, I believe your hand was up earlier.

Well, good morning. Sorry to not be there in person, but wanna make sure everybody can hear me.

Yes. You're good.

Oh, very good. Thank you. Well, I really appreciate the opportunity with councilwoman Sawyer and councilwoman Torres, to work on, the wage theft ordinance, that we've passed in the city and moving it over to Denver labor, etcetera. But I wanted to give a little bit more legislative intent history since, as you know, I was elected to Denver City Council in 2015. And so, prior to being elected to Denver City Council, I was the executive director of a nonprofit organization that worked with, the National Park Service, with US Fish and Wildlife to, pay city kids to work outdoors and learn about science and natural resources.

And so I applied for a lot of environmental protection agency, grants, etcetera. And so I, before getting elected, was well versed in prevailing wages and Davis Bacon and the requirement to pay those salaries, those wages on jobs, especially jobs that are for the government, because of, our large capacity. And I wanna remind folks that we are talking about the people who build our city, the construction workers who are also very vulnerable to wage theft, which is legislation that all of us have voted on and support. And so, prior to getting elected, I knew well about Davis Bacon and prevailing wage. And so in 2015, we, started really working with the carpenters who they were last night at Denver City Council, Phil Par Weidner, to talk about, advocating for good wages and rightful wages that are not exorbitant.

And so it it you know, these are wages that are through the federal government, are approved by government, state. We all follow it. And so for Denver to not follow that, that is super concerning because that is not our value. And so, in 2016, councilman Lopez then, now clerk and recorder Lopez, brought me in and said, you know, hey. You need to learn about wage theft.

You need to understand how hard it is for workers in Denver who, you know, live here, who send their kids to DPS school and are really struggling, and we need to create a space to listen to them. So we started monthly meetings around wage theft and how to, address this issue. And so that was back in 2016, 2017. And then clerk Lopez, his time was, getting short. He was turned out.

And so, in 2019, when councilwoman Sawyer got elected and councilwoman Torres got elected in 2019, I brought them in to the conversation with the carpenters, with all of the unions in Denver, with all of the workers to talk about this issue and how hard it was for them to even get fair wages, to even get paid because somebody would have them do work, and they'd work for two weeks. They'd work for a month, and then they'd up and leave, and they couldn't find them. And so these are real issues and real stories of people in our community. And so I want to remind for the record that on the council with council with clerk Lopez was myself, councilwoman Kenich, councilwoman Ortega. So any question about the legislative intent not requiring affordable housing projects with city dollars not having to pay prevailing wage is untrue, and I am a legislator.

And for the executive branch in the administration to be insinuating this is very untrue and false because I lived the intent. And I remember I remember it all crystal clear. And so I've also asked clerk Lopez to hop on to clear the record on this requirement. And I'm happy to work with any housing organizations, nonprofits to help fill that gap, but wanted to give a little bit of the history. And so thank you for, a little bit of time from an elephant on the council, but I think it's important for the record so we don't have to do like this on the floor.

We can do committee work in committee. Thank you all.

Thank you for your context. First up in questions, council president Sandoval.

Thank you. So just want to say thank you for the work on all of this. And Sue, thank you for your work and looking into the questions. I think both things can be true. We do want fair wages for our workers a 100%. And we also wanna we are we all know we're in affordable housing crisis. We are. I'm living it day after day after day. I think every single person around this table understands that. So is there anyone from host who could speak to what we talked about?

Hi. Awesome. So I need to do is to for host. Right? It's gap financing. It's part of the capital stack. And what we'd have to do is figure out the back end on invoicing on what would actually have to pay labor, what would not. Is that accurate?

Part of what so I'm Laya Mitchell from the Department of Housing Stability. Thank you. I think part of what where this clarification has come from is is when and when it does not apply to projects. And so I think part of what Host is concerned about is the increased cost, including that reporting requirement. So the way that invoices are done when and when it doesn't apply.

And so, for example, when we invest in, for example, soft costs versus hard costs, when we invest when the dollars are going, you know, there's a part of the way that we make investments that are really in exchange for affordability requirements, and so we're not directly designating funds for different components of the project. I think part of what we need clarity moving forward is really where it applies and where it doesn't. For example, when we do service funding for a project, does that require prevailing wage? If we allocate the allowance of private activity bonds, does that kick in? Does land acquisition kick in?

Or is it really are we focusing on when host dollars are being allocated via a contractor to construction costs, in which case they're actually reimbursing us for construction costs and having clarity about, like, that when we're talking about prevailing

Absolutely, right. So it's a great question, and I think it's a good point, and I think that that's exactly the point. Right? Davis Bacon is very clear on what the 185 job classifications are, that are covered under prevailing wage. And so there's the the our law, which has been here since 1950, has it is very clear that we follow Davis Bacon. Right? We follow the four classifications. We follow the 185 job classifications under those four classifications. Bless you. So they're invoicing for work that is not covered work.

Davis Bacon and prevailing wage ordinance does not apply. That's it's very straightforward. There's actually no drama here at all. Davis Bacon is real clear. So I think the the knee jerk reaction that I have experienced from the affordable housing community is fair because it is, you know, something that needs to be discussed because there is this gap because it didn't exist in 2016 when this when the law was updated.

But at the same time, there is a very reasonable, very straightforward path here that gets us both prevailing wages on construction and on whether it's a city owned project or whether we just invest in it and affordable housing based on invoicing for costs that are not covered work, that are not covered under Davis Bacon.

So my question back to you is does that provide clarity? I mean, I think it's complicated because we're invoicing. Right? You guys are on the back end of invoicing. But it seems like if there was clarity amongst the affordable housing developers, like, hey. So when I was talking to councilman Sawyer yesterday, I was talking about environmental, environmental. All the surveying costs, all of the things that come to build an affordable house, a project, any project. Does that provide you all clarity? Because what I think both things can be true. Again, I'm gonna say this.

We just provided a developer or whoever it is, $70,000,000 of tax dollars to build a sock a soccer stadium. I think that should have prevailing wage, period. End stop. It should have prevailing wage. Now when it comes to building 20 units of affordable housing, some of it should have prevailing wage, 100%.

I agree with that. If you're building if you're a drywaller, all of these things where we've had wage theft in our communities of color. And at the same time, I believe that we could be able to have loans and still be able to finance the loans to be able to have gap funding because we're not the primary financer. We're a gap funding Right. To get the project to the finish line and to have deed restricted affordable units.

Mhmm. So what does it need to take for you all to get comfortable? Because it feels like this law has been on the books for a long time. And for us to not to have clarity, do you need, like, a, like, a city attorney to go through all of those 100 jobs and say, hey. This is when you invoice towards prevailing wage and not, or how can we work with that? Matt?

Yeah. I so so I I do wanna just reiterate what council member Sawyer said about the classifications that aren't included. So so you mentioned soft costs. You know, there's no architecture classification that we enforce. It's not the people that the law is concerned with. In terms of getting clarity, if if you all have a few minutes to talk after, I'll give you my cell phone number, and we can work our way through these piece by piece. And and we're, like, we really wanna be partners with you. We just wanna be part of your process and not have ours bypassed.

Yeah. Absolutely understood. And I would just say, like, I think we very much understand the interconnection between living wages and our, you know, fair wages for our community members and the need for affordable housing. You know, some of those workers may may be living in affordable housing. Right?

Like, it's a holistic system, and we definitely want to look at it from that point of view. I think some of what might be challenging, and we can talk through sort of when it applies and doesn't, I think as written currently where it says financing in affordable in financing in projects or financed by the city, that's where there's just there is uncertainty. And we have sought interpretation from the city attorney's office, and I think there's been some conflicting views, right, about what that is. So I do think we need to maybe take a little more time and make sure that we're really clear in what goes into the ordinance so that six months from now or a year from now, not sort of having this conversation again about what we did if we followed the ordinance correctly or not. So that Yeah.

I just I wanna just Go ahead. Too.

I don't think financing means that they're going to invoice us for that loan. Not financing. I bought a house and I have to suddenly pay my real estate agent, like, wages. It's it's not in the law. I mean, I think have you read the law for the wages? Not our this law, the other law that literally calls out all of the labor? Have you have we I

mean, I've looked at it. I haven't I don't I don't know the categories to the degree that the auditor's office

has that's the hard part

Yeah.

Is that we haven't had you all sit down with the city attorney with the auditor's office and clearly delineate that. Because I think once you see that, I think it it will work. Because you're right. Some the affordable housing we're building, in my personal opinion, is for these workers a lot of times. Yep. Okay.

Yeah. And I will just respond and say, like, again, I wanna be very clear. We're not changing a word of this ordinance. This ordinance has existed since 2016. All we're doing is changing the structure of it because the way it's currently written in the DRMC is one long run on sentence, and the way it is written under our proposed is just to break apart that sentence into very clear lines so that the one piece of the city attorney's interpretation in the memo we received is taken off the table. She said it wasn't clear the way it was written. We disagree, but you know what? That's okay. We can reasonable people can disagree all the time. We're the legislative branch of government.

We just go in and fix the structure. No big deal. Right? I think that the challenge here is that the city attorney's office is executing on the direction of the city attorney, and that is not the direction that city council in 2016 went. It's not the direction city council in 2023 went, and it's not the direction that this city council feels strongly about.

So here we are because we're the legislative branch of government. This is what we do. Right? Two things in that memo to address. Number one, unclear lack of clarity in the plain language.

Great. So now there is no lack of clarity in the plain language that has existed since 2016 and was an edit to an an ordinance from 1950. And two, the legislative history, which does have a gap based on the fact that this law was updated in 2016, and we did not have an affordable housing fund until 2017. So this wasn't an issue that existed before. So, like, I think that the concerns that Host is sharing are valuable and real concerns and reasonable.

I also think that they have had this information since 2024. It's 2026. So there were two years worth of time to sort out what this looked like and educate themselves. If they have not done it, that's not something I can control. That's a different branch of government than the one I'm in. What can we control as Denver City Council members? We can control fixing the language so it's clear and clarifying the legislative intent. That's what we're doing here today.

Yes. So thank you, mister chair. I would just ask that you all, before this comes to the floor, just have a conflict meeting so that on the floor I agree with councilman Gilmore that we don't wanna do committee work on the in the on the floor, but it would be nice for you all to conference and figure this out with your attorneys because I I believe both of them can be true. I really do think that we can get through this, and I think it is a really needed aspect of of what we have to govern in our laws, and it's part of my values is paying people living wages a 100%. Yeah.

I could I one more sort of request is just that we have projects who are in our pipeline who have accepted or are in the process of accepting host funding with an understanding of kind of our current operating. And so if there's a way to build into here either some time or a window before it becomes effective so that we're not sort of having commitments in place with existing partners who are planning for an added expense?

I think that we are happy to talk about that and happy to loop up with everyone. When something is in committee, our bar for voting on it is, is this ready to be considered by the full council? Right? That doesn't mean that we can't make any changes after it goes through committee. It just means that we need to have a conversation with our fellow council members about any changes that do get made, which we're happy to do. So I don't think we have a problem with that at all. I think I feel like we shouldn't even be here today. I feel like this should have been a conversation between host, the mayor's office, and the auditor's office and not gotten city council involved. But after the memo that came two weeks ago, there is really only one way to fix this, and it's for us to just do what we're doing today. So that's unfortunate.

I can't control that piece, the all those moving pieces. What I can control is what we're here doing today.

Thank you. Thank you, mister chair.

Thank you. Next up, councilwoman Alphedrez and then councilman Flynn.

Thank you, committee chair. I appreciate this being brought. It's something that's background is construction. And as a small business, we had to pay prevailing wages on everything, and I think it does make things more expensive. It also elevates you as a contractor to act in a higher and better way. And it was very frustrating to have to compete with other construction companies that don't hold those values, that don't pay those wages. And so I think it will make our housing more expensive, and we need to think and talk about that. But that is a reality, and I think it makes our roads more expensive. It makes our sidewalks more expensive. But isn't that why this was put in place in the first place?

Because those taxpayer dollars are going to part of the reason we talk about this is because of the economic development that these projects also give and those working those jobs that are able to to be given because we're providing these. And so I'm curious about how another thing I just wanted to uplift is that, for example, with the Jewel Bridge in my district, we accepted federal funding on that bridge, then the costs went up. So I think that is something that will be anticipated. So just bringing that up and then for workers to have some stability. So it's not if I'm working across the street at Warren Village, I'm making this dollar amount.

But if I'm putting up the sidewalks in front of it, I I'm gonna make this amount. And I think that has been really hard on the construction workforce. Another issue is that there are bad actors out there, and I think you spoke to that. And a lot of them are in residential. And those contractors that say, I'm not gonna bid on this project because it's too much work are saying, I'm not gonna bid on this project because I don't wanna pay.

I don't want anybody checking on how much I'm gonna pay. And so I wanna uplift that as well and validate that. And then lastly, I will just say that there is some frustration with the process even in the projects that we have prevailing wages already. One of the things and maybe that's something that we can work to clarify. So for example, my background is concrete construction.

And so you have laborers, you have carpenters, you have concrete masons, you have iron workers. And one of the things that could be a very unexpected cost is when you have a laborer on a job site, for example, moving rebar. And all of a sudden, they're classified as an iron worker, which is not the same. So I would ask that that be part of the consideration looking at this is how are we classifying workers so that somebody that's dedicated their life to learning a trade like ironwork that's an ironworker isn't getting the same wages as a laborer who just walked on the job looking for a job for the day. So that's the only one thing that I would really like to see if this could help address our it looks like you might have a response to that.

Jensen, I think your experience would be really valuable. We have I think it's around a 70 page clarification document that that goes through everything and and how we interpret and enforce and evaluate. And I'm happy to send that to you if you don't have it. I would I think we would all really value sitting down with you and hearing more about these concerns because because of your experience before you were on council.

Thank you. I appreciate it. That's all I had. Thank you. Thank you, committee.

Thank you. Just a quick time check. I'd like to call a stop at twenty after, if possible. Gives us about seven minutes. Councilmember Flynn. Well, thank you,

Mr. Chair. Councilwoman, you said during the presentation that there was a path forward which I took to mean to address the division between the two values that we're dealing with here. And can you elaborate a little bit on what that that

forward is?

Yeah. So I think Sue's testimony really elaborated on it. Yeah. And so I think, you know, Sue mentioned this to me yesterday, and I I think it was a a really tough but fair path forward that if the city is not paying for covered work, then the prevailing wage ordinance doesn't apply. Right?

So if there are spaces where hosts can invest where it's not covered work, then that is a that is a fair balance to give us both moving forward. Right? Because if we're not paying for the construction piece, which is where prevailing wages apply, then prevailing wage does not apply, but we're we're still in within the confines of the law. And I think that that's not perfect. I think that there are some challenges with that, but I also think that we don't want to set up a situation where we have competing values.

And so if that is how we move forward in a way that makes sense to not raise the cost of construction and not diminish the ability to build affordable housing in our community and also ensures that we are paying people the wages that they deserve and also recognizing that the best way to get people out poverty is to pay them Yeah. Then I think that we are in exactly the the right imperfect spot to move forward with this.

And I like that. Sue had mentioned that the project that you looked at, Warren Village, it was about a 3% delta. Mhmm. Then I'm I'm wondering if we have a view to some of our other projects and what the impacts because it it would obviously would vary.

Yeah. So

you get as granular as you were talking about separating

Sue's the expert on this one, so I'm going to let her answer that.

Was based on a Susan conversation I had with a contractor who is building probably half of the affordable housing developments that are going on right now. Yes. Yep. It was across the projects. And you know, that's basically the data we used. And then and then we, you know, we compared it for with with what the actual impact would be. Okay. So

And your experience is similar?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We we have another project where that's yeah. One that's that's not finalized yet, but it's it's about 3%.

Yeah. Alright. You.

Could I

have anything there? Sure. Just

from a host, we

did a little bit of we didn't have time to do, a deep dive in the impact, but we looked at two different projects, and one was a 3% impact and the other was a 9% impact. And part of the higher impact are projects that are in the heavy or the building category where the wages increase, so those that are five stories or higher seem that they would have a higher impact or wage jump. And then our small projects, are nonprofit community based groups that maybe don't have the reporting component, have more of an impact from the compliance side or the compliance reporting side.

And I will just follow-up to that to say I also spoke with Bill Mosier about this, who builds large developments. And so huge shout out to Bill to walk me through what this looks like on the much larger development perspective. Right? And this would be things construction that fits into the larger classification as opposed to the residential classification. So they're prevailing wage, two different classifications based on the size of the job, and and the the size of the job also indicates who's gonna be bidding on it.

Right? So when we're looking at that commercial construction rate, we are looking at very large construction firms that have the ability to essentially build those kinds of things into their pro formas from the very beginning. So there's a and and are moving across a number of different projects to be able to sort of absorb those costs in different areas. So so there's it's a great question. There's sort of two different classifications of what we're talking about here, and when we're looking at those commercial ones, I think that's a totally different story because we're not working with the same people, the same companies, as opposed to the residential classifications ones where this is real.

Right? These are they do not have multiple projects across the city that they can absorb each other's costs and things like that. So our focus is more on the resident is on the residential side because that is a that is a different calculation and conversation versus those larger commercial projects and the people who build those.

Great. Thank you. Clerk Lopez has joined us. I'd like to give him a couple of minutes to get his perspective. Clerk Lopez, can you hear me?

Deal. Deal. Floor is yours, sir. Yeah.

Apologize for not being able to be there in person for the background noise, but, you know, I was asked to, opine, you know, my time as a councilman when this came in front of us. You know, my the intent and the discussion and support that I gave for the affordable housing policy was, in fact, to try to try to combat poverty in this city. Right? And part of that equation is making sure that we not only have affordable housing, but have a livable wage because we wouldn't have an affordable housing crisis if we had a living wage for folks all throughout Denver. And so prevailing wage was a was a big part of that and making sure that the two coexist and that affordable housing is is is built, not exempting prevailing wage, but including prevailing wage, including the practices that, you know, we we wanted to see help elevate folks out of poverty in Denver, keep people in their homes, keep people in Denver.

Well, I appreciate you taking the time, mister Clark, and appreciate your perspective. No further questions from counsel. This is an action item. If someone would like to

Can you just add anything from Please. If

I may, I mean, I I think it's important to say out loud that what Host does and what we do, it's all anti poverty work. Right? You you referenced an interconnected system. I completely agree with you. And so if what we're concerned about are increased affordable housing costs, I hear that, but it's also increased wages for working class people, many of whom are low wage. And so I just wanna stress the human element here of when people make more money, it's the most effective way to make them less economically insecure. And they're healthier and they're happier and they're less anxious. They can go to the doctor. They can have stability. They're less likely to commit suicide.

And so this is money that, in our opinion, is money well spent. Even if it's going to raise the cost of these small affordable housing projects by 3%, it will have an extraordinary impact on, in the next few years, thousands of workers in Denver.

I agree with you wholeheartedly. It sounds like to move this council president Sandoval, seconded by council member Flynn. Any need for a vote? No need for a vote. We will pass this on to the full council. Thank you. As we transition for our state ledge update, councilwoman Sawyer, are you staying down that end or are coming

All right. Well, for the second part of our gov committee today, we're gonna do our state legislative update, and so really appreciate PolicyMatters team being here. We don't have the full PolicyMatters team here today because, the RTD bill is on thirds in the senate right now as we speak, and so they're there doing what we pay them to do. So, really appreciate you guys being here. Do you wanna take a second introduce yourselves?

Yeah. Of course. Hi, everyone. Katie Hancock with

the PolicyMatters team. Jimena Alumni with also with PolicyMatters.

Adam Paul with the mayor's office.

Fantastic. Why don't you guys take it away?

So I'll go ahead

and just kick us off. Madam chair, council members, as always, thank you. Just a quick reminder, as our committee works, we have two council members. Council members Sawyer and Gizal Scoutierrez, and we have two members from the mayor's team, myself, Tim Hoffman, and Becky Studemeyer does an incredible job supporting us. So as we start to move in to where we're at so far this second, we have about twenty two days left, so things are starting to move fast.

Over six sixty five bills, resolutions, other things have been introduced, the city's ran through about 175 different bills through the agencies through our processes. To give you a little bit of flavor, in 2025, I think we engaged on about 80 bills total, plus or minus. You can see where we're at today. We're a total of 53 bills, 19 in support, 10 in opposition, 14 amend for monitor, and position ended at six. And that's where we've been able to see different outcomes to amend bills or work with bills to remove those and have them in a better spot to where the city wouldn't have negative effects.

This slide here kinda shows more in-depth the different areas where we have engaged on the support side, in the monitor side, and then the amend side. And when we go into amend, as a quick note, the HB twenty six zero one zero zero one, also known as HOME, former Yigbee, did pass and was signed by the governor on a threetwenty five. Last slide will show kind of the opposition piece. And I think as you start to go down this list, we've been pretty judicious in what we've opposed. And as you can see, some of these ones that we have opposed have actually died.

And there's a new one, s B26062, I think, died yesterday in committee. So these are we we take it pretty seriously when we're gonna come out in opposition, so they have severe impacts on the city. And I think we've been pretty successful. And then those six that I mentioned, these are the ones where we've ended positions. We've been able to get clarifications, legislative declarations, and certain amendments to help put these bills in a better spot. So we're here today. Oh, before I jump there, we have our counsel only. Yes.

I'll just quickly cover these. As you all know, these are, bills that counsel has taken position on on our own. And we've made this apparent to the Denver delegation. And so we have house bill 10 o five, which is the worker protection collective bargaining. The bill eliminates the requirement under the labor peace act to conduct a second election to form a union, and it also requires employees and employers and employees to bargain in good faith.

That bill currently just passed senate appropes this morning and was referred to the committee of the whole for second reading in the senate. So it's in its second chamber. This was the same bill that last session the governor vetoed. And it passed both chambers last year, and then it was vetoed by the governor. So we're, I guess, anticipating what will happen next on that if it makes it through the senate.

The other bill, senate bill 42, has to do with TABER, the taxpayers' bill of rights. This bill is really trying to keep some some of our tax money in the state's budget by changing how certain funds are classified under TABER. This is it's a it's in its still in its first chamber. It just passed senate appropriations this morning and was also referred to committee of the whole for second reading. So it still has a path.

It still has some time to get through, and I think folks are really hopeful for that because that will help hopefully create some relief when it comes to essential services that we're they're cutting a lot, right, this year because of the state budget. So that's those two bills.

Thank you, counselor. Alright. So now we'll jump into a couple bills of interest. We have basically thirteen twenty six and then senate bill one fifty. Thirteen twenty six is the PUC sunset, which looks to reauthorize the PUC for an additional eleven years taking into September 2037.

And on a high level, the summary of kind of this legislation is that deals with governance administration, energy policy, affordability. They also regulate ride shares and contracting common carriers, rail and transit telecommunications, and small operators and national natural gas and other kind of entities. So this is a big bill and something I think we're somewhat excited about because we have an opportunity through our CASR folks to look at some amendments. And so I'll turn to our lobby team if you have anything else you wanna add to this, and then we have our CASR team here to to give a highlight of of some of the amendments, if that's okay.

Just wanna add that we have shared our requested amendments with sponsors, and we are working to get a meeting to discuss the Denver requests. It is scheduled to be up in committee later this week, so we are hoping that we'll be able to sit down with the sponsors before then.

Travis?

So before we move on to our next sorry. My brain is fried here. Before we move on to our next slide slide, that's the word I was looking for, you guys. Why don't we just do questions on this one and talk about this one? And, Johnny, did you wanna add anything from the CASR perspective? And if you wanna come up to the table and or if you wanna stand the microphone, I don't care either way. You're good. But will you please just introduce yourself and kinda talk us through what where CASR is on this? This one is confusing and complicated a little bit for us because we don't do this all day every day. So I think it'd be really valuable to just sort of talk through what it is we're asking for as a city and why we're in amend.

Absolutely. Hi, everyone. Jonathan Rogers. Call me Johnny, deputy executive director of climate action, sustainability, and resiliency. The reason why we're engaged on this one, you know, the public utilities commission is our primary venue to help influence, Denver's energy mix.

You know, we wanna make sure that we're provided with affordable, reliable, and increasingly pollution free energy where and when it's needed to support sustainable economic development and, the livelihood of all, Denverites. The PUC sunset reauthorization, you know, that being the entity through which we're able to participate, gain access to information, and help to influence, the nature of the system. It provides the opportunity where we can make administrative adjustments to different rules and procedures that help to govern that access for franchisees and other interveners in PUC proceedings and what information we can gain access to and ultimately retain. Through participation in those proceedings, we gain access to certain public interest utility data such as where RXL Energy's facilities located that serve Denver and that exist within our right of way. How is energy flowing through those systems?

You know, when are we hitting peak capacity capacity on substations or feeders or transformers? What are the age of their pipelines or things that are delivering, gas to customers so that we can estimate? When might they be due for replacement? And how do we make sure we don't replace those systems with things that can continue to perpetuate the use of fossil fuels so that we can have a managed transition to those affordable and reliable and non polluting energy options. Now at the end of certain proceedings related to distribution system planning for the electric grid or gas infrastructure planning on the gas system, we'll gain access to highly confidential maps, or other, very valuable pieces of information that we are legally only permitted to use for the purposes of that proceeding and then we delete and we no longer have access to.

So we can't say work internally to do an assessment and look ahead for the next ten years of, hey, which neighborhoods are due for gas line replacements that we can target with our climate protection dollars, climate protection fund dollars to support in pursuit of electrification or other alternatives. So we're engaging in these proceedings effectively with one tied behind our back because we gain access, and then we have to rescind that access and we can't use it to be ready, for the next cycle. Our amendments relate to exactly that. If we wanna be able to retain this information that Denver already gets access to by being a franchisee and a participant in these proceedings. Now we have engaged with other local jurisdictions, city Of Boulder, County Of Boulder, Colorado communities for climate action, Colorado municipally, and others.

We've all recognized the same problem. Our amendments, you know, we hope to take it one step further where simply the act of being a franchisee or being one of these local government entities should provide access to that same data. Now we think that, you know, if a government is trusted to gain access to this information by being a participant at the PUC, why shouldn't we have access to it to enable system planning and coordination with our utility providers so we can make informed decisions together that affect our constituents and help to support the provision of a reliable utility service. So that that's what we're hoping to accomplish with this. I think the main question we get asked is, why doesn't Excel just give you this data or why don't you get it through the franchise?

I assure you we have asked. I assure you we have requested it through the franchise. But if they say, no, we don't want to give it to you, our only recourse would be to say, well, we're not going to sign the franchise agreement and blow up the whole deal. That is a decidedly very, very bad outcome for the city. We have far more to gain by being a franchisee with access to the PUC process than we do holding ourselves hostage when we have alternative means to gain access to this information. And this would be one such opportunity through our partnership with the folks at the legislature to continue to make sure that us and others have the information that we need to make informed decisions.

Everybody get all that? Thank you. Johnny, that was really like, you summed up an incredibly complicated stance in, like, a minute and a half. So you're amazing. Thank you for doing that. Questions on this one before we move on? Okay. We'll keep you posted. But right now, we are in amend, and Kasar is leading conversations about amendments, and we really appreciate all the work that you're doing on that. So thank you.

Of course. Reach out anytime.

Awesome. Appreciate your help.

Madam chair, I think this is the one you really wanted to get to Senate bill twenty six one five.

I'll never

hear the

word RTB again. LB White is doing all that. So,

you know, as we've we've talked about and we talked about this last year and we're back here this year in this piece of legislation that's come forward with kind of taking recommendations from the RTD accountability committee. We had a little presentation and trying to implement those statutorily. And few of the high level on this would be disability services study, RTD board redistricting, RTU board composition. And so it's certainly a polarizing and hot topic for the metro area and for the district as well for the city and county of Denver because this has a lot of impacts to the city. As of yesterday, I think there were eight amendments that passed.

We'd been engaged in some of that process. And just to share, if I might, the three kind of thing, main ones, we moved ridership, which the ridership provision would have based the district drawing upon ridership, which would have enhanced leadership potentials for Denver as we have the largest amount of ridership investment infrastructure. Second one was there were two Doctor. Cogs seats that would then recommend people to the governor's office for approval. One of those seats was pulled.

And then I think the third one came through our discussions, especially through your input counsel, on a review or a sunset provision that went through at fifteen years. So that's where we're at. And we certainly have our experts here at the table and all of you as experts who've been engaged and have been a part of this for a long time. So Madam Chair, happy to turn this over to you to kind of guide the discussion on on where we want to go and how we'd like to go.

Yeah. No. David, do you want to take a minute and introduce yourself and just talk through Dottie's perspective on this?

Sure. David Krutzinger, transit director for the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure. Similar to what the mayor's office said, we're in current amend strategy. We'd still like to see a stronger, clearer connection to ridership because we do have the majority of the ridership in the region and have representation that's more assured for Denver by having one of the Doctor. Cox seats be a Denver seat.

Mamie, do you want to

Yeah, do you guys want to

anything? Yeah. So it is scheduled to be up on, third readings today. The, senate brought a bunch of buildup on second, special order second readings. So it should be up in the next, I would say, probably half hour. We do expect it to pass on the senate floor, and then after that, it would move over to the house. So we are working on engaging members of our house delegation on our concerns and what we would like to see come out of this legislation.

Yeah. And I really appreciate that. I will just say, I know it is there are really the council would like to move to oppose, right, on this. I think that there is the real possibility that this bill is gonna pass, and so staying in amend to ensure that we're at the table having conversations, especially in the house as things continue to move, is really, really valuable. So I really wanted to say thank you to all of the view council members for, you know, all of the phone calls that we had late last week to agree to be willing to stay in amend as we continue to have these conversations.

I think we'll see what happens, and we continue to reassess, like, five times a day every day about this, which is great. So we'll keep you posted on what comes next, but I do, you know, I do think it is valuable for us, at least for the moment, to stay and amend and see if we can amend back in the ridership piece, which would get us where we need to go. I will also say very clearly and loudly, I am not thrilled with the way that this has been set up at the state. I think it is incredibly unfair that Denver, and to some extent, Aurora, as the two, you know, sort of capital and attached city, two of the three largest cities in the state of Colorado and the only two that are in the the two biggest that are in the RTD District have been sort of set up, in opposition to the suburban cities. I think that that's unfair.

I think that it is unrealistic, and I think that if we continue to behave that way as a state, we're never gonna get where we need to go because we all need to work together to get there. So I find that piece of this really, really frustrating. That's why the ridership piece ended up coming out at the end of last week, and it is it is not I think we can all agree that we want our the RTD board to change, but setting pitting us against each other isn't the way to do that. And so I I'm personally very frustrated about that. Thanks for letting me get on my soapbox. Council member Flynn?

Oh, thank you. Could one of you at least, Adam, David, talk a little bit higher level about how this fixes anything at RTD, just changing the butts in the seats and reducing the number of seats, how does it get people back on buses and back on the rail, which is the biggest problem they face? I don't see how this addresses any of that. It's just governance. Yeah. And thank you.

And I wanna go back to one thing real quick just so the committee knows that the mayor's office is out lockstep with you on this. So we're we're in amend if we need to go to oppose. We're we're we're there. We understand and wanna try to make this the best. Yeah.

I think you kind of answered your question with your question. There are fundamental issues that are much larger than just representation. It has to do with dollars and accessibility frequency and and these other things that really help to build the system back out. I think where they're coming from is because it's grown so large and the voices may have diminished a little bit as far as how many seats there are, this shrinkage gives a better opportunity maybe for a smaller board that's more specialized due to the requirements based upon finance. So I think that's where they were going with that. David, I don't know if you want to kind Where of add to we put

the deck chairs on the right hand and how many chairs.

That's right.

Yeah. I agree with that, that maybe we gain a little bit of professionalism by the appointees, but that's not guaranteed either. There would at least be some vetting with those folks. It doesn't solve the fundamental budget issues that RTD is facing and it doesn't solve the fundamental questions of getting people on

the Why are people not taking the bus? Frequency, routes, times of service. Katie, do you have any

No. I would I would just echo exactly what Adam and David said that I think you're correct that it's mostly a change in governance, but it doesn't address those key issues that we've seen with RTD. Okay.

You know, just globally, just as a comment. COVID, number one, and work from home has really altered how people get around. But more importantly, it's it's put them they found another way to get around, and frequently, it's by their own vehicle or from staying at home. And I don't know how how you can solve that when folks just don't wanna get on the bus because they're working from home now or they don't feel safe or it doesn't run when they get off work and they gotta find another way home. And then that was compounded by a lot of things that probably had to be done that CEO Deborah Johnson did, which is state of good repair, the downtown loop, the Southeast Corridor, and how how long was the the slow travel time on the on the e and the h lines coming in.

And if I lived in Southeast Denver and relied on the light rail during that period, I would have found another way. Breach. That's the problem. The problem isn't the 15 elected versus the five and the and the four. So good luck with that. Thank you.

Yep. Councilwoman Gonzalez Gutierrez.

Thank you, madam chair. And I do wanna thank, you know, the team and and all of the work that has been done and also the mayor's office for, you know, coordinating with us on on all of this. And it's absolutely right. You know, the the amount of investment that Denver makes in the infrastructure, the amount of land that we contribute, it is extremely concerning, the representation conversation. But I think in addition to that, to your point, councilman Flynn, the fact that, you know, going from 15 to nine, it just broadens or it makes as, like, an at large member.

Right? I represent over 700,000 people, and you think about tailoring down the RTD districts to nine people and how many people they are then tasked with representing. There's a huge bet much bigger conversation around whether or not the governor should have any appointments at all, and that's something that I've I've brought up as a concern. And I think there are other council members who feel similarly because, one, we know, like, that's giving one person way too much power. Yeah.

And then, two, who are those folks then who who are they do they do they report to? Right? Who are they accountable to? And is it the people, or is it the governor? And that's really concerning, and we don't know what governor we might get into the point of the sunset, which I thought was a great idea because we don't know what will happen in, you know, eight years when there could be a new governor or maybe before that.

We don't know. And we don't know who they might want to appoint that may value transit or may not value transit. And so I think all of those things are concerns that we've raised to at least I have raised, I will say, I'll make guidance statements on that front to some of our legislators and and also to our committee as far as, you know, the concerns that would come from as as city council. And in thinking about the professionalism piece of it, we are all an elected body. We don't have requirements other than what?

Is it age? I know at the legislature, it's age, and you have to live in your district or live, you know, in your jurisdiction for so much time in order to qualify to run for these seats. Why in these elected roles are we saying, well, we need somebody who's an expert on on transit, an expert on this, an expert on that? We don't have that on our body. We don't have those expectations.

Now we do have resident experts on things like land use and employment law and, you know, being we all have our our different things that we bring to the table, but what we're here to do is to govern in our elected capacity, even our mayor. Right? Our mayor doesn't have special requirements to be mayor of the city of Denver. And so it's it's we're now saying, okay. Now we're placing this expectation on Okay.

Our TD directors as opposed to what their role is to govern and to to represent the people that elected them. And the expertise and those that have the expertise are then the staff just like how our city operates. We have all of our agencies and departments who have the expertise, and we we look to them to help us in in our governance. And so that's just something that I I wanted to make sure is is heard as far as, like, there's, I think, a group of council members who maybe feel more strongly that this shouldn't the governance model shouldn't change at all. And if we want to change it, then it should go back to the people for a vote, which is what, you know, I think has been stated by council members.

And and, you know, we know that right now, we wanna make sure that Denver does have representation despite all the things I just said. Right? Like, those are are real things and real concerns. And I think, you know, why I think we're continuing to be in this amend position because we do wanna make sure that Denver is well represented because of everything that we do currently and that we will continue to do. I appreciate everybody's work on this and know that we're all committed to continue to push this forward.

All right. Anything else on RTD? Because we still have the fun budget conversation coming. But before we move on it's the next slide, budget. I think it is.

It works.

It is. Yeah. So before we get there, could we just do a quick legislative update? Thank you, David, on what's going on on thirteen o eight and 11:14. These are the two land use bills that are still open and outstanding. We are in a pose on both. One is the lot splitting bill, and one is the maximum lot size. I think Kyle Dalton has been promoted and is online if we have any questions first from the CPD side. But just wanna because we're the land use commissioners for the city and county of Denver as as city council members, just wanna give council a quick, you know, three sentences on what's going on with those. I know we have some council members who were set to testify Thursday.

It is our understanding that it has been delayed now. I guess there was an email that came from, like, the automatic system this morning, which is the only reason we we knew about it. This is all happening real time, so you guys might not even know about it yet. No. We are still planning for it to be up on Thursday. Yeah. So we can have a conversation about that after this, but I would just like to give council members a quick update. We remain in oppose. But 13 o eight and eleven fourteen, I think, are our two land use bills that we still have a lot of concerns on. And I will just say thank you to CPD.

CPD always tries to come up with amendments in order for us to go into, at the very least, amend and try and get us to a support position on all of these. And CPD's recommendation was opposed on these two because there is just simply no way to fix them. They are still trying. So anyway, CPD's here, council members, if you have any questions about those two. Our lobbyists are also, you know, here if you have any questions about those two, but wanted to just kinda give you a quick one second update on those before we move on from legislation.

Yeah. We are still seeing that they are up Thursday, but I've I've got questions out to see if that is planning to change. We are working closely with CCI and CML on the committee vote count. We think we'll get to a good place, that we wanna be in, but, there are a couple of committee members that are a little bit of a wild card.

So we're trying to shore them up. Awesome.

And I would I would just add, and and I shared this with the chair this morning. You know, like the home, this is a little bit different. We home was a little bit easier for us to work. I think it was more a home rule. This is really bad, 13 o eight. And so we do have community planning development meeting with one of the sponsors this afternoon just to share potential amendments without the sort of promise that we'd get to a support, but it's that bad for implementation that we're hoping we can get an audience that might help clean the bill up a little bit.

As it is right now,

it's real bad. Yes. I did just get word that it does look like 13 o eight, the lot splitting was rescheduled to April 30, but we're waiting on confirmation.

Okay. Really appreciate that. We'll see. Like I said, this is all happening real time, like, into our inboxes right now. So no worries that you are not a 100% on that right now because you're presenting to us on the long bill and the orbitals, which are also such a good time.

Yes. Absolutely. So, some updates on the budget. So both the house and the senate have debated and passed, h b fourteen ten, which is the long bill and the related orbital bills that support the long bill and are part of the budget package. 11 of those bills of the orbitals were amended in the senate requiring the house either to concur with those amendments or request a conference committee.

The JBC is the conference committee for these amendments, and they are planning to meet this afternoon once floor work is done to consider both house and senate amendments and see how those bills should move forward. There were a couple of orbital bills that we wanted to highlight specifically because of their impact on local governments. So the first one is house bill thirteen sixty, the affordable housing financing fund. If you remember in the governor's budget request, he requested that a 110,000,000 be moved from prop one twenty three in an effort to balance the budget. The JBC did move forward with this request and added an additional 20,000,000.

So it totaled a 130,000,000 will be transferred from prop one twenty three as a budget balancing measure. The next orbital we wanted to highlight was house bill thirteen ninety nine. This would eliminate the general fund transfer to the multimodal transportation fund. This bill would cancel the transfer that occurs every July 1 from the general fund to the multimodal transportation fund. It cancels the one for 07/01/2026, but the resumes the transfers beginning 07/01/2027.

The bill also reduces the appropriation from the multimodal transportation fund by 10,500,000 to reflect this change. This this bill and 13 oh, sorry. Thirteen ninety nine was amended in the senate, and the house did not concur with those amendments, so it will be heard in that conference committee later today. Another one is house bill 14 o five. This is cash fund transfers to general funds.

This mandates transfers from approximately 30 different cash funds to the general fund. The largest single transfers include 27,300,000 from the local government severance tax fund and 19,400,000 from the same fund on a different date, 15,000,000 from both the small business recovery and resiliency fund and the infrastructure investment and jobs act cash fund. This bill also the house considered set an amendment, and they did not concur. So it will be heard in the conference committee this afternoon. And then the last bill we wanted to highlight was house bill 14 o nine.

This is the marijuana tax cash fund distributions. This bill removes the current 3.5% distribution of retail marijuana sales tax to local governments and redirects the revenue 73% to the marijuana tax cash fund, 11% to the state public school fund, and 1.5% to the marijuana cash fund, and 14% to the to the general fund. So this change will decrease distribution to local governments by 6,100,000 in fiscal year twenty six twenty seven and increase funding to the state, primarily the marijuana tax cash fund. Senate amended this with a technical amendment that did not change the fiscal note. The house did not concur, and they will discuss this in conference committee this afternoon.

So things are not coming late. Amazing. Amazing.

I also have Catalina here from the Department of Finance to talk about just to give us sort of a brief overview of the impacts of the general fund. Then, Adam, I don't know if have

anything I was just gonna say and and also we'll make sure when this passes, we'll have a whole financial piece for counsel when we have a chance to really sit down and go through everything that will be much more comprehensive as to the impacts to the city. Right now, it's real high level, so things may change.

Yes. And so to add to that, for the marijuana sales tax bill, that's about 3.5% that goes to local governments, as Katie said, and that would be an impact of approximately $1,300,000 for the 2026 budget. Then in perpetuity, if it passes, we would be missing about 1,300,000 For the multimodal bill, those funds usually go to Doctor. Cog, and so we'd have to work with Dottie to see what the impacts of what capital projects that could impact.

Alright. Questions on this great news?

Can we pass a law to take their money?

I wish we could. There was one other bill that I wanna just run across briefly for you all, and it is the hold on. I wanna look up the number. And it is traffic safety near schools. This is house bill thirteen eighteen.

I just wanted to flag that one back up for you because as we know, this is a really important, priority for us. So I'm wondering if Dottie could just talk through. We are in amend on 1318. It was really, really we're in support on 1318, but it was a really, really close vote between amend and support. And so I wanna just ask Dottie to come up and just can you talk through where you guys are on 1318 and what that looks like? Because it is something he feels really strongly about supporting. But there are the fiscal note is zero.

Yeah. We know what that means.

Think we we know what that

Madam Chair, Nick Williams, Dottie on this. Yeah, this is one we've had a number of discussions with. You know, it does put some additional administrative burdens that will then, of course, translate to either additional time or additional cost into how we both establish, but I think more importantly, how we adjust our school zones on this. Some of the changes made, I think, make it less onerous on there. I think recognizing kind of the importance of this topic and understanding counsel and the mayor's office desire to support we're comfortable with this.

This is not going to bring the house down, for it. But but, yeah, certainly recognizing, as you said, as that fiscal note comes down, down, down, we know where that goes. That will go to us, on there. And and, yeah, just some, I think, a little bit more process, a little bit more administration around school zones and those establishments.

Awesome. Thank you. Questions? There's a lot going on. Can guys tell? Oh, we don't.

We're almost done.

We're almost done. We're so close. So you guys will so session closes in thirty three days? Lobbyists come because that is gonna be sort of the period of time when our when the governor is gonna be signing bills and things are gonna there's just, like, a kind of a weird lag time there. So they will be back in June to do kind of legislative wrap up wrap up for us then, but we won't see them in May.

If you have any questions or you would like to speak, we would love for council members to sign up to speak at the state house. I think it's really impactful and meaningful, But also our calendars are a hot mess. So understanding the challenges of what it looks like to speak at the state is tough, but our lobbyists can help us with that. So if you're interested, please let us know or let our lobbyists know because it's really a great opportunity for us to have our voice heard.

Yeah. Go ahead. I do just wanna clarify what I said earlier. 13 o eight, the lot splitting bill, is supposedly rescheduled, but eleven fourteen, the minimum lot sizes, is still scheduled for this Thursday. So if you would like to provide testimony on that bill, please let us know, and we're happy to help support you in that.

K. I'll follow-up with an

email to you guys.

So Sounds great.

Great. With that, we have one item, a couple of items on consent, and we are adjourned. Thanks for joining us.