Governance & Charter Review Committee - Regular Meeting

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

All right. Good morning, everyone. It is Tuesday, July 21st. This is the governance committee. I'm Amanda Sawyer. I have the honor of representing the residents of district five and also chairing this committee. We have an action item and a briefing today. So before we get started, why don't we do a round of introductions and I'm going to start to my left.

Good morning, Daryl Watson, fine, District 9.

Good morning, Diana Romero-Campbell, Southeast Denver, District 4. Jamie Torres, West Denver, District 3.

Good morning, Amanda Sambo, Northwest Denver, District 1. Hi, everybody. Sedona Gonzales-Guchenez, one of your council members at large.

Kevin Flynn, Southwest Denver, District 2.

All right. Fantastic. And just checking to make sure we don't have anyone online. We do not. Okay. So we are going to start with 1048 and 1055, which is going to be a block vote. And our presenters today are going to be Council Members Torres and Sandoval. It's very weird not to call you Council President Sandoval. So why don't you guys take it away? Thank you so much.

We are bringing this proposal for a ballot measure to change the Charter. Since we came to budget and policy a couple weeks ago, we have also drafted a companion ordinance, per the good recommendation of Councilwoman Sawyer in our conversation, to accompany this. We were aiming to do it later, no time like the present. to make sure all questions get answered. So Councilwoman Sandoval and I are pleased to bring this particular charter change forward and ask for your support. I will go through our entire kind of process. We started, nearly a year ago. And in our meeting with the Office of Social Equity and Innovation, we knew that we had really wanted to orient this review of two charter sections leaning in with an equity lens. And so we partnered with OSEI, Robin Jones in particular, who had already been working with public safety departments applying equity lens to their policies. And she agreed to work with us, which included pulling a group of stakeholders together who would be workshopping these two sections of language and starting first with a training about how you apply, how you create and apply an equity lens. So many thanks to Robin for her help in really kind of creating that foundation for us with this. This was our workshop team of stakeholders and all of the folks that we knew would have a stake in this conversation. Denver Civil Service Commission Director Gracie Perez. Originally, Civil Service Commissioner Al Gardner was participating. He became Department of Safety Executive Director and continued to participate in that capacity. Office of the Independent Monitor, the Monitor, Liz Castle was a part of our group. Robin from OSEI. The two chiefs from Fire and Police, Chief Fulton and Chief Thomas. And then representatives from the two safety unions, Chris Ferguson from Local 858, Firefighters Union, and Brian from, Brian Palsec. President of the PPA. We did have the prior PPA President originally involved. It is currently Brian and additional folks from the PPA. So we were looking exclusively at Section 9.3 and 9.4 of the Charter. That governs civil service and classified service. And if you'll remember, this was really prompted by our prior charter change removing citizenship from the recruitment requirement for police and fire. We recognize that there were probably other things that just needed to be updated. There's a lot of out-of-date language in our charter overall and in these sections that we didn't want to continue to get in the way of really broad and diverse processes that we knew that our safety departments wanted to be able to implement. The admin details as well that are in the charter, we wanted to potentially move to ordinance where they could be subject to update, to change, to broaden, to constrict as time needs, as the conversation needs in the future. We are not proposing major changes to those sections today. So our proposed solution was modernizing these two sections and you'll find that we added two other sections per the request of the two Chiefs of Police and Fire. So with regard to 9.3 and 9.4, we are moving language that feels very operational and very detailed into ordinance. To have that kind of detail in charter fills like really confining to have something exist in concrete that cannot be changed other than with a vote to the people. So we wanted to make sure that that had some flexibility, but there's still legislative and decision-making process around those pieces of language. even when they're in ordinance as well as rulemaking for civil service. We wanted to update the charter with gender neutral language. We'd like to do that to the whole charter and we're doing it anytime that we're in it. We are removing the citizenship requirement that remains in the charter for civil service commissioners. That was one that we had not removed before that we are taking out of it this time. The public safety cadet program is listed as in the civil service section, even though civil service has nothing to do with the cadet program, and we would just like to move that to the appropriate section of the charter. We are offering to extend some timelines that the manager of safety has to review disciplinary recommendations or suspension pending investigation recommendations and those are just being extended by a handful of days per their request. This one is another one that we found very interesting once we got into the details. Allowing probationary periods to be extended in the cases of approved leave. So that's like military leave, medical leave, allowing probationary firefighters and police officers to extend that period so they don't have to start back over once that leave ends. And then at the request of the two chiefs, removing the command staff caps felt like an appropriate thing to do, knowing that we also have backstops. during the budgeting process for how many FTEs they have, how much budget they might need to allocate to new ones. This is the proposed ballot question. We tried to keep it very simple, very clear as to what we were doing. and the companion ordinance. So this is new since budget and policy. We want this to accompany the charter amendment moving forward and we wanted to make very clear what was going to be in the companion ordinance. So we have worked to make sure that anything that we took out of charter moved into ordinance which is really only three sections of language and We've just kind of oriented that companion ordinance to give a little preamble as to what we're doing overall. So it does repeat kind of that the commission is created, the Civil Service Commission, and then here are the three sections that we moved out of charter. We're not changing those sections. They are as written from charter and putting it into ordinance just so that's clear. No substantive changes were made and one of the things that we wanted to make sure was really clear was that when we refer to additional powers, we're referring to our power as Council to create the companion ordinance. It's not that we're granting additional powers to Civil Service Commission or to anyone else. So wanted to make sure that that was clarified. This is our engagement timeline. All of the folks that we met with, the way that we've been doing this has been really iterative and really building on those deep workshops that we had where everyone was able to participate. I was really pleased with very little attrition. Folks stayed engaged the entire time and felt like their input was heard. This is our current timeline. We are here July 21st in Governance and Intergovernmental Relations Committee. We would like to be at first reading on July 27th and final reading and ballot referral vote on August 3rd, aiming for this question to be on the ballot on November 3rd.

That's it.

Open for any questions.

I have no council members in the queue. And I believe there was, are we doing the... We do have public comment. Public comment. I do not have any information about anyone signing up for public comment. No signups? Okay. No signups for public comment? Councilmember Flynn, you're looking at me. You want to get in the queue? Well, I'll ask a question.

Being a retired editor, in the ordinance, to 251 selection of hearing officers, the Commission shall compile a list of all qualified persons willing to be hearing officers. The word all I think is superfluous. How do we know when they've acquired all persons? Where are you at again? In the ordinance, it's section 2, 251, paragraph B, first line. I just suggest taking out the word all. The commission shall compile a list of qualified persons. You have to have at least seven.

We'll do that.

No.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Okay. And I'll just finish by saying that this, as this is referred to the ballot, we'll just need your help. When we talk about this, people don't understand that there's even a separate commission that hires our firefighters and our police officers. So when I've explained this to my family, they're like, what are you doing? What I don't understand, so they don't quite understand that. So it is a bit complicated, but we really do think it helps us become compliant with our charter. Right now, when we were going through and doing this exercise, oftentimes we would be like, oh, we're not compliant with the charter in this section. And then we would find another section, we're not compliant with the charter in this section, which makes us vulnerable. And so I would want to just really emphasize that this is really good governance and cleaning up our charter and moving this to ordinance so that we can work together with all of the stakeholders like we have in the future to make sure that everyone is protected and we're compliant, really. Thank you.

I'll also point out that we're putting into legislature letters of support that we've gotten from the Civil Service Commission and the two chiefs.

Thank you. Council President Romero-Campbell. Thank you.

I just wanted to thank you all for the work that you've done on this. It was a tremendous amount of work. I think you have no questions because you've been so thorough and the briefings that you have provided have really, I think, clearly explained everything to a point where, you know, you don't have questions on the floor and I just appreciate that and appreciate the work that you have done. When you say how we communicate it forward, you've created the chart. I mean, it's just so clear and easy for us to be able to communicate this out as well. So just thank you both for your work.

Great. Thank you. Great. Thank you. I do just want to take a second because we had time set aside for public comment to see if there's anyone in the room who wants... I always just like to check. Okay, great. And I want to just take a minute to say thank you guys. I think it's really important that the companion ordinance get moved through at the same time. I think it just, as former Council President Sandoval always says, clear is kind, right? And so just moving that language directly from the charter into ordinance and moving it through together makes a lot of sense because then, you know, whatever updates need to be done can be done. But at the very least, the expectation is clearly set for everyone that we're not changing anything or deleting anything. We're just moving it into ordinance so that it can be updated in the future, depending on the future needs, as opposed to having to go back to a vote of the people every single. time we want to make a change. And I will just say, in my personal opinion, our charter was written in 1916. It is incredibly and inappropriately prescriptive. And what that does is hamstring us in a lot of ways as a city. whether you're a city agency or, you know, city council or the mayor's office or an independent agency within the city. So I know that there have been a lot of charter changes that have come through over the last few years, and that's why. And this is another one I think that is really helpful and useful and makes a lot of sense, but really appreciate you guys just moving that language and the ordinance through as well so that the voters get to take a look at everything and know for themselves that we're not changing any language. We're just moving it into ordinance, so. With that, I'm going to move these in a block and need a motion and a second.

I'll move.

All right. Moved by Council Pro Tem and seconded by Council Member Flynn. That's the first time I got to call you that. Okay. Do we need a voice vote or are we thumbs up? Fantastic. Then we will see you all on the floor. Thank you very much. Thank you. And then second, we have a briefing today. We have our state legislative final update. So we're going to take a minute to just switch everything over. But really appreciate Policy Matters being here to talk through. Now that the governor's office has done signing bills and things have officially gone into Some of them have gone into law July 1st. We are going to do a quick wrap up here of everything that we had discussed previously and worked on over the stage of the session.

And then we'll talk a little bit about what comes next.

You guys want to take a second and introduce yourselves first? Yeah, absolutely. My name is Katie Hancock with Policy Matters.

And my name is Ximena Luna, also with Policy Matters.

All righty. Okay, great. So we are here, like Councilwoman said, to just give a brief update on how the end of session went and everything that happened. So just a reminder that these are your Policy Matters teams. Heather and Tanya couldn't be here today, but Jimena and I are really excited to be here with you all.

So, the next couple of slides provide an overview of the legislation Denver formally engaged on during the session. In total, we engaged on 61 formal positions. A lot of them switched around, but these were the final registered positions. Next slide, please. Of the 23 bills the City and County of Denver supported, 18 passed. Of the 12 opposed bills, 8 died, either by being postponed indefinitely or being lost on the floor. A significant portion of our work focused on amendments. We successfully amended 18 bills for more accurate and productive implementation within the City and County of Denver. In total, with Our formal positions, two bills were vetoed. The first bill is Senate Bill 184. This is the Firefighter Cancer Benefits and Workers' Compensation Bill. We were initially in an amend in this one, and then we switched over to neutral. And the second bill that was vetoed was Senate Bill 5, which is the Rights Violation and Immigration Enforcement Remedy. This one we were in support. And then, in addition to the positions registered on behalf of the City and County of Denver, City Council independently supported two labor-related measures, House Bill 1005, and regarding collective bargaining protections, and Senate Bill 42 concerning revenue classifications under TABOR. And we would like to say that House Bill 1005 was vetoed, unfortunately. Main legislations of interest throughout session included housing development, zoning and land use, human services, energy and utilities, transportation and infrastructure, technology and artificial intelligence, and fiscal policy. These issues shaped both the city's registered positions and our broader engagement throughout the session. And I'll pass it on to Katie to present our budget overview.

Yep, so we wanted to get into kind of a deep dive of the fiscal year 26-27 budget for you all. So as you all know, we started the year with a $1.2 billion shortfall that the state was tasked with closing. Some of the non-cut mechanisms used to close the gap include the provider rate cut from Medicaid providers, $150 million in cuts across state departments, and then eliminated grant programs, primarily in education and health departments. Some of the things that happened with Medicaid, as we've talked about before, we're seeing rising Medicaid costs. This led to the 2%, again, provider rate cut, reduced funding and limit, limiting of several categories of coverage for cover-all Coloradans. And then the Commission on Medicaid was created that has been meeting over the interim to try to come up with policy recommendations for how we can keep up with the rising costs. Some of the things that happened in county administration, there was a measure to centralize fraud investigations across SNAP, Medicaid, and TANF. There was a $3.5 million increase for county administration cost allocation plans. And then also the additional 25% share of SNAP administrative costs paid by the federal government will now go to the state. Some other Colorado Works program, the cost of living adjustment for basic cash assistance was paused for two years and permissive authority was granted to the counties for extension of those benefits. And then the marijuana tax cash fund eliminated the distribution of marijuana special sales tax revenue to local governments, which is estimated to be $6.1 million reduction in local government revenue. We recently heard the June 18th, I believe it was, the June revenue forecast, which gives us an outlook on what to expect during the next fiscal year. So short-term outlook, after roughly $2 billion in cuts and budget balancing actions over the past two years, lawmakers are expecting the current fiscal year to end with a surplus in what the chief economist is calling his Goldilocks forecast, if everything goes right. So we're looking at $116 million projected general fund surplus for fiscal year 2025-2026. The surplus improvement is driven by federal HR1 tax and spending bill that cut state tax collections less than we originally expected. And then the rising inflation is pushing the TABOR cap up faster than anticipated. The scenario B from the Office of State Planning and Budgeting assumes that we need about 315 million in cuts to restore reserves to 15% in fiscal year 27-28. But there is also a possibility for the JVC to decrease the reserve to 13% through an orbital bill next session. So what this means for a longer-term outlook is it's a reprieve, not a fix. Like we mentioned earlier, healthcare and other costs keep rising faster than TABOR allows the state to spend, leaving structural challenges still unresolved. The $315 million that we would have to cut also has strings attached because it just assumes that several other budget cuts continue, including no inflationary rate increase for Medicaid providers. We also are expecting some federal cuts in 2027, which raises the question of how much the state should backfill the social safety net. So the bottom line is we don't have a repeat of last year's $1 billion shortfall, which is the good news. Tabor refunds are expected to resume. And then OSPB puts our recession odds at around 40%. Oh, I'm so sorry. Doing two computers is getting me. And then looking ahead to the next legislative session, we're in an election year, so there will be new administration and state leadership. We're the gubernatorial race of Weiser versus Marks. House and Senate leadership is expected to shake up with Senator Rodriguez leaving, Representative McCluskey leaving, so we're expecting to see some differences in state leadership that we probably haven't seen in a few years. And then the Joint Budget Committee is also, will have to vote on new members to join. So we'll see kind of a shakeup in that committee as well.

The Senate is a vote, but the House is elected by the Speaker. Yes, you're right.

And then for primary results, what we saw kind of was a shift towards more progressive candidates in a lot of races. We also are seeing some ballot measures. So Initiative 175, this is the state revenue supporting road transportation. You'll remember that this was a measure that was introduced later in the legislative session. This came to be known later in session, and lawmakers introduced House Bill 1430 to try to combat the ballot measure if it were to pass. And that passed and was signed by the governor. Also, Initiative 195 and 232 are this year's just latest push to make changes to Colorado tax code. And these ballot measures are not officially on the ballot yet, but we just wanted to flag. And then the policy trends we're expecting to see in 2027, Medicaid and healthcare, just with that rising structural concern, technology and artificial intelligence. We saw that the data center measures this year didn't really go anywhere, so we expect those to be back, as well as any legislation involving AI. Tax and fiscal measures, again, make changes to Colorado tax code and try to combat some of these budget difficulties. And then housing, affordability, development, zoning, those tend to just be popular every session. And then also energy. We saw the PUC bill this last year and we expect topics to continue coming up around those issues. So what's next? The Medicaid Commission continues to meet over the interim to discuss those policy recommendations for Medicaid. Their next meeting is next week where they will discuss the impacts of HR1 before they really get into the cost and payment structure of Medicaid and start speaking to providers and communities. We're also, the midterm elections are coming up, so a lot of candidates are prepping for those and we'll continue to keep you updated on any changes and report out in November once those are finalized. And then the next thing we're expecting on the budget is the September revenue forecast, which again will give us a better idea going into session what we can expect in cuts or surplus and anything like that.

And that was all we had for you today. Any questions?

Awesome. Thank you. I want to just acknowledge the mayor's office team. Dom and Tim are also here. Council Pro Tem and I have been the team up to this point. Council President, do we know who the team is going to be next year? It'll be me, but do we know who my partner's going to be?

Have we decided yet?

I think we're still in the process of deciding. Okay, great. But I wanted to say thank you to everyone. It was a lot of work, a really heavy lift. But as you could see from the outcome slide, we were actively participating and really influential in a way that the City of Denver hasn't done previously this year. And I think that that's really, really great. Do you have anything you want to add?

No, I just thank you. Councilman Sawyer. No, I appreciate all of your contribution, honestly, to the group, because I think it helped tremendously when we were trying to think through, you know, ways to maybe make a bill better and thinking about, you know, that strategy of if something is going to pass, is it passing in the best way for city and county of Denver? And I thought that was just really valuable and important. And I really just I value how you what you brought to the table as part of that group and also staying on top of all of our colleagues and making sure that we were getting feedback from folks. And I do appreciate all the feedback that we did receive from our colleagues on that. different measures. And sometimes we agree, sometimes we don't. And that goes the same with the mayor's office. But I feel like we did a lot of really good work. And hopefully we'll be debriefing and then figuring out kind of what does it look like for the coming legislative session? Because we already have to start planning for that. But thank you very much for your leadership in that space. Thank you.

Question for how things work. This is probably a question for Dom and Serena, but how do things work in an election year, right? So we know that everybody gets five bills that they are going to put forward, but we don't know who the people are going to be yet in those seats.

So how does that... Until the general election.

So we're just going to say it'll be like a sprint on November 4th?

They'll do new member orientation for any new members coming in. And that's when they'll receive their deadlines. If we're talking like... Politically, when we look at Denver legislators, most typically those end up being Democrats. And so usually whoever wins and prevails in the primary will very, very most likely be. But we don't want to count the chickens ahead of time and know that there's still an election process. But that is typically favorable towards Democrats. that side so whoever has picked up those primary seats through the primary election are likely to then move forward to prevail in the general election but we will not know until after november 3rd then they will go straight into leadership elections the following week usually within like what is it seven days they have to do leadership elections in both the senate and the house and determine who's going to be leading each of those chambers. And then those new members, yeah, they go right into their new member orientation and get the water hose at them.

Good times. Okay. Dom, anything to add? It was perfect. Okay. Dom and Tim, in terms of what comes next for the city, is there anything that we're watching or flagging beyond the budget for things that we've heard coming from the state next year or anything like that that council needs to know about?

Okay.

Good morning, Madam Chair, members of Council, Dominic Moreno, Mayor's Office. I think the one that we will be pushing for with particularly a new governor's administration is that ADU fix that we have long sought and not have. had a ton of success with. We are hopeful with that a new administration, we will have more success. So I think we'll be having conversations with some of the Denver delegation to see if there's someone that would be amenable to sponsoring that, but also having conversations with the incoming administration to try to get that fixed since it's been a couple of years now.

That'd be great. Great. Any questions? Yeah, Councilmember Flynn.

In the presentation you saw, you mentioned that there's ballot issues coming up. And I'm curious, one of them caps the state income tax at 4.4%. And another one establishes a graduated income tax. Both can't be true at the same time. What happens if both pass? Is it the greater number of votes?

That is a great question, Councilman Flynn. I'm going to pass it to Dom.

Dominic Brando, Mayor's Office. Councilman Flynn, great question. Yes, your assumption is correct. Whichever provision passes by the most votes takes effect. What's interesting is with Initiative 195, it is both constitutional provisions and statutory. So the constitutional provision, for example, that they're proposing to remove the uniform state income tax rate, that could still go into effect. But the conflicting statutory provisions are whichever gets more votes is what prevails.

Okay, say that again on 195. There's constitutional and statutory elements. Yes. So if it were to pass, but the other one also passes, what happens?

People's brains explode. So what happens is the constitutional provisions of Initiative 195 take effect because the competing initiative doesn't have constitutional provisions.

And that's an adjustment to Tabor, correct?

Correct. It removes the language that says that there has to be a uniform, flat income tax rate. So that can still go into effect. However, the statutory provisions of the conflicting ones of those two statutory measures, whatever gets more votes is the controlling is what will take effect.

I'm thinking single subject here. I don't know how that went through. But so if we were to pass by 51%, Only the statutory would be effective, but not the constitutional, which would kind of cancel it out, wouldn't it? No, because— There's a higher threshold for constitutional.

You're correct, yes. Any constitutional provision has to pass by 55 percent of the general electorate. So in order to take effect, it would have to cross that 55 percent threshold.

So it has to get 55 plus, even for the statutory, to take effect.

That is a good question, Councilman Flynn. I'm not sure about that. I think the 55% for sure for the constitutional measure. For the statutory, I think it's just 50% plus one.

Right, but it would violate TABOR then because we failed to amend it.

All right. You're going down a path I don't want to follow, Councilman. That means one explosion.

Thank you. Thank you.

Okay, great. Thank you. Councilmember Watson.

Less complex question on your trends. I can see transportation. Or did I miss that as you're seeing for listed? I think it's a slide you had.

We listed it for the trends of the 2026 legislative session, but you're, you're right. It will probably be a major issue coming back in 2027, especially with the recent bill passing.

And that was really why I was elevating it. Curious as to your thoughts on anything you're hearing. Obviously, it's an election year, you're not going to hear much, but on any of the cure still need to be, the steps still need to be implemented or executed on the proposed RTD changes.

We haven't heard anything yet, but we do have a meeting coming up with Senator Ball, and so we will discuss with him and see what kind of information he has about next steps.

All right. That's it.

Yeah, thank you. That's actually a great question, Council Member Watson, that I was going to ask as well, just in terms of follow-up from the things that have passed that will impact the city as we move forward. And I think RTD is a really good example of that. So for some things, it's going into rulemaking. For some things, I don't really understand what comes next. RTD is one of those. So just kind of curious what... You would recommend we keep our eyes on, uh, kind of in this downtime when the city agent city agencies, when the state agencies are sort of doing the rulemaking process or moving things through and legislators aren't elected yet, but they're all thinking through what their 5 bills are going to be and kind of all the things. This is a weird in between time.

It's a weird in between time, especially because it's also an election year. And so, like, um. President Pro Tem Gonzalez-Gutierrez said we'll probably kind of see a sprint after the election in November because state departments are going to change staffing, they're going to change leadership, all of these things are going to happen. And so we will continue to monitor those changes and keep you guys updated on any next steps.

Okay, really appreciate it. Other questions? Any last minute thoughts? I just want to say thank you to the team again. You guys all did an absolutely fantastic job this year. And I feel like we really made some real progress and had some real positive outcomes. So super excited about that and really appreciate you guys. With that, hold on. I got to back up so I can see my... I forgot my reading glasses. Do we have any items on consent? That's what I'm looking for. We have one item on consent that has not been called off. And with that, we are adjourned. Thanks for joining us.

Different.