Health Safety Education and Services - Regular Meeting

Welcome back to this weekly meeting of the Health and Safety Committee with Denver City Council. Coverage of the Health and Safety Committee starts now.

That was scary. Good

catch. Good morning. It's April 15 tax day and you are at the health and safety committee meeting. My name is Darryl Watson. I'm honored to serve as the chair of this committee as well as the city council member representing all of the fine District 9. Before we begin with our one action items today, why don't we go around the room for introductions for city council members? We'll start first on the right, and then I'll verify their council members that are online. So council member Flynn.

Thank you. Kevin Flynn, Southwest Denver's District 2.

Good morning. Stacy Gilmore, District 11.

Good morning. Paul Cashman, South Denver, District 6.

Sarah Perry, one of your council members. Lewis, District 8. Sorry. We're really bad at this tonight. I'm a councilmember.

I'm 8. District 8.

Good morning, everyone. Serena Gonzalez Gutierrez, your other council member at large.

Oh, good morning.

I'm at

Vanderbijn of Northwest Denver District 1.

Jamie Torres, West Denver, District 3. Loral Vibres, Waukee District 7.

And just checking to see, do we have a council member that's coming in virtual

this morning?

So, Tim, that's a no. Alright. Today, we have one action item. It is ordinance to revise criminal penalties for municipal offenses. This is an extended two hour meeting. We have public comments as well. Once we move from the presentation from the sponsors, we'll go directly into public comments, and I'll share kind of the announcement of how that public comment process will will be facilitated. But first, to the council sponsors, the floor is yours for your presentation.

Thank you, chair. So good morning good morning, everyone. We're here to discuss our bill looking at municipal sentencing. As we said before, because we've been here many times, I'm councilwoman Lewis, councilman Gonzalez Gutierrez, and councilwoman Parady, and we're excited to bring this change forward, which is an opportunity for us to align our municipal code with state charges and will allow the prosecution and co enforcement team to continue to enforce important aspects of the municipal code in the city. I'll pause here if either of you wanna add anything at this moment. No.

It's your turn.

Bad. I was doing bad on the slide. No. I'm good. I'm good now. Thank you. Okay. So we have presented this numerous times to all of you, and I think you've seen our faces lots of times in in briefings and things like that. So when we talk about what the problem that we're trying to address, we know that in 2021, the state legislature passed a policy to change the sentencing structures for misdemeanor offenses. That work was at the direction of the governor and was worked on in a bipartisan, multi stakeholder fashion because at the state, it is partisan, and so it is a little bit different than for us here at the municipal level.

With that said, what that created was an inequity when it came to municipal crimes versus state crimes that had same type of conduct or that were similar types of crimes, where we had people in Denver were facing sentences up to 30 times higher. And we say facing because they could be, and what was in our current ordinance is that people can face up to three hundred days in jail for the same types of offenses that they were then lowered down to ten days. I am so sorry. So 2025, December 2025, we know that the Colorado State Supreme Court did make a ruling and the decision was that this was deemed unconstitutional, that these thresholds were different.

Let go back to this one.

Which That one.

Oh, let me take pictures like that. Oh, yeah. Okay. Okay. That's what you were showing

me.

Okay. So going into what the current landscape is, as I mentioned before as I mentioned before, the current in our current ordinance, it is we have the maximum sentence of up to three hundred days in jail and nine and a $999 fine because that is our city's general penalty. We do not have our crimes at the municipal level marked out in different classes, right, just as they do at the state level. We don't have that currently in our ordinance. And so that is currently what we're dealing with, and the types these types of sentences can carry a lot of collateral consequences from those that that get these kinds of charges.

And even what by the mere fact of having this kind of level of sentencing penalty on the books can create all kinds of implications when it comes to immigration status, when folks are are going into jail for long periods of time, they face losing public benefits such as Social Security, SNAP benefits, housing, income, Medicaid, and and in sometimes and in some cases, can risk losing the custody of their children depending on the situation. And I did discuss the problem, so I'll go to the next slide.

Thank you. You did

skip the municipal numbers and those bullet points. There's a slide note about them.

Do you wanna go ahead

and do it? Sure. Yeah. Yeah. No worries. So then on that current landscape slide so one back. The other the other thing we wanted to highlight here is that just more about the numbers of actual filings that happen in our municipal court. I know everyone is sort of familiar with the idea that everything that's kind of at a felony level or even more serious misdemeanors, those are state crimes. The conduct that we handle in municipal court is more equivalent to petty offenses and low level misdemeanors, and so that's where we're we're that is focused. We're seeing 12,000 municipal criminal case filings every single year.

So that's it's just pretty striking. If you look back over five years, you'll see about 70,000 sentences handed down by the municipal court, and three quarters of those charged are at or below the federal poverty line, which I also think is just really worth kind of letting that sink in. In terms of the crimes that we are that are petty offenses, so crimes that under this bill and the camp decision would now carry a ten day sentence. Those are relatively unusual among those 12,000 cases per year. Over the last two years, there were a 100 people roughly who were sentenced to more than ten days in jail for a a municipal only offense that would now be limited to ten days.

So that would only have changed the sentence in about a 100 cases from about 25,000 cases. To those 100 people, that really matters. And the difference between a ten day sentence and a fifteen day sentence was which is the most common, like, know, sentence that would exceed this bill that has been given down for those muni only offenses is it's usually fifteen days if it's more than ten. Right? Occasionally, you'll see a little bit more.

It might be twenty, might be thirty. But fourteen days is the cutoff to lose a lot of benefits. And one thing I just want people to keep in mind is that if that person then if they lose their Medicaid because they've been in jail for fifteen days instead of ten, they're still gonna go to Denver Health, they're gonna get treated, but it's not gonna be covered. So that's part of what we're really trying to address is the benefits loss, that that cliff, and that is part of why ten days is the right sentencing level for those crimes. Then I've mentioned a 100 people from the 600 that you see on the slide.

The other roughly 500 are people who were sentenced for to more than ten days for a petty offense that now under the camp decision and this bill has to go down to ten days in the future. So for those people, that's what the sentence would have had to be if they were sentenced after the camp decision, and the bill accomplishes that effect. So I just wanna point out that the discretionary portion of the change to sentences for petty offenses is almost a vanishingly small number of cases, but to those human beings, does really matter. Thanks.

Thank you.

Thank you. So I wanted to ground us in some more data. And so as you can see from this slide, there has been a 24% decrease in reported crime from the from 2021 to 2025, which is represented by the orange bars on this slide. And at the same time, there has been a 52% increase in municipal case filings in that same time from 2021 to 2025, which you can see on with the blue bars on this slide. And so in short, crime is falling, but the file filings are increasing more and more at the municipal level.

In addition to that, I want we wanted to talk about some of the jail data. So how are these filings affecting the city? Well, the cost of jail per day is $240 per person. Those increased filings that we showed you on the last slide mean that 40% of the charges that people are facing while held in Denver. Jails are for municipal ordinance violations, most of them pre trial. We we as we have heard many times in the past few years, this is also creating a bad situation for the sheriffs who are understaffed and doing the best under these difficult circumstances.

And that 60% number, just to be super clear, on the prior slide, we were talking about filings that go through municipal court, so municipal cases. On but the jail will hold people for other jurisdictions and for state crimes. So people could be in our jail even though their case was in state court or even in Jeffco, Adams County, or something like that. Anywhere that they are being charged and prosecuted, they might be in our jail for a period of time. I I should say our two jails. So 60% of the people in the jail are from those, you know, 25,000 cases in the last two years that we're talking about here.

Thank you. So in light of these problems and the constitution constitutional requirements, we are proposing the following in this bill. Revise the Denver revise the Denver revised municipal code to match sentences to the maximum sentences for the same or identical conduct. This this reflects the constitutional requirement. Revise sentences for all offenses in the municipal code that do not have a comparable state offense at the level allowed for petty offenses under state law as an up to sentence of ten days in jail or a $300 fine.

Revise the language of certain offenses to align prohibited conduct with a more stringent state law and retain PACE's ability to charge higher sentences, which includes domestic violence cases cases, and we'll walk through that in a bit. Rewrite a few offenses to align with state law, but in a way that does not change the severity of the punishment or sentencing guidelines available. Maintain current fines available for some regulatory offenses to give city departments needed leverage for enforcement, and eliminate mandatory fines on prostitution prostitution to align with state law.

Yeah. So this is these are the new classes of offenses that we would be creating, and every one of them lines up with a state law class and penalty other than class one, which I can explain in a second. So each of these align with a a sentencing category at the state and, therefore, with the maximum that could be sentenced under camp for equivalent municipal crimes. So by aligning these, we're preserving the ability to charge at the highest level that camp would allow. The difference with the class one offenses is that we've always had this outlier category.

Our general penalty, as councilman Gonzalez Gutierrez mentioned, has been 300 in jail and a $999 fine. So that's been the penalty for the vast majority of municipal offenses. And we've also had this very short list that after our last pass through this code, we left at three hundred and sixty four days and a $9,999 fine. So we're just leaving those alone. We're not changing any of them.

They will continue to have that same penalty, but listening here for clarity. So then the class two, class three, and class four offenses are all, again, designed to to align with to allow us to align the sentences for municipal crimes with the highest possible sentence for the equivalent state crime. So what if the state says you can have up to a hundred and twenty days in jail and a $750 fine, that's not what our code will say. If the state says you can have $993,100, that's not what our code will say. And if the state says $300 and ten days jail, that's not what our code will say.

So in all instances, we're aligning with state law to preserve the highest possible sentencing authority where there is an equivalent state crime. And then a couple people have asked about these class V offenses. This is a group that we don't think has contains anything in the Denver Municipal Code. But if if we ever had something like that or or learned of something like that, camp would mandate us treating it in this bucket. So the state has a category of crimes that only get a $100 fine.

Those are usually state kind of regulatory offenses, and so there are things that we just don't deal with at the city. So we haven't found any overlap between that category at the state and what we currently cover in our muni code. But we figured that we should have the category there because, say, in the future, we decide to add something to our muni code where we're now gonna prosecute people in city court for, like, some state regulatory violation. I don't know why we would do that. It should have that $100 fine. So it's just sort of making sure that we have that container there to remain in compliance with CAMP, but I don't believe there's anything in it at the moment. As

many of you know, as we talked about this, and it has been in the bill from day one, and this came by way of during last year's legislative session when there was a bill being proposed, house bill eleven forty seven regarding municipal sentencing. It was brought to our attention that our current assault ordinance would not allow our city prosecutors to be able to prosecute domestic violence cases at the level that they already were, which is up to three hundred days in jail. And so at that time, we made a commitment to addressing this issue with no matter how anything went forward going from there. And so we have stayed true to that commitment. So when in the drafting of this bill, we made sure that we included that language and we did consult PACE, our city prosecutors, as well as victims rights organizations on this.

And so we amended the threats ordinance and assault ordinance, as well as violation of a court order, trespass of a dwelling so that these laws track the elements of a class one misdemeanor under state law. This allows our city prosecutors to continue to prosecute these case at the level in which they prosecute them today. And so that that is, you know, something that we committed to and we have followed through with.

Yeah. And this slide, as I'm looking at it, it's actually these things are really in the same category as the last slide that councilor Morgansal has talked about. The difference being that these are offenses where so we had the changes to threats and assault from the very beginning because we were aware of those issues. And then with all of this of the crimes on this list, those were brought to our attention and stakeholding with with PACE in the city attorney's office. So these are they've been in the bill since the last draft, since last time we were in this committee, but they were added to the bill based on Paces feedback as opposed to threats and assault where we had it in there from the beginning.

So just to explain what's happening here, these are all areas where the city has long criminalized all of these kinds of conduct. So we've had things in our muni code that say you can't commit wrongs to minors, which is essentially child abuse. You can't obstruct a police officer.

Councilmember Aparity. If folks have their phones on, can

you please shut phones off? May I please place those on mute?

Thank you, council member.

I appreciate that. So we've had we've had municipal ordinances that address all of this conduct, and our prosecutors have always prosecuted all of this conduct. But the challenge after camp is that there has been a tendency in our municipal code because we haven't revisited this code much. Like, this code has been just sort of it hasn't been paid as much as attention to. And so we've tended to have these very broadly stated criminal offenses.

And so we may have an offense that encompasses this whole I these are my hand brackets. This whole range of conduct, whereas the state gets more specific and breaks that conduct into three parts with different sentences. And so you can see that where these can be a class three or a class four, class three or a class four. That's because with a huge amount of help from Marley Morley Bordofsky in the city attorney's office, she's the one who really sat and paired up all of these municipal offenses with state offenses and said, where do these overlap? And so can we be more clear and break apart our city offenses in exactly the same way so that we can, again, prosecute these things to the maximum possible?

Because the assault example is a good one. If we if we had a an ordinance that I think it said assault is defined as assault. You know, it was it was pretty broad and vague, and that would mean that every every case prosecuted under that ordinance would arguably have to get the sentence for the lowest form of assault. So we have made that fix for all of these crimes, And if we don't do that, there is a risk of all of them reverting to the lowest sentence within the the broader umbrella. The only feedback from PACE that we had back and forth about was that we've tried to draw a very clear line between conduct that was already covered by our municipal ordinances, and in some cases, the state ordinances might cover a little bit of additional conduct.

So, you know, maybe this was our city bracket, and maybe there's a little conduct up here that would never have been prosecuted in city court previously. And that was a that was a hard line to draw, so it just took quite a bit of back and forth to figure out, okay, under what the city is currently criminalizing, are we really prosecuting every every subtype of this state crime, or are there things in here that would not have come to the city before and that we should therefore keep that the same and keep them going to state court. We probably need to have a conversation about the line between what we criminalize in the city and what goes to the state, what gets, you know, upcharge or or can only can only be prosecuted there, and also about some things that we criminalize that maybe we just don't need to. But we made a decision to just not do that in this bill because this is enough of a lift for us. There are so many considerations here that if we were going to be adding conduct to our municipal code that has not been prosecuted in municipal court previously, that would take a very intentional conversation with victim rights groups.

And And we have a letter from one victim rights kind of umbrella group that talks about some of this in more detail. But, essentially, there would be a variety of positions, and I guarantee we would hear the position in some instances that there might be a preference for certain conduct to be prosecuted in state court. State court is where they do felonies. They're staffed differently. So we would have to really dig in and figure out if we were going to be prosecuting things now here in our city courts that haven't been before.

Are we staffed for that? Do we have the right attorneys and victim rights advocates for that? And we just don't that's beyond the scope of what we're trying to in this bill. So I just wanna be very clear about that. Beyond that, when it was just a matter of, you know, separating out these offenses into more tiers, we took 100% of the feedback from PACE and thereby preserved the mass maximum possible post camp prosecutorial authority for everything that overlaps with state law that you see on this slide.

Oh, this is me too. Okay. Right. So then regulatory offenses. This is another big and complex category. So as you all have heard, something that was news to me early on in working on this whole bill is that throughout all of the we have the municipal criminal code, then we have the whole rest of the DRMC. Right? Airports, licenses, noises, everything else, the other 49 chapters or whatever it is. Anytime legislated in the past or past councils have legislated and used the word shall, that is something that could be prosecuted in municipal court. You know, I doubt anyone's gonna prosecute the auditor for not issuing wage regulations.

I was looking back at ordinances that I worked on to see if I had used the word shall, and I think that's the only time I used it. But theoretically, anything that's mandatory language in the entire DRMC could become prosecution. So we have spent time talking to agencies and trying to figure out when they actually prosecute items not under the municipal criminal code, but under the health code or the housing code and all of those things. The three agencies that really do this and work with PACE and sometimes prosecute conduct are these are violations of the fire the fire code, licensing violations, and then probably most importantly, DDPHE. DDPHE oversees about a quarter of the DRMC, as we have learned.

And I'm going to just pull up something from that agency that lists this out. So they oversee air pollution, animals, child care, emergency vehicles, food safety, health and sanitation, boarding homes, residential residential health, wandering, mobile homes, noise control, nuisances, pest control, solid waste, and swimming pools. So out of the 59 chapters of the DRMC, those chapter titles are overseen by DDPHE. And so I'm going to start with excise and license and fire because for those two agencies, it was pretty straightforward for them to identify which portions of the DRMC they ever have an interest in prosecuting. And in conversation with them, we created an additional class of offenses that continues to have a $999 fine, which is what they have today under the general penalty, but drops the potential jail sentence from three hundred days to ten days because we have found that there has virtually never been jail time actually served under any of these regulatory types of violations.

And so the threat of it can be significant to gain compliance. I think we found one example of a fifteen day sentence that I think then wasn't actually served by the person but was handed down. But mostly, this is an arena where you gain compliance through fines. And so we're proposing to keep the fine at $999, but the jail time at ten. Keeping in mind that for regulatory types of offenses, most of the time, there would be multiple violations.

And a lot of these the regulatory codes even say that every day that something is not in compliance is a separate violation. So you can imagine if you're dealing with, you know, a bad building type of situation, if you if we if if anyone else were to go to the Raven as CDPHE has, we could find a 100 violations very quickly. We could find 10 very, very quickly, and then every day is another continuing violation. So each violation, which is sometimes defined as one day of of the same conduct going on, would be subject to another ten days in jail and another $999. That, I think, will take some conversation.

And you think the only one is the animal protection Yes. So atlas of the virus.

So this is why I'm talking first about fire and excise and license. We've had one more email exchange with excise this morning identifying we we need to add another subpart of their code to this 999 in ten days. So we've gotten that feedback. But otherwise, I think those two agencies were basically able to identify, like, where there are offenses where they need to make sure that they preserve that 995 fire fine authority. Great.

DDPHE, because they oversee much more of the code, our back and forth with them, and it really just came we sort of got final word on this yesterday, I think. And you can see why because they have a lot of code. They they are wanting to continue the conversation. They find it more difficult to identify all the subparts of their code that might need that 999 fine to continue because their code is just longer. So I think we will sort of put a pin in what the solution to that will be.

I am hoping that it is still possible to identify all of those code items by number. But the other thing to know about DD50 prosecutions that they do are overwhelmingly under the animal code, and most of those violations have state law analogs. So there are already sentences that are gonna be dictated for animal bites, owning a dangerous animal, cruelty to an animal, neglect of an animal. Those are all state crimes. So those are all handled by camp.

The sentences for all of those things are clear. And those are there are you know, for the common categories of those crimes, there might be, like, a thousand charges a year with what we see about 500 animal attacks and 500 keeping a dangerous animal each year. Then if you go away from the animal code and you look at everything else that DDPHE does, we found less than 200 total offenses under all of the rest of the code in 2024 and 2025. So we need to figure out how to handle those, but they are not commonly charged. And part of what we've been grappling with in this bill is trying to figure out, given the the volume of the municipal code, it is huge, What should the default sentences be?

And can we be comfortable moving forward if something hasn't been prosecuted in in a while setting a default and and feeling okay about that? And then knowing that we could always revisit specific sentence for these regulatory offenses, which are, other than the animal stuff, they're pretty much all municipal only and therefore not dictated by camp, just to be clear. All right. That's probably good enough for that slide. Okay.

All right.

Now now turning to the last part of what we are proposing here, and it's eliminating mandatory fines for prostitution. In the in the municipal code, there are mandatory fines for prostitution, 500 for a first offense, 700 for a second offense within five years, and $999 for a third or subsequent offense. The fines do not exist at the state level, and so we are removing the fines to align with state law, but note that the judges will have the discretion going forward to fine for each offense up to $300 per violation.

Okay. Now we're on to the feedback, and I think councilwoman Parady covered quite a bit of this. But just to put a finer point on it, there was we really appreciate the the partnership and the work from PACE in, as councilwoman Parady mentioned, kind of, like, taking a look at everything and seeing what aligns and where where we can find that alignment and to also make sure that we're not you know, the goal of this bill is not to add any new crimes or elements, and it is also not to take any crimes away. Our lane is purely focused on the sentencing piece. So with that said, there were some some changes that were requested that we were able to incorporate in the current bill that is for war folks.

I do also wanna note, you know, we have crew we have provided, you know, what we call red line versions, and a lot of that is because we know that council members really appreciate to see what all the work that has been done and all the changes that have been done based on the feedback that has been received. So in the camp decision, in the language, they utilize the terminology same or identical. We had initially only had the terminology same. Hazard wanted us to include the term identical, so we met a compromise and said we will then say same or identical, which matches the language that's in that decision when it comes to state offenses that are comparable to municipal offenses. We did delineate trespass to a dwelling as a separate, more severe crime than a just a mere trespass, knowing that, you know, going into someone's home, as we heard from our city prosecutors, as that is seen as a more serious type of offense.

We included language about the continued pattern of behavior in wrongs to minors. That one took a little bit of time to just grapple with a little bit to better understand because we know there are a number of crimes that are also prosecuted at the state level. Former child protection worker here, caseworker, I have worked on a lot of cases where we may have, you know, dual you have your dependency neglect case, but you also have sometimes a criminal case, a companion case, and that is where they're either being prosecuted at the state or the municipal level. We also added language to conspiracy offense to clarify the statute. We maintained the failure to obey offense as a municipal only crime.

This is to align with the interference ordinance with state obstructing a peace officer statute. This is something that we heard pretty loud and clear from our coalition. They were asking us to remove actually some of these types of offenses completely. And so that's when I say when we wanna focus on the lane that we're focusing on, which is only about sentencing, not removing any crimes, and not adding any new crimes or elements, that is our focus, and that is what we have stayed true to. And that is a pure evidence of that fact.

And that's for a different conversation and a different possible bill. I don't know if somebody might wanna take that up. With regards to retaining area restriction order violations as a municipal only offense, again, there is high concern that this is being utilized in a discriminatory way and causing harm to folks. And, again, because we're staying in our lane, we have kept that in the bill, and and we'll continue to allow that to be prosecuted. With the regards to painless assault, this was something that we heard from PACE that they wanted to maintain in harassment ordinance.

You all, as council members, and I believe it has also been uploaded into Legistar, there is a letter from an organization called Violence Free Colorado. They are an umbrella organization coalition that works with a lot of victims' rights organizations. You will see in their letter, they want that language removed. They want that language removed because of the implications and negative impact that it can have on victims. These groups are made up of members who are survivors, who are victims of various types of crimes, mostly domestic violence and sex assault.

And so these folks have come at us and asked us to remove this language. And so that is something that, you know, we wanna be able to have continued ongoing conversation. We want to be able to you know, if we need to bring our partners with the mayor's office with PACE together to hear directly from victims and what they are asking for and why they are asking for it. And the last piece is something that councilman Parity touched on, which was around the class five civil infractions, was to have that just because it it mirrors what is in state statute.

And just to be super clear about this slide, these are the things we've incorporated since we were last here in committee. So there is far more, as you all saw, as far as, like, delineating offenses on the slide that I did before, But these are the new pieces of PACE feedback that we've incorporated since the last time we were through. And you can see that several of them trespass to a dwelling wrongs to minors. What we were trying to figure out there was how to incorporate state language that PACE was asking for without adding new conduct to our code, and that was taking us a little bit of time, but we got there on all of those. And just to add something about failure to obey, area restrictive orders, and painless assault, these are all examples where the city has long had an ordinance that captures a range of conduct, some of which is criminalized by the state and some of which is not.

So we have always had an obstruction statute. Under the state obstruction obstruction statutes, statutes, you have to physically interfere with a police officer. Under our statute, you can be prosecuted for just verbals, for yelling and interfering with an officer. And so the concern from our coalition that that is it can run into First Amendment concerns because you might be prosecuted because of the nature of what you said. It can run into like, it I think we need to have a conversation about that.

There's a reason why in our earlier draft, we were proposing removing that, But then we just decided no removing criminal conduct, no adding criminal conduct to keep us focused on sentencing. So you'll hear from us in the future about that, I think. Same thing for area restrictive orders. Those are a form of court order that the state doesn't have that we do. And then painless assault assault is defined as sort of like putting someone in fear that you're about to hurt them or actually touching them and hurting them.

Under state law, you do have to cause some level of pain even if it's a really small level. Sorry, the state may actually have painless assault. I'm going to go away from that and just say, sorry, Serena just caught me. She was looking at me and she put that thought in my brain. Let me take back the piece about the overlap of state law.

The point here is that you can have different types of assault. You can have assault where someone actually physically causes someone pain, or you can have assault where someone is frightened. And the interesting feedback that we got, which I had not thought about much in the past, is that painless assault prosecutions are quite common where you have a relationship where domestic violence is occurring, and one person is being physically hurt by their abuser. And they in return are yelling, defending themselves, and the victim then is open to being prosecuted if you have a painless assault on the books. VFC Colorado has raised that with us, and I

think

that we, a body, need to consider taking that feedback. And so that is the one area of conduct that we currently criminalize where we may ask to actually take that out in the bill, and we're sort of putting that to everybody as a whole. So you all can look at the VFC Colorado letter and think about that. Right now, we maintain painless assault in the bill because that's the line that we have drawn. But we have that ask, and so we're putting that to everybody. So thank you, council member. I just wanted to

You're good.

Reemphasize those things.

Go ahead. You're up next.

Oh, I am. Okay. Stakeholding. So we went back to try to figure out how many times we had met with sort of the mayor's office and and PACE about this. We have had, in addition to all kinds of emails and, you know, other correspondence in between, we've had 10 different meetings with PACE.

And then I think a few additional that included the mayor's office, but not PACE, going all the way back to 2024, August 2024. And we had circulated to Pace I'm going to find the exact date and to the mayor's office in September 2024. So our first meeting was on August. In September 2024, a year and a half ago, we had sent a chart with the comparison between municipal and state charges, asked for feedback on that. We then sent an updated version of that with the briefing from the camp case.

We got a response from Pace to that chart in an email in late twenty twenty four, and then the back and forth has kind of continued from then on. But the reason I wanna point that out is because the core proposal from the sponsors here has really never changed. Our proposal has been we need to line up our city sentences with state sentences. We were proposing that even before the Supreme Court said we had to. And our municipal only commonly prosecuted offenses that are equivalent to petty offenses should only be ten days, not 300.

And so that has has been the proposal for this entire time. And the complexity where we're now going in and redefining elements of offenses and everything else has been responsive on our part in trying to meet concerns about the impact of the camp decision on city prosecutors. So we have taken that on to try to get that as right as we can after that decision. But that's where when you see changes to the elements of crimes, those are coming only in response to requests from PACE and the mayor's office to maintain their ability to sentence at the highest level post camp. So you can you all know that we were first in budget and policy on this almost a year ago in June 2025.

We've been through committee, I think, four times before today. I think this is our fifth committee meeting on this. And then you you've you can see here that we've met with with PACE many times, with OMPD many times, with the with members of our coalition led by the Freedom Fund who I say our coalition, but, actually, this coalition existed before this bill and advocated for a state bill, was part of the work that went into the camp decision. So it's a freestanding coalition that has approached us about this issue. And then our first meeting with public safety, I wanna highlight, was in summer twenty twenty five as well and at the d the DA's office in 2025. So these are the early meetings, and councilmember Gonzalez Gutierrez, I think, is gonna talk about the more recent ones.

Thank you.

So I'm gonna just walk us through real quick of all of the correspondence and work that has been done starting at the beginning of this year post camp decision. Right? Once we got word of that, we wanted to make sure that this body was aware of this change, and we started having meetings with both the public defender's office, with the mayor with PACE as well to try to make sure that we were understanding what was happening in the courtroom. So as you all know, we came back to budget and policy in January 2026. We had briefings offered to council members in February throughout that month.

We have had multiple meetings with violence free Colorado that started back in February 2026 and have continued, that we've been in ongoing conversations. We held a public webinar in February 2026. We met with the mayor's office and PACE in February 2026. And I do wanna go over a couple of things that have occurred in those in those moments where we have received a spreadsheet that was, I think, really helpful that PACE had been working on that that kind of gave us some of the data that we would need and understanding of, like, what are the most serious crimes? And that was the thing that we started asking pretty immediately once, you know, we got indication that PACE might they had some concerns with certain crimes.

We said, okay, tell us what those most egregious crimes are. What are those serious crimes? What are your concerns? So that we can see how we can incorporate that feedback in. And so it took it took us a a little bit to get the the information, but we did get it.

And that's specifically municipal only crimes that don't live in the criminal code. So that's the regulatory stuff, just to be clear. K. Everybody's nodding. That's good.

So we we received it back in mid February. On February 20, we met with the mayor's office and PACE. We received some feedback. They were still trying to get, you know, in touch with the bill that we had already started have in drafting. On February 25, we received edits from PACE asking for changes.

On March 4, we met with the mayor and mayor's office and the mayor and PACE, and we were able to discuss the current iteration of the bill. On March 9, we shared an updated bill draft for committee that day with PACE, and that was for, I think, another budget and policy committee. Yep. In March. And then on March 17 oh, sorry.

I'm getting my dates mixed up here. Okay. So we there was a mix up around that time of budget and policy in March where we didn't actually get the draft, which is why the draft came a little late to council members is because it was held from giving it to sponsors for a brief moment. And then when we finally did get it, we were able to then share it with you all. We had another meeting in late March with PACE and the mayor's office to discuss feedback and continue policy items.

We had to do multiple meetings to get through all of the amount of feedback to make sure that we were understanding what the asks were. We had three agency meetings with the mayor's office and PACE. We had the licensing and consumer protections in March, Department of Public Health and Environment, and the Denver Fire Department also all in March. On April 6, we shared an updated version of the draft with PACE. I'm just making sure I'm passing the line here.

And then and then we had another meeting, and we outlined the policy changes and compromises around various issues, including issues around masturbation, victims' rights, group outreach, and the committee that at that time, the committee briefing was canceled. And we did receive notice that, you know, changes were appreciated at that time, and so we continued to work forward.

Yeah. We've significantly narrowed the range of the outstanding concerns from the mayor's office. They still have outstanding concerns, but it is a far shorter list at this point.

Then we had a meeting with various downtown groups, visit Denver, Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce, downtown Denver partnership, Colorado concern, Denver Center For Performing Arts, and many others as well in April. And we told them that it wouldn't be the last time. Right? We were happy to circle back with folks, and if there is actual substantive feedback that they have, then we're happy to have that conversation. We have three upcoming community engagement sessions, and these will be each be one hour virtually that will be coming up Tuesday, April 21 from four to 5PM, Wednesday, April 22 at 06:30PM, and Saturday, April 25 at 10AM, where we are inviting and intentionally, we'll be inviting our bids, JIDS, and any other community member that would like to attend those meetings to learn about what we're proposing and an opportunity to engage with us.

Now we'll move on.

So while the three of us are here presenting in front of you, there is a coalition of support as the councilwomen have already spoke about, and you can see here it includes the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, the Colorado Freedom Fund, ACLU Colorado, disability law Colorado, among others. And we received, as was mentioned earlier, a letter of support from violence free from violence free Colorado, which is an umbrella organization for other organizations aimed at ending or addressing domestic violence and for supporting survivors. Note that this letter, which is in Legistar, is qualified in its support, and violence free Colorado is taking a position that the so called painless assault change to the municipal code should not be added and that the inclusion of that piece would be sufficient for violence free to flip their position. And

the last thing is next steps. So these this is just proposed kind of next steps, and we're looking forward to the conversation today.

Happy to take any questions.

Tim, would

you mind pulling down the presentation? We have public comments. Before we roll to that, I would like to welcome council president Pro Tem to the meeting and council member Sawyer. Thank you both for for joining us. Prior to public comments, we usually make a statement for whether it's on the floor and committee, and I'll I'll repeat kind of the expectations for engagement in public comments. We have twenty minutes. It's usually fifteen. We extended the time by five minutes for public comment for this item. For those participating in person, when called upon, please come to the microphone that's right there by the audience. On the screen, you will see your time counting down.

For those participating virtually, when called upon, please wait until our meeting host promotes you to speaker. When you're promoted, please accept the promotion. Turn on your camera, if you have one, and your microphone. If folks who are presenting in the room aren't seeing the time, I'll give a quick reminder for you, and folks that are online will be communicating to you as well. All speakers should begin their remarks by telling the council their names. Speakers will have two minutes. There is no yielding of time. There is no passing time to anyone else, any other speakers. Speakers must stay on topic and direct their comments to counsel as a whole. Please refrain from profane or obscene speech and refrain from individual personal attacks.

Those are our stated agreements. Tim, thank you so much for promoting the folks that are online, and we'll begin with our first speaker in the room, Javier Mayberry. Representative. Representative Javier Mayberry.

Thank you, council members. My name is Javier Mabry. I'm the chair of the house judiciary committee. I also have the honor of representing Southwest Denver. Thank you for the opportunity to speak today. I was the prime sponsor of House Bill eleven forty seven, the Municipal Court Fairness Act. One of the provisions I fought hardest for was the ten day cap on jail sentences for municipal only offenses because so many of these offenses, camping, loitering, trespassing, are offenses of poverty. And using lengthy jail sentences to punish poverty does not solve anything. It does not make us safer. It costs money.

It destabilizes families, and it does nothing other than punish poverty. And I know this personally. When I was a kid, my mom was jailed at the municipal level for a leash law violation. I was in the fifth grade. I attended Saint Louis Catholic School down on Sherman in Inglewood. A Denver police officer picked me up, from school instead of my mom at 9PM. Only me and the principal were left in the building, a municipal only offense, a lease law lease law violation. She spent a week, in jail. Denver's current code allows for sixty to three hundred days in jail for the same kind of offenses while state court allows just ten days for the same conduct. The Colorado Supreme Court has now ruled unanimously that this disparity is illegal.

Denver's municipal court has already issued more than 500 illegal jail sentences in the past two years. This council has both the legal obligation and the moral imperative to fix that. If the state legislature could undertake a comprehensive misdemeanor code review and lower sentencing caps for the lowest level offenses, surely Denver can do the same. My preference would be to go further and decriminalize these these offenses entirely, but at a minimum, this ten day cap is the right thing to do right now. Denver has led on criminal legal reform. The code is overdue for an update that reflects the values of our city. Please vote yes.

Thank you, representative. David Howard.

Here, Watson. Never mind. There are folks in the overflow room, so maybe we can call the next three names just so to give folks time to come down, please. Correct. Thank you.

David Howard.

Hi. Thank you, committee. I'm David Howard, council district cashman. One of your newsletters recently said, I believe as a whole, den rights value accountability. Well, I agree. You hear it from us all the time. This bill does not reflect that value. This bill uses the camp decision as an excuse to lower penalties for a raft of low level crimes that create disorder in our city. Vote no. You've read the city attorney's memos.

The ten day catch all penalty is an unnecessary overreach. It reduces discretion of those whose job it is to enforce consequences for trespassing, wrongs to minors, flourishing weapons, and domestic violence. This bill strips power from our enforcement system while residents are begging the city for more stability. We see improvements in areas where we put our foot on the gas. Don't throw the gas pedal out the window. Vote no. Colorado, particularly Denver, has become a magnet for chaotic behavior. Criminal justice reform has gone too far. We prioritize granola bars and forgiveness over the rights of the self reliant and productive citizens who love this city. We chase away the fabric of the Denver community as we ask business owners to absorb the costs of chaos.

We excuse those whose lack of self control spills onto our sidewalks. Most Denverites are not asking you to weaken our justice system further. We want you to protect victims' rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. During USA two '50, remember our timeless values. Don't pass this broad reduction in consequences. Vote no. Direct the city attorney to draft a narrower version that complies with camp without surrendering our city's ability to maintain order. Pass that version instead. The city attorney, the department of safety, fire, police, and the community want you to vote no. Stop making Denver a magnet for disorder. Make it easier to run a business and raise a family. Make it harder to damage our city. Thank you.

Thank you, mister Howard. The next three speakers, we have Jen Garner, Leanne Fix, and Brittany Choate. So we'll start first with Jen Garner.

Good morning. Thank you so much for allowing me to speak. Think mister Howard made all of the points I'd hoped to make much more eloquently. My encouragement to you all is to reject this current proposal and adopt a narrowly tailored ordinance that complies strictly with what is specified as same and identical in the state statutes. There is no appetite for increased disorder in Denver.

And I'd like you all to reject the framing that there are crimes of poverty. That's an insult to people who are in poverty. We need to be accountable for our behaviors. We need to and people who are struggling with addiction and things like that, we need leverage to be able to encourage them to divert to treatment, or they need to be held accountable for the behaviors that they actually do. These sweeping reforms are not something that the people of Denver want.

We want order restored. We want there to be actual consequences when someone steals from us or damages our property or sets up camp in our carports. That's not what we want. And we are a generous people who give a great deal of our tax dollars and our charitable dollars to be helpful. If there is an unmet need there, let's redirect how we are spending or caring for Denver dollars, etcetera, to create the capacity so that we're not undermining the camping statutes, that we're not undermining loitering, that we're not undermining destruction of property, etcetera, that may seem low level to you all, but it's a big deal to the individual household, the individual business, and goes a long way to creating more chaos and havoc in our streets.

So let's be generous elsewhere and strict here. Thank you.

Thank you, Jen Garner. Leanne Fickes? And please correct if I mispronounce your last name.

Good morning, council members.

My name

is Leanne Fickes, and I am a social worker with the Denver Office of the Municipal Public Defender where I lead our client support team. I'm here today to ask you to vote yes and support sentencing reform. In my daily work, I see how our current system cycles people through arrest, jail, and release without addressing root causes. Over eighty percent of the folks that we represent live with mental health conditions, substance use disorders, and traumatic brain injuries, and more than half are unhoused. In Denver, around forty percent of municipal cases involve people experiencing homelessness, often for low level offenses like trespass, closed park violations, and disturbing the peace.

As a Kappel resident in District 7, I understand the concerns of my neighbors and local businesses. However, longer jail sentences are not an effective deterrent for these low level offenses. And in fact, they often reinforce the very cycle we are trying to break. I also wanna be clear. Jail is not treatment.

Incarceration often worsens mental health conditions and increases the risk of overdose. Even short jail stays are deeply destabilizing. And as a Denver taxpayer, at $240 a night or more, I would like to see that going to more supportive services where people can actually get help. This sentencing reform gives us the opportunity to address root causes This and invest in what works like housing, mental health, and substance misuse treatment and other supportive services. I've seen this approach work.

One client that I've worked with for several years had dozens of charges. Once they received housing and other supportive services, they did not receive any more treatment. I want to also share we currently don't have any treatment courts in municipal court and we do at misdemeanor and felony levels that are they are evidence based and actually help hold people accountable and get them the support they need. So I ask you to vote yes, and thank you for your time.

Thank you, Britney Choi I'm sorry, Lan Fix. Britney Choi is next.

Thank you. My name is Brittany Choate. I'm a member of the Rose Andam Center's Voices Committee and a survivor of more than a decade of intimate partner abuse, including financial and emotional abuse, harassment, and stalking. I oppose this bill in its current form because I have real concerns about what it means for survivors in practice even with the amendments made. The sponsors have worked to preserve sentencing authority in some DV cases, and I want to acknowledge that delineating trespass to a dwelling is a more severe severe offense is a step in the right direction, but preservation on paper and protection in practice are not always the same thing.

I know what it's like to navigate a system where opinions tech or options technically existed and where, at every turn, I was turned those options didn't apply to my situation, that a decade of financial and emotional abuse and a year of stalking after I filed for separation was not enough for the legal system to take action. I wanna speak directly to the physical contact without injury provision in this bill, what has been referred to today as painless assault. The framing that physically contact physical contact without visible injury is somehow less serious is one I know intimately because that is exactly the argument used against me again and again. Coercive control is not painless. Financial abuse is not painless.

Stalking is not painless. A shove, a grab, a block, physical contact that doesn't leave a mark is often how abuse escalates long before visible injury occurs. The absence of violence visible evidence on my body did not mean a crime did not take place. It meant the system wasn't equipped to recognize it. I'm glad to hear that there's interest in discussions about what this type of language we need need in practice and to do so before passing this measure.

I would strongly urge you to make revisions that ensure that what is included properly recognizes survivor voices who have the lived reality of abuse that doesn't leave marks. A system that sets a ceiling of ten days and a $300 fine for events offenses with no state counterpart sends a message to survivors about how seriously this city takes their safety. Coercive control doesn't happen in a single incident. It's a pattern that depends on a user's confidence that the system won't intervene. When consequences are minimal and definitions are narrow, that confidence is justified. I urge you to take the time to get this right.

Thank you, Britney. Courtney Garrett, Kim Ray, and Cecily ly Riney. Riney.

Good morning, council members. Courtnee Garrett, president and CEO of the Downtown Denver Partnership. I want to start by, first of all, thanking the bill sponsors for your time last Thursday to go through the details of this bill. It's really critical at this moment in time that we understand the detail and we're able to have conversations around it. As I shared in that meeting, our downtown community is highly sensitive to anything that has the potential to erode our ability to enforce in an era when downtown is so incredibly fragile.

We know that our downtown businesses continue to struggle. The visitor experience is getting better, but we still have some significant challenges. And we have to make sure that our residents feel safe. And on that note, I have to tell a bit of a personal anecdote. I've told you all before I live at 33rd And Pecos, and I have a 14 year old son. And we have a vision that we adopted with the downtown area plan to have a family friendly downtown. My 14 year old is very independent. He takes out on his bike, and he goes across to the Denver Skate Park, and now he's going to 16th Street. And I still have to hold my breath despite the progress. So I ask you all to also think about that context.

I know most of you have children. I know most of you care about the future of our downtown community, and we have to ensure that it feels incredibly safe for all. A little passionate about this. At the same time, I want you all to hear me very clearly. As an organization that runs street operations, street outreach, we recognize that there are significant failures in the system, and we want to be your partner in solving for those.

So what we are simply asking you for today is some more time to speak with more community groups, more of us in the business community, those of us who are raising kids in this city, because the list of people who you've worked with thus far has been city agencies and PACE, we respect that. We just want a little bit more time to understand and work and collaborate with you. Thank you.

Thank you, Courtney Garrett. Kim Ray and Cecily Rining.

Hi. Good morning, chair and council members. I'm sorry. My name is Kim Ray, and I serve as the Denver campaign coordinator with the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition. In 2025, we launched the Get Real Denver campaign because reducing the overuse incarceration in Colorado requires action at the local level.

Denver plays a significant role in shaping that reality. Today, we're here because the Colorado Supreme Court has made something clear. It is unconstitutional for the city of Denver to impose harsher penalties in the state for the same conduct, but court rulings do not implement themselves. It's up to this body to ensure that Denver's municipal court system is constitutional, proportional, and aligned with the values we claim to hold as a city. That includes aligning sentence sentencing practices with constitutional standards for municipal only offenses.

This means also respecting the ten day jail limit and ensuring that individuals are not subjected to excessive or disproportionate punishment simply because their case is handled in municipal court rather than state court. For too long, our municipal system has relied on jail as a response to low level poverty based offenses. This approach does not make our community safer. Instead, it destabilizes individuals and families and diverts diverts, excuse me, resources away from strategies that are more effective at promoting public safety. This moment is more about more than compliance.

It's about rethinking how Denver responds to harm and building a system that is fair, effective, and grounded in our shared values. So today I'm asking you for a yes vote, and I would like to thank you for your time.

Thank you, Kimray. We have Cecily Rining. Make sure I'm pronouncing that correct. It is Cecily

right.

Thank you, Cecily, please.

Hi. Hello. Good afternoon. Thank you for the opportunity to testify. My name is Cecily Riney, and I am testifying on behalf of the Rosendum Center today. I work in family law aside alongside victim survivors, and I am a survivor myself. When I speak of patterns of escalation, I am speaking from both professional and lived experience. This bill is being framed as alignment with state law. It is not. In practice, it reduces the city's enforcement power to a maximum of ten days in jail and $300 fine for the mass vast majority of municipal offenses.

That is not alignment. That is a functional elimination of meaningful accountability. Municipal law exists because state law does not capture everything, especially not the early pattern based conduct we see in domestic violence and child endangerment cases. This bill removes that layer. But the most concerning departure from state law is how the bill treats violations of of protection orders. Under state law, violation of protection orders carry enhanced consequences, particularly for repeat violations and for cases involving stalking. That reflects what we know to be true. These are not isolated incidents. These are patterns. This bill removes those enhancements and treats repeat violations more like first time conduct.

It removes recognition of escalation, and in doing so, it weakens the mow one of the most critical enforcement tools we have for protecting victims who have already sought help through the court. Protection orders are not suggestions. They are legal boundaries put in place because the court has already identified risk. When those boundaries are violated, especially repeatedly, the system should respond with increased seriousness, not less. Municipal enforcement is often the first line of response when these violations occur.

It allows for faster intervention, early accountability, and the ability to document patterns before harm escalates further. When you remove that layer, cases do not simply shift to state court. Many do not get charged at all. Patterns go undocumented, risk goes unaddressed, and victims are left waiting until harms becomes undeniable. So the question becomes, what conduct are we actually willing to take seriously?

Thank you so much, Cecily, for your testimony. We have two more individuals. I'll be able to speak today. Bayer Campbell and Anaya Robinson.

Bia, sir.

Thank you for the correction.

Hi, everybody. Bia Campbell. I'm the senior director of public affairs of Colorado Concern. And I think we would like to start with where there is agreement. The city needs to update its codes based on the decision. With that said, we have a problem with the process here. If

this

was a simple compliance, then why are there so many people in this room against it? I think that alone should give pause. One thing that we'd really like to request is for us to let the experts be the experts. When we talk about policy and politics these days, one thing that becomes very clear is the idea of the death of the expert. We have a director of PACE in the room that has over twenty years of experience and that knows the Denver Municipal Code back to back to front.

Why are we not giving voice to the people that actually can implement a technical decision into a technical case? Our ask today is that you please involve the city attorney's office and the community into this process. We've received the updated, which was version nine of this bill last Wednesday. I don't know you all. I don't think a week is enough for us to speak with any conviction on the matter.

If we need if we need to comply with a decision of the Supreme Court, which is true, then let's do it correctly. Let's make sure that we're not opening the door in creating an even more aggravating problem than the one that we're trying to fix. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Thank you. Our final speaker, we have Anaya Robinson. And if I pronounced your name incorrectly, please correct.

Thank you, mister chair and committee members. My name is Anaya Robinson. I'm the public policy director at the ACLU of Colorado here today in support of municipal sentencing reform for Denver. At its core, this is about fairness, legality, and aligning Denver's code with our values and laws. Right now, Denver's municipal sentencing structure is outdated, unpredictable, and in some cases, unlawful.

The threat of these lengthy sentences alone has real consequences. When someone is told they could face hundreds of days in jail, many will plead guilty just to avoid the risk, even when they may have a valid defense. This undermines the right to trial and creates a coercive system, especially for people who are already vulnerable. Much of Denver's code is out of compliance with the Colorado Supreme Court's decision, Simons Encamp, which makes clear municipalities cannot impose harsher penalties than state law allows for the same conduct. Right now, Denver is out of step with that standard.

The impact is not evenly felt. These broad sentencing ranges disproportionately harm low income residents and communities of color. When poverty related offenses carry the possibility of months in jail, we are effectively criminalizing survival. These policies also increase the risk of deportation for immigrants for the lowest level conduct subjecting families across the city not only to jail time but to a heightened potential of being broken apart possibly forever. The solution being proposed is straightforward and reasonable.

Align Denver's code with state law, create clear and proportional sentencing ranges, and critically establish a ten day maximum for municipal only offenses. This reform would bring consistency, reduce coercion, and ensure that punishment is proportionate to harm. It would also align Denver with reforms the state has already made to reduce disparities and improve fairness in sentencing. Put simply, no one should face months in jail for a municipal violation that would carry far less or no time under state law. This is about restoring balance, protecting constitutional rights, and ensuring that our local laws do not deepen poverty or inequality. I urge you to support these reforms and adopt the ten day limit for municipal only offenses. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Thank you so much, Anaya Robinson. I wanna thank everyone that showed up today. We have a full room of folks to speak. And as it is with most of our public comments within committee, we're not able to provide the opportunity for everyone in this room and the overflow room and folks are virtual. Know that we respect your opinion, we respect your input.

There will be many other opportunities either by letter or through public comments as this process moves through Denver City Council. You're invited and encouraged to stick around for council members questions of the sponsors, but I wanted to just take a moment to thank you all for being here and for participating in this very important discussion. And with that, we do have a queue for Denver City Council members that has begun. If there's a council member that would like to join the queue, please do so. There are two things before I go into the queue that I wanna read into the record, and I wanna make sure that we have those actually listed in the record because I don't believe they're in Legistar, and I spoke with both of the writers to make sure that they were there.

Our district attorney, John Walsh, asked for this to be read into the record. This will be in Legistar as this moves through the process, but I wanted to read verbatim the letter he sent to Denver City Council. In People versus Camp 2025, the Colorado Supreme Court held that for identical offenses under state and municipal law, municipal penalties may not be greater than state penalties. The bill currently before city council goes far beyond addressing that issue and seeks to enact a sweeping reduction of penalties on almost all city ordinances, even those not covered by the Supreme Court's decision. It does so without discussion with stakeholders regarding public policy with respect to those ordinances individually and without considering the collateral consequences of those changes.

Those consequences include potentially increasing a caseload of Denver district attorney's office by limiting the remedies currently available at the city level. In addition, the bill makes changes not only to penalties, but to the substance of many municipal offices, changes that are not required by the camp decision. Among other things, those changes would negatively impact both domestic violence survivors and stalking victims by limiting the effectiveness of charges for violations of protective orders. For these reasons, the Denver DA's office opposes the proposed bill in its current form. If changes are to be made to ordinances beyond those changes directly required by the Supreme Court's decision, a careful process to consider those potential changes individually would be appropriate.

Thank you for your work on these important issues. I'm always happy to discuss them. If you have any questions, and that was district attorney John Walsh, was sent on 04/14/2026. The presiding judge Lombardi asked for a communication that was made to Denver City Council on January 29 to be read into the record. This is not currently within Legislature.

We're gonna ask for this to be uploaded to Legislature. I'm writing to address concerns regarding a narrative suggesting that the Denver County Court is not in compliance with the Colorado Supreme Court's decision in People versus Camp number two four s a three zero eight and number 24 s a three zero nine. In the People versus Simmons, the Camp decision or is acting unconstitutionally. I want to provide clear reassurance that the characterization is inaccurate and that any abrupt changes to municipal ordinance based on this premise are unnecessary. The court is in full compliance with the law that the Denver County Court believes the Colorado Supreme Court decision in People versus Camp required immediate implementation even without counsel action amending the DRMC to to reflect its application.

The court is currently advising defendants individually of the maximum penalties found in Colorado revised statute section 18 slash 1.35011 a five and eighteen slash 1.3 hyphen five zero three one point five. And when the municipal ordinance violation prohibits the identical conduct conduct, its state counterpart prohibits and is in the process of updating its advisement forms to reflect those changes. We take our constitutional obligation seriously and have implemented specific measures to ensure compliance with the laws required. There is agreement among the parties on most charges, and in the event there is disagreement on the issue of identical conduct, the parties are afforded the opportunity to present arguments and the court issues rulings accordingly. There is a citation there and then it says, we believe open dialogue helps ensure that any legislative solutions are based on accurate information about current court operations.

Thank you for your attention to this matter, sincerely.

As one of the sponsors, I would just like to to speak to that because we weren't aware that those letters were going to be read into the record. And I might take us back to the slides in which slide 13 and slide 14, as those letters are a bit old, that some of the stakeholder and that we were able to do with different folks, not just in the coalition but with city departments as well. And so just want to remind folks the extensive stakeholder and that we've been doing, and so we have actually addressed some of the things that were brought up there. With that, I'll give it back to you,

chair.

Just wanna council member Lewis

I just wanna add one thing on that that the court from the the county courts from judge Lombardi. We had a meeting with them in which we were able to have that conversation. And so I just find it concerning that it's just a one-sided kind of letter. So if we need to write a email response so that that can also be entered, we can absolutely do that because we did respond to those concerns and never meant to imply that we were violating the law in our courtrooms because we knew that our city prosecutors and our public defenders were doing that work alongside the judges to make sure that we were following the camp decision. What we did say is that we, our ordinance, needs to be in line with the law, and that's what we are taking on.

I appreciate your comments. What I wanna be clear, when the district attorney and the presiding judge asked for items to be rolled into the the record, I provided that opportunity. If council members, sponsors would like additional information read into the read into the record, we surely can do that. The district attorney provided us that information and asked for that as of yesterday.

So I would just say for procedural Yeah. If you're gonna read one letter into the record as council president, I think you should read all letters into the record. I don't agree that we should have one record bled over another. It just doesn't feel right. So I think if you wanna do that, we have to take time and you should read all letters into the record right now. Because I understand that the presiding judge and the DA read those. I've never, as council president, in my time here, had a chair read letters into the record. We all got them, and they can be uploaded to LEGISTR. Correct. So can you please read the other letters into the record?

I don't have any other letters if the top Legistar. Members have

Legistar. Legistar. Which is

where we share public testimony.

Kids where read all of them because they're in Legistar. But I don't

picking out amount.

It's a There's a lot. There's a lot.

We wanna make sure we answer questions from

you guys. Correct.

Yeah. But if that's just that I don't agree with that.

Correct. Understood, madam president. If the items are in less than our folks want those read, we can read them, read them. We do have questions from city council members, and we have a whole room of folks from the city that are available to answer questions.

Yeah. I just don't know what to do here because we do we do have a few letters that I think are really germane. I don't know that it's the best use of our time to read them. I do think this is slanted. And I also wanna point out that in the testimony, we went to Oppo one pro to Oppo one pro. I don't know why we would have done that. We've never done that before. And we had 13 members of our coalition who put a lot of work into this and a lot of work into this bill, many of whom are here in volunteer capacities who were on the list to testify. So I I appreciate your words to people, but it it feels like a real bummer that that that wasn't even happening.

So to clarify to to council members, the listing of names pro, con, and noncommittal was created by city staff. That was not created by either the chair or

So the opposing speakers registered as neutral? So I see.

The individuals from who sign up for every public comment has the opportunity to list whether they are pro or con. That is the current process or noncommittal. We left that up to city staff to manage that as they do with every public comment. Nothing was done differently. I asked the city staff to manage that, so that's outside of any of the committee steps that we've taken. So with that, we're moving

our staff just to be clear. So let we should I think we should to the questions.

Yeah. Correct. We'll move into the queue for questions from council members. Council member Flynn, council member Sawyer, and council member Torres.

Thank you, mister chair, and thank you to members who devoted so much time to briefing us through the various iterations. Last night, around 05:30 as I was getting ready to go to a community meeting, I got version 11 of the draft. And I think that that is good because it reflects that you're incorporating more input and making changes based on that. So who the person who said they got version nine a week ago, we're up to version 11 now. And it sounds to me based on the fact that you're still doing engagement into late April as it's still as the calendar shows it going through the council process, I'd suggest that this isn't ready to move to the floor until you finish that engagement and maybe made the changes that you've hinted or suggested maybe coming painless assault meeting with more victims' rights folks.

We're not under any shot clock to get this done. There's no urgency because the municipal court is county court is is meeting its constitutional obligations. And so I think it's important to get it right the first time when it goes to the floor. So I I would not vote to move this out of committee at this point based on your own statements during the presentation that you're still doing an engagement. Can I offer I did get about I got back at 09:30, and I was able to last night, I was able to go through most of it?

And being an old editor, I think there's a drafting error on page three, line nine. I think that should be class three offenses shall include, and it says class two offenses. That is comes under class two. I figured we're just we we missed crossing out the two and changing it to three. Is that if if that's not right, let me know.

Hold on.

I mean,

this I almost have it up. Braylen. Braylen. Section?

It's page well, I printed it out, so it's page three. It's section

it's

under section two of the bill, section one fourteen offenses classified, and it's right after class two offenses, and then it moves to class three offenses. And then it's the list where it's parenthesis two. It says here's a class three offense.

Yeah. Yeah. C two. Yeah.

C two. And it's also in in paragraph in the paragraph tie title one. Yeah. Any person convicted of a class two offense may I think that should be class three. Is that correct? Yeah.

I think

that's right.

Good catch.

That's the old editor. Nice work. I actually read these things. Where did actually, let me ask a data question, and I know you won't have the answer right now. But as you were talking about the risks to people serving more than fourteen days and the fact that there were very few people on a relative basis who actually do that. When I went through the Excel file from county court, a number of people who are serving more than ten days, it looked to me, were sentenced to time served. In other words, they were in the jail during that time. So lowering the sentence to 10 doesn't help at all. So I don't know if there's a way to sort

that still does. It's it's not then legal to keep someone past ten days if the only things they're being charged with you you can't keep someone more than ten days post camp for a state petty offense even if it's time served. Okay. Same constitutional obligation.

The spreadsheet was just very, very dense and was very hard It was. To sort that out because of it wasn't well, it just wasn't sortable in a way that made that easy to read.

Yeah. And we

got that from courts as a result of the meeting with courts that happened after the Lombardi email that Kat Sherwatson just read. So that's the sequence of things we we've been engaging with them quite a bit since that email, including to get this chart of 70,000.

It looks like it looks like when we took out things like shoplifting, petit theft, damaging, defacing, where did they end up? They were taken out. They're red lined out, but I don't see where they ended up.

I don't at my fingertips every line of where everything moved, but those things are absolutely still in the municipal code, and the only differences are to so, for example, for shoplifting, I think maybe will you tell me which offenses you're just taking? Shoplifting, petty theft,

and Damaging destruction Yeah.

Each one of those, he's asked us for clarity if we would divide those into $300 and below and then 300 to 1,000, which is what state law does. So we did that, and I don't know the

line

numbers.

And that was my other question. Why are we lowering it from 2,000 to 1,000?

We're not. The state laws so there is a state law that says that we are not permitted to criminalize above 1,000. So we are changing 2,000 to 1,000. Right. That's just reflecting what state law directs. Okay. We have heard an argument from PACE that that that was somehow like a mistake by the state legislature or a typo and that they meant 2,000. Then they have to pass the bill. Mean, we but state law says that a thousand is

the limit of what we can include.

I'm gonna try to get in and out very quickly because I know other folks are in the queue, I have a lot of a lot of stuff here. I do not support the catchall. Any municipal offense for which there is no state offense that prohibits the same conduct, it's still ten days unless it's somewhere else in the code or something else. That catch I I just I just don't support that. This would be much easier if it were just aligning us with the camp decision, the things that we had to, and we can be more deliberative about the things that we don't have to that are discretionary.

And I wanna I wanna respond to that really clearly, miss Member. And and you can can keep going with your question, but I wanna respond to this piece because this has come up over and over and over again in this room and in the DA's letter, which I respectfully feel is just inaccurate, and I can explain why. So when we talk about what there is that we only criminalize in the city that we that is not criminalized at the state, there's sort of I would think about this in two categories. There's stuff that's throughout everything in our code that's not the criminal code, health code and all that. And then there's stuff that which is mostly regulatory.

Right. And then there's stuff that is in the municipal criminal code. And all of that, without exception, is just incredibly low level of conduct. And so for us to leave a potential three hundred day sentence for public urination, smoking on the 16th Street Mall, the camping ban, you know, sitting in the right of way, These are things that are so low level that the state does not bother to criminalize them, and that would leave us with a deeply irrational city sentencing scheme. If we have ten day sentences now for state petty offenses, which includes simple trespass, theft under $300, property damage under $300, much bigger list that is dictated by the state.

Most of our petty offenses do line up with state conduct, and then we leave these, like, stray Denver offenses at 300. We have a massive due process issue. And we have a massive issue where if you are a police officer and you encounter someone who police officers are much more likely to encounter people who are living outdoors than they are those of us who live in houses. Like, that's just a fact. Right? And so they encounter someone, and the person is in a parking lot that they don't own. Okay. That's trespass. That's now ten days under camp. But maybe the person has also urinated while we were there.

Are we gonna leave that at three hundred days and create this risk of sort of cherry picking? I cannot I cannot, in good faith, allow us to leave those offenses at three hundred days. They should be 10. Maybe they should even be less than 10, but there is no argument in a rational sentencing scheme for treating those things more. Ten days in jail is a lot of time. It really is. So I and we can charge people with multiple offenses if they have trespassed and urinated in public and they have drug paraphernalia. By the way, our code doesn't deal with drug crimes other than paraphernalia. Each of those things can be a ten day charge. That is already very strict.

There's a reason why judges often don't impose jail time for these things and why there were really only a 100 instances where they oppose more than ten days, and it's because that is not what's warranted. So I will go absolutely to the mat for that reduction to ten days. Now the other category

I I

I need to I need to

move on. Other category in the regulatory offenses, there's probably more to say about. Those are unique city things.

I need I need to do one.

I'm sorry. Council member Flynn, we we have everyone in the queue. We have only thirty minutes even though we extended this into two hours. So I'm gonna ask Pace actually to clarify that before I go back to the queue because I I'm I'm going to ask Pace to respond to

I just wanna level set for a minute here. Yep. Settle. Gotcha. In our council rules for all of us around the table, we have rules of decorum. Correct. We really do. And we have rules that say, do not attack other people and work together. Correct. So I would ask mister chair, we are asking questions right now. So can we please ask questions?

I can go

through ask for an agency to come up and respond, please do that. And I'm gonna ask everyone. I'm gonna put it in the chat, our rules of decorum because they are really serious and we just voted on them recently. And I'm gonna hold every single one of us, including me. And if you see me act out as council president, please call me out because I win I will not have this happen in our chambers or in our in our committee room. So please, everyone, this is really passionate. I understand. Except all of us just go back to our rules of decorum and treat each other as our rules of decorum state.

Correct, madam president. So what I'm gonna ask of council members is then it's just one question because there's a a need for clarity from the departments that are impacted for us to be able to get for for as chair, I have questions for them as well. So we're gonna do one question per council member, and we encourage folks to go through that process then. So council member Sawyer, then council member Torres, and council president Pretenda America.

Can we just take a second on this because I think this is important? We all chair committees. The chair asks their questions last, and any council member who's asking questions can all can call an agency up.

I I I So I

I would not limit people to one question to save time as chair. I I just wouldn't do that incorrectly.

So let's have council member Sawyer and council member Torres and council president pretend Romero Campbell. I wanna make sure we get through this list.

But one question?

We think let's do let's go back to our two questions, council member Sawyer.

Okay. Thank you. I really appreciate that. So switch over. Thank you. And I wanna say thank you to you guys first to start with. This is a very different bill than it was when you first came to us over a year ago with it, and so truly appreciate the amount of work that you have done and the depth that you have gone into on this. I went from being an absolute no to being willing to consider this, which is a big move for me. So thank you for all of the work that you did. That said, two questions. The first question, I just want to clarify for the public. I'm going to use the Saturday version because last night's version that came to me at 05:30, I just haven't had time to read it fully yet.

Has one substantive change, just Thank so everyone

you. So page one, line sixteen seventeen. This is where you lower the general broad sentencing from nine ninety nine and three hundred days in jail to one twenty and seven fifty. Correct? Then we are looking at page four line six seven. This is where you say all offenses are ten days and $300, I believe. So I just wanna I wanna clarify for those in the room and watching at home exactly what I'm looking at here Relationship between those. When I asked this question because I like, council member Flynn referred to it as the catch all. I've heard city attorney's office referred to it as the catch all. Like, if that's an easy way to describe it, great.

But I want the community to understand exactly the language that I am looking at when I ask these this question. Yes. Because I do not understand the I need some clarity around that. Your intention as to it, and then I need some clarity around the city agencies. And in particular, the ones that went off in my head were excise and lice or whatever we call excise and lice. Sorry, Molly.

Protection and lice.

DCLP and DDPHE and ZNIS. And so I want to ask them what the impacts are to them as a result of this. But first, can you just, like, clarify for the record what the issue is that I'm asking about here? Yes. And I understand what

you're asking, and I agree. It's so, essentially, the, historically speaking, the general penalty was sort of the only penalty. Right? And I agree with you. After this, there would be there wouldn't be a lot that would fall into the general penalty because most things we have now gone through and taken the time to align them to the highest possible sentence post camp.

And so we've essentially taken the majority of the municipal code or the or the criminal code, the things that are charged with any regularity, the common offenses, and and working with PACE have aligned those so they're not under the general penalty anymore. Where the general penalty would still come into play would be if we criminalize new conduct in the future that overlaps with the state, the general penalty and we did not specify a different class, if that makes sense.

Okay. Thank you for clarifying that for me. I really appreciate that because I was feeling a lot of confusion, and everyone's like, the catch all provision. And I'm like, I need

So I will someone say the general penalty plays a much smaller role now. And maybe it makes sense to do something different with that. The ten day catch all provision for anything that's only in the muni code is partly part of the reasoning for that is because within the municipal criminal code, in addition to the the the low level offenses that are commonly charged from the data that we've called out repeatedly, and that's that short list of, like, five or six things that I just ticked off, they're also just a huge miscellany. There's throwing a stink bomb. There's putting a horse in a garden. We have a lot of bizarre little muni only

pets.

Having more than three goats on your land. And we have read it's like

one of those old lawyer joke things. But we've looked at them all. So has OPD. I am sure that PACE has also. And there's nothing left lingering in those bizarre little categories that needs more than a ten day sentence. It just doesn't seem worth listing them all. Yeah. There's a lot of them.

Thank you for saying that and thank you for

clarifying

it.

We're quite

old. I appreciate it. My concern is around the impact this is going to have on enforcement. And so I'd really like to hear from DDPHE. Is there someone from ZNIS here? Can I answer your question with the agency side of things? No. I wanna hear from

the agencies what they That's totally fine. So Sorry. I just wanna make sure that

From DTHC.

Yeah. We've got two mics here. If there's not you can go off. Someone for here from ZNIS, then I would ask maybe fire because you guys are the other ones that we work with a lot in our office to come and get as well. All the agencies. Your perspective, that would be great. And I will just say before you start, like, concern is what my office hears is complaints about the quality of living. I have Cedar Run. Bless you. Cedar Run-in my neighborhood.

Concerns about animal control, concerns about meth cooking in empty garages at 1290 South Colorado. Thank you, fire department, for getting that taken down. And we've talked a lot about this. We've done a ton of work on enforcement in our community to enforce the NADB ordinance that we wrote, the meet and confer ordinance that we're working on right now. Like, there are real quality of life things in our community that I'm worried are gonna be impacted by this. And so I just wanna I wanna know from the city agencies, Are we gonna be impacted by this? And no. I wanna hear from the bucket.

That's the only thing I wanna say.

Okay. Let me so I appreciate that. Thank you. Let them have an opportunity.

Mister chairman of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to speak. I'm Alex Fiedelhull, legislative liaison for Department of Public Health and Environment. We've also had some trouble keeping up with the process. We were engaged a few weeks ago last month, and

a lot

of our enforcement staff is busy day to day out in the field and so trying to gather information about how this impacts us has been a challenge. We don't have anybody here from environmental quality or tobacco enforcement, for example, so we're still learning about how this would impact us. We are concerned about because given the breadth of code provisions that we enforce, this would impact, One of the concerns is that just because something wasn't criminally charged in the last two years doesn't mean that it wasn't criminally charged prior to that or won't need to be criminally charged in the future. And so we are concerned about breadth of the impact on our enforcement

activities.

And I've got Nicole Caldwell here from our residential health team and Josh Rolfe from our animal protection team

here.

Yeah. Thank you. If you don't mind, I'd like to hear from DLCP and fire also. I wish ZNIS was here because I feel like that's a really important one that I need to hear from too. But would you guys just mind sharing your perspective too? Like, I need to I really appreciate it. I know you guys have a ton of stuff, so thank you all for being here. But I feel like I have one minute left. So thanks.

Hi. Thank you. Molly Duplachain with Denver Licensing and Consumer Protection. Yeah. So the current proposal does incorporate changes to the licensing violations that we issue citations for, so I would put them in two categories.

One's where we issue, where we prosecute for license violations, and one where we issue and prosecute for unlicensed violations. So unlicensed violations where we find a business that's operating without a license, whether that's a residential rental, a short term rental, a security guard, right now that is three hundred days, $9.99. This changes it to $999 in ten days. And so the other piece is for license violations. So for a business that has a license, could still be a security guard, could be a private security employer, so somebody who hires security guards, and it could be a residential rental, any of the 100 plus licenses that we issue.

If they are not in compliance with one of the requirements that they have to comply with in order to maintain their license, right now, again, that is $999 in three hundred days, and this decreases it to $300 in ten days. And so yes, I think there will be an impact in compliance by both businesses and unlicensed operators. I think we'll see decreased compliance of obtaining the license. I think we could see decreased compliance by licensed businesses, including things like residential rentals. That is a great example where right now we're working with several challenging operators who are not in compliance with the requirements to pass an inspection to obtain the license, and the cost for them to make the repairs are less are more than the fines that we're charging.

So they're just going to keep paying those fines rather than addressing the repairs that need to be made. And I would say that's the case with both with many. That's just an example, and I think we'll see that across the spectrum of our licenses.

Okay. Thank you very much. Chief, you want to? I'm one minute over. Apologize. Chief,

as quickly as you can. Thank you.

Absolutely. Thank you very much. Desmond Fulton, chief Denver Fire. To answer the questions if this could potentially impact Denver Fire, absolutely. First and foremost, I have experts here from Denver Fire. I've got technician Scott Thornton, Lieutenant Colt Smith, who deal with this day in and day out. I am very appreciative of this opportunity and for the conversation. And we have been, in all fairness, in in discussions. But very similar to the last response, you know, we're really trying to look at compliance. And when we have building owners, we have business owners, sometimes it's just cheaper for them to build in fines to the overall cost.

And we're here to protect us, to make us all safe. And in the end, that's the bottom line. And when we take away the potential for lengthy jail time sentences, that takes away our potential to keep things safe. We're talking about buildings that are are chained up because maybe the owners want to keep someone from breaking in. Their answer to that is let's change the door shut. Well, what happens at three in the morning when we're responding to a fire? We're trying to evacuate people or we get trapped and we can't get out ourselves. Those are the types of lenses that we're looking through. So I I just ask that we really take the time to slow down. You know, this has meaningful consequences, and and it's important to get this right.

So I ask that we just take the time to have deeper conversations. I appreciate the intentionality of what we're trying to accomplish here, but in the end, I'm looking through the lens of safety and keeping all of us as citizens and the men and women of the Denver Fire Department today.

Thank you. Thank you. So I have one more question that I'm gonna leave unanswered. It's okay. And then I will just make a quick comment. So my thank you for that to all of the agencies that, were here to respond to it. That is of real concern to me, and that's because it's of real concern to my residents. So, I heard agencies say this. I've heard victims advocacy groups say slow down. I've heard business groups say slow down.

I've heard my residents say slow down. So I would like to get a real answer to the question, is there a middle ground here that we could do something differently as it comes to this language so that the leverage for enforcement is maintained, but we still achieve the goals that we all want to achieve with what you're trying to do here. So I would like to hold this in committee for those additional conversations to happen because I would I would like to see if there's a better compromise for that. That's all. Thank you. Thanks for the extra time.

Thank you, council member Sawyer. Council member Torres, council president Pro Tem Romero Campbell.

Thank you so much. So we wrote the NADB code and then delayed it. So that is an August August 1 deadline that I think we're tracking pretty closely. I would feel better knowing that there's just some operational assurance. NADB, sure.

Thank you. Neglected abandoned and derelict buildings ordinance. Passed a really good set of improvements on that process. So just want to be sure operationally that I know how that's supposed to roll out because we spent a lot of time on that. So that that would be helpful for me in if we're planning to delay it at all, is being able to just tighten that up, I think.

The other is I think there's a a deep level of misunderstanding of what the bill does and does not do, particularly around repeat offenders or even some of our domestic violence, the protective order effectiveness, stalking, that I'd want to make sure that we feel really clean also coming out. So I don't want to short shrift it and tell people, It's in there, it's okay. If it's not or if it is, I want to be able to point to it. So I just want to feel more confident about some of the points that were raised that we know how to myth bust that, and we know that it's super clean. So those were what my questions were largely about, because I I don't believe it has an impact on repeat offenders, I wanted to give the sponsors a chance to myth bust that.

But if we're thinking about postponing it, we could take more time to do that. And so that was gonna be kind of my line of questioning what in the DA's letter or that are Roseann and folks, what is a correction on those or what is accurate. So those are the questions that I was largely gonna have, But I could hold those. You don't have to answer them here, particularly there's only twenty some minutes left, if we want to take more time and just make sure that's

of bowed off. I'll respond to this quickly. One thing I think is a source of that confusion, quite honestly, is an email that went out from someone within the city attorney's office between drafts that essentially presumed that we would reject all further PACE feedback, which we never intended to do. We were still working through a lot of things. So that email went out to a whole bunch of people in the victim rights community.

It wasn't cc'd to sponsors. We eventually got it, thanks to council member Hines, and I think that may have done a lot of damage, to be completely honest. And and it was it was referring to a bunch of edits that we had not yet incorporated because we're working them through and that are now in the bill. The and to be very clear about all of these offenses, if this bill does not pass, we will be stuck with only the lowest level of penalties for assault, for threats, for all of these things. This bill is absolutely necessary to preserve our ability to prosecute DV cases. And the only area of dispute that I think we have left with pace about that are a tiny handful of elements of state laws that on our review are conduct that we don't prosecute in meeting court right now that would have to go to state court.

Okay.

And and I think victim rights groups might have a variety of opinions, but I know for sure that at least some of them would advocate for those things to stay in state court because of their seriousness. So I'm not speaking for those groups, but that's why we're trying not to touch that. And that's all I want to

ask to I'm super supportive. I also wanna make sure that there's no sense of misunderstanding about how it affects those other things. That's just

where I'm We offered meetings with once we knew that email had gone out, we offered several meeting times with all the organizations that had been on the emails. Some of them took us up on it, some of them did not trying to communicate differently. But we weren't aware of it immediately when it went out.

No problem. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you, Councilmember Torres. Council President Pro Tem.

Thank you. And thank you to the sponsors. I know there's been a tremendous amount of work that's gone into this, and just appreciate the conversation over time. I will be pretty brief. Council Member Sawyer, I think, really touched on one of my concerns. Very specifically, I have a bad actor in my community that we've been dealing with for a number of years. And my concern is in the it's now a class four.

I

believe it's a section what section is it in? Section four thirty two-4B. Being able to hold that operator of a large residential, you know, multifamily residential facility. And I know members Gonzalez Gutierrez and Perity, you've really been working in this frame as well. It's been a lot for them to be able to get this operator owner into compliance, and what did motivate them, and I know it's not used often, but what did motivate them was the kind of hanging over them was jail time.

And so I just wanted to look and see what could be done. I think that we need to be able to hold this bad actor accountable. I know it's not the only one that we have in this city. And so I don't know if you have any comments or thoughts as to what that might look like moving forward. Councilmember Parady, you had mentioned it in the statement or in the presentation, so I really appreciate you elevating that, you know, for how we come to some resolution for that particular issue. So this is for the licensing.

Yeah. And we had I don't know where Molly went. There she is. We had an exchange yesterday about needing to make a parallel change to 32 dash 12 to make sure that all the licensing violations could keep the $999 fine. Would you I genuine question. I wanna know if that understanding that the department also has a preference for higher jail time, I wanna understand if that fine piece captures the fines that are of concern to councilmember Romero Campbell and that we've been talking about.

I mean, the fine I I would actually defer to the department and to

Molly's coming up is coming up. Yeah. Molly's coming up right now.

On Bertam. Bertam. Bertam. Bertam. Coming to Molly's coming to the mic.

Yeah. So right now, this the business that councilwoman Romero Kinnamal is referring to is an unlicensed operator, so they would be accountable for nine hundred ninety nine and ten days. So the 999 doesn't change from what the status quo is right now. It's the license piece that does change, and then the jail time obviously does change. So can't say how much they would be compelled to come into compliance by ten days versus three hundred days, but I can imagine that it's not as compelling for them to come into compliance with that change in jail time.

Go ahead. I was just going to say, so if they have one tenant that's ten days and then another tenant ten days up to a certain amount or would that be an unlimited amount of times? It's a 400 unit.

Yeah. I mean, we our license is actually by parcel, so it would be one violation for operating without a license. Now I I think I have been asked, and we could issue that every day, every week, but that is extremely draining on city resources, both within our office, city attorney's office, court time. But yes, for us, that's one violation because the license is by the parcel.

Okay. Thank you. I would just request that maybe this is one that we could work on a little bit more to be able to hold, our bad actors accountable.

You. Council president Fortem, any additional questions?

Thank you. No. I know we've got a lot of people in the queue. Thank you.

Council president Sandoval and council member Cashman.

Thank you. So thank you to the bill sponsors. I really appreciate you digging in. I think I've taken you up on every single briefing

Yes.

You have. And more. And I've told you in full transparency that when I've had a briefing with you all, I had a briefing with PACE. Mhmm. And I would call to go back and forth. Right? Because it's my job to confirm and verify. I have so I just wanna say I'm supportive, but I do have some concerns at the municipal level, and I think I brought brought that to your attention on Friday. It's best with the fire code. I was thinking about the fire that happened in councilwoman Sawyer's district.

I think that's gonna actually get persecuted at a different level, so it might not be the muni code. But there are some fires that I had when I was representing West Colfax. And I think I mentioned those to you all that in, like, the second briefing I had with you all that we would have these fires in abandoned buildings, and I think they are under our municipal code. And then the other concern I have is when councilman Gilmore was president, she worked on the residential licensing, and it was a huge lift. And I don't wanna take the teeth away from that.

And I'm afraid that one of the unintended consequences could be taking the teeth away from that. I know councilwoman Sawyer has a really bad actor in her council district. I've had some motels that are really bad actors that had not had DDPHE and the fire code and all of them working together to be able to to shut down those those motels. One was on 6th Avenue, and now we're actually turning it. It's been demolished.

It's the Howard old Howard Johnson, and it's gonna be affordable housing. That was a bad actor that got shut down. And then one, when I was a council aide, was on 6th And Federal, and now it's a new one. And it it's actually we used it for our our for migrants. And the really bad one that I have is on 27th in Zunai.

And he just doesn't care. He's a millionaire and he just pays his fines every single time over and over. And he has, like I think at one time I checked, he had 25% of his motel hotel rooms and he doesn't even care. The only thing that's held him accountable is he'll come to court because he has jail fines. So I do think that those parts are really important. And I just wanna say to the victims who talked from the Remandant Center, I don't think it's easy for you all to be here. I don't think it's easy. I saw you shaking. I know we talk for public comment often. We get shaky.

You saw it up here. And I just wanna say that when a couple weeks ago when Cesar Travis came out and all of those happened, I said in a press conference that I have to believe victims. And so I just want you to acknowledge that I do and that I hear you and that I don't want this to move forward without you being at the table to be heard because that is really, really scary. And I've had a friend go to the Rose Andam Center. I was there with her, and the work that you all do is really astonishing.

So just wanna say thank you because I wanted to personally acknowledge you for your testimony. I know it's not easy. And with that being said, I would love if if we could figure out how to get the workers at the Rosendum Center in in touch with the bill sponsors so we don't have this tension because the Rosendum Center plays a critical role in the I think of our city as like a puzzle. And I think they really and I do not know I I really believe that you all don't wanna do that. That. I know the intentions. Who

were jointly served by Rose Adams Center when I was an attorney representing people that were sexually harassed and assaulted, and I care very, very deeply about

that one. That that the three sponsors, I know your intention, and so I just wanted to call that out. But at the end of the day, I just wanna voice my support for all of the work that you're doing. I don't think that this has been easy, but I also support holding it down. I keep thinking about the VO contract that we have to vote on. I think it's later today.

Yes.

And I think we have postponed that twice in committee because we didn't get the the contract in time. We didn't get all of the pieces that were were needed. And so if I can hold a scooter contract, I really wanna be able to support you all and get this done. I keep thinking about the former class that I was in. We always used to say we don't wanna do committee work on the floor. That committee is for committee work, and so I just wanna support this body to do committee work in committee. But thank you. Thank you, mister chair.

Thank you, council president. Council member Cashman and council member Gilmore. Thank you, committee chair. Also very supportive and and kind of, amazed at the complexity of the work that you're doing. I mean, all the vast bulk of research that I've done tells me that high jail sentences for low level crimes of poverty don't have an effect on reducing crime.

They may actually increase recidivism. At the same time, it does appear that there are certain crimes that those higher penalties will affect. And so good on you for for the work you're doing, and and I believe we'll get there. My one question is for Pace. Marley, if I'd just like to hear Pace's view of where things are at now. Are you a 100% happy, or specifically, what areas do you still think need to be addressed?

Thank you, councilman. Marley Bordowski. I'm the director of the prosecution section of the city attorney's office. I appreciate that question. I first of all, I wanna start out with thanking the bill sponsor for really working with us closely.

They have been. They've incorporated a lot of our feedback and I really truly appreciate that. The piece that we are still struggling with is what's been called the catchall provision and the impact that it could have on our agencies and their ability to enforce on the code in general. The general penalty is currently three hundred days, $9.99 fine. In theory, it's being reduced down to seven fifty days, 120 fine, but that catch all provision swallows the rule and that becomes the new general penalty in Denver and there's no other city in the metro area that has a general penalty that low.

That's my concern. Now, I will say that when we did the sentencing overhaul in 2017, the CAO actually sponsored that bill in response to the federal administration in place that time in response to some of the immigration steps that were being taken. We realized two things: one, that the three sixty five day jail sentence that was in place at that time put a lot of our migrants in jeopardy and people who were here legally on green cards, on DACA, all of those things in jeopardy of being deported. And so that was the impetus behind that initial reduction to three hundred days. We also recognized the second thing was the impact of those higher sentences on our population that's experiencing homelessness.

And so we created the class two offenses. I think there's about eight in there, including camping, sit lie, urinating in public, panhandling, park curfew, to name a few of them, that actually have a sixty day max, not a three hundred day max. Only a sixty day max on those, no fine, because they're recognizing that they do suffer from poverty many times. And so we did recognize that population of offenses then. Those are now in the class IV offenses.

We 100% support that. Those crimes should be in the class IV offenses. But I think the biggest sticking point there are a few that I could get into the details. The biggest sticking point for me and for our agencies is that catchall. I think we need to come at it a little bit more.

I appreciate that. If I know you don't have much to fill your day, but if you could send an email to counsel with those specifics, it would be very helpful at this point. Thank you very much. The the other question my second question, and I I guess this is for the sponsors. Just looking back on the the testimony our brave survivors of domestic violence gave today, How do you feel this bill is now addressing those concerns?

So the none I don't think I don't wanna miss speaker, but I don't think that I can't imagine how anything that is now subject to ten days in jail would be part of a domestic violence prosecution. All of our different ordinances that come up for covering DV, assault, threats, harassment, violation protective orders. We have done the work to take what were very generic Denver offenses and break them apart so that they now overlap with more serious state offenses, and we can continue to seek higher sentences, the highest possible sentences available post camp. Without this bill, all that work goes away.

Is is I would ask if either the city attorney or miss Bardowski, do you feel that there's additional work that needs to be done for this bill in the DV area?

Sorry, I just put a mint in my mouth. I think there is a little bit of work to be done. I think there's a conversation about flourishing weapons that we've still been having, and there's a conversation about threats to property, specifically threats to injure or kill a pet as an instrument of power and control over a domestic violence victim. We see that a lot in our courtrooms. That's not included in the threats as it's been amended and in this bill. And so that's those are a couple of things that come to mind right now.

Thanks. I appreciate if you'd include that in your letter. Absolutely. Thanks very much. And that's all, committee chair.

Thank you, councilmember Cashman. Councilmember Alvarez.

Thank you so much, committee chair. Thank you for the sponsors. I really appreciate how you started explaining how much outreach you've already done, and I don't wanna discount that at all. We've been trying to follow all the drafts and follow the things, and it has been a challenge. And so grateful for the opportunity to continue to work on this and just wanna say, of course, like, we we were supportive.

I think a lot of the stories around criminalizing poverty are important and also the ones around domestic violence. As right now, domestic violence is going up in the city, and so that's something my office has been thinking a lot about on how we do that. And in my district, we've specifically been experiencing assaults on women, people at the Wash Park incidents where we couldn't find the person that was flashing women comps, like, over and over. And I think part of my concern around those issues has been that women don't wanna speak out. It's so hard for them to even come forward when they're going through these things and when I brought up at one of the Washington West Wash Park r and o meetings, how we couldn't find the people this person that was assaulting women, one woman stood up and said, oh, yeah.

They tried to assault me, but I just I got away, so I didn't wanna call the police. I didn't wanna bother and take that time. And so I I really appreciate that thoughtfulness and how we look at a lot of these issues in the future, but thank you so much for all the work because I know you've been working on this for, like, I don't know, two years now. So thank you. Thank you so much, committee chair.

Thank you so much, council member. I'll be there. It's we're right at time. So I just wanna make a a brief comment first. I also wanna thank the victims and victim advocates that are here in the audience as well.

I know that telling a public story is never easy, and being here for this committee meeting was important to you. For all of the other speakers who are here that have spoke for or against, I wanna thank you all once again for being here. To the sponsors, I wanna thank you for the work that you have done. I've been clear believe that the steps taken beyond camp are a step too far for for for my support. I won't have time to go through the the line of questions, the 25 questions I sent to the sponsors, and to go through that

If we respond to the writing. Yeah. You have our responses in writing. So those questions I

I won't have time to go through the line of questions that I provided to the sponsors or the questions I have for the members of the the city that I wanted to dive in, but I do appreciate the conversation. And I know that there is a for delaying this presentation so that we have additional time to engage more thoroughly in this. And so with that, I will now entertain a motion to postpone. Councilmember Parity?

Yeah. I move to postpone council bill twenty six zero three two eight to a date certain of May 13. Second.

It's been moved and second. Do we need a vote? By acclamation, this has been delayed until May 13. Let me just make sure for closing up. We have five items on consent that have not been pulled off consent. With that, this meeting is adjourned.