Public Amenities Committee - Regular Meeting

Thanks for joining us for this weekly joint meeting of the mayor and Denver City Council. Follow along as the mayor and city council members hear updates from city agencies and projects, discuss important city matters, and hear about what's happening across the Mile High City. Join the discussion with your elected officials starting now.

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Mayor Council. Thank you so much for joining. We'll start off with some introductions and announcements, and we have a general session today to update folks on our quarterly report on our citywide goals. But we will start with introductions, and no better place to start than the distinguished gentleman to my right.

Thank you, sir. Good morning. Paul Cashman, South Denver District 6. As usual, pleased as punch to be here. It's punch.

Amanda Sawyer, District 5.

Good morning.

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

Chris Hines. Punchy, perfect 10.

Darrell Watson, 5, District 9.

Diana Romero-Campbell, Southeast Denver District 4.

Well, great. Thank you all so much for being here. Thank you, members of the public, for joining us. I'd love to start with announcements. If there are any announcements that council members have to share with the public at large or each other. Councilman Sawyer.

I just want to remind everyone the 30th anniversary of Mayfair Park is coming up August 22nd. Every year there's a big party in the park put on by the neighborhood organization Mayfair Neighbors. They're fantastic city partners with us. So Denver Municipal Band will be playing, there will be food trucks, there will be community, bring a blanket. Come and hang out, listen to Denver Municipal Band, celebrate the 30th anniversary of Mayfair Park. It's 5 to 8 on August 22nd, which is Saturday night. Join us.

Love it like fun.

Councilman Watson.

Thank you, Mayor Johnston. I want to share two things. First, last night I was remiss to thank Park Hill Pirates for another amazing event this past weekend. So Coach White and your entire team, all the honorees received awards, the hundreds of little kindergarten kids. in pads, knocking each other out, playing. Fantastic, and all the community members are out there. It's what a great event in Park Hill, so congratulations to everyone that's out there that came out this weekend and participates each and every year. I'm wondering, how many folks remember St. Patrick's Day Parade? Show of hands, show of hands. It happens every year, and we're like, what a great event. I've got some information that shows why it's even a greater event. There's an economic impact study that we asked the St. Patrick's Day Parade folks to do, and Council Member Hines in my district, and they provided some information. And Council Member Hines, I'll send this to your office so you can have it in your newsletter as well. Thank you. But the St. Patrick's Day economic impact is $20.7 million, they've estimated, as far as economic impact to the city. 450,000 spectators come downtown to Perfect 10 and Find District 9 on that wonderful, usually cold day, but it's this year. I wanted to really reach out and thank some of the city employees that do amazing work within both of our districts for that event. Megan Sullivan with the Office of Public Event and Film Permitting does a great job. Jim Rose with Denver Police does a fantastic job. And then the St. Patrick's Day parade leaders, Frank Holligan, Dave Anderson, and Maura Zizinski, they all every year, each and every year, do such amazing work. But we thought that we would uplift this because we have so many great events in Denver. The fun that we have is one thing, but also they draw folks to our districts, to our city, and we wanted to share kind of what that impact has been and what it continues to be. So thank you so much, Mayor Johnson, for giving us the time. Thank you.

Both fun and funds at the same time. But the fun jokes are free. We need them. Lean into it.

Thank you. I wanted to invite people this Saturday, August 15th, to Bible Park. It is the South by Southeast Concert Series. We are going to have the Don L. Wood, if I got this right, Don L. Wood Big Band. It's like a swing band that's coming and the opening act is from four to seven. Opening act is the Thomas Jefferson High School Orchestra. There will be lots of food trucks and lots of city agencies as well as some of our nonprofits, tabling out there. And so come and join us for a fun summer concert in the park. And it says it might rain, but rain or shine, we are going forward.

It's going to be a party regardless.

It's going to be a party regardless. So it'll be a lot of fun. So please come join us this Saturday in Bible Park starting at 4 p.m. Excellent.

Any other announcements? We go to the order. All right, great. Well, we will jump into general session today. Thank you all so much for joining. You probably know we do quarterly updates on the citywide goals and progress that we're making, any obstacles we're hitting and opportunities for the council to both weigh in with feedback and or questions on those. And so just want to have a chance to walk them through. If you are not tracking these, you can see the dashboards we have on our website. public website that can show you the updates on each of these goals. You can check them daily, you can check them quarterly, but we make them publicly available so you know what we're trying to do and what progress we're making. So I'll walk you through these 2026 goals on our path to delivering a vibrant Denver. Thanks so much. We'll go to the next one here. The six goals we've laid out this year and last year, vibrant, affordable, safe. Our focus on all-in Mile High, climate, and child-friendly, and I'll walk you through each of those with a quick overview. First one is our goal on vibrant Denver, which is really focused on the economic recovery of the city, and there are two key priorities here. One this year is focusing on filling the 3 million square feet of vacant commercial and retail space. Great news is we're actually ahead of schedule on this. We have about 1.6 million square feet of office space we've already filled. That includes 18 new retail openings in the second quarter, four new to downtown office deals. And important that we have this little piece of data on the bottom I think is very important, which is 607,000 square feet of renewed leases. Those are folks that had the opportunity to leave downtown or leave the city and all decided to stay. We don't count it in the new square footage that's been filled, but it is important for us to focus on keeping businesses that are already here in Denver, and those are all successful steps forward on that front. Also wanna note, we announced our Denver Jobs Agenda Plan, which many of you saw and were a part of, but that includes a couple of priorities for supporting both workers in Denver looking for opportunities for jobs, as well as for small businesses, including looking for opportunities. And so we have four different components of that. It includes our Launch Denver, which is if you are someone who's been starting a business here, we have resources to help you do that. Build Denver, which is if you are a small business owner currently and you're trying to scale, have a restaurant or a cosmetology business and you want to be able to get some money to help grow your business, we can help support you with that. Open Denver is an effort to try to recruit businesses from around the region or around the country or around the world. to move and bring jobs to Denver. And then our work Denver is really focused on a $40 million fund to get Denver workers into higher skilled jobs that pay you a better salary. And so if you're interested in either finding a job that's gonna pay you a better family wage or being able to grow or start a business, we have resources available to do that. Our other priority here was on the big projects the city's working on, making sure they're coming in on time. A couple of landmarks here, as you know. Thanks to the council's final approval, there will be construction set to begin on the Denver Summit Stadium for our new women's soccer team. We'll start in the fall of 26 with a 2028 scheduled opening there. Burnham Yard small area plan is still going with third public open house coming up this week. If you want to learn more about the plans at Burnham Yard, please come to that open house. And then our National Western Center has a triangle community vision process that Councilman Watson is very aware of and involved in. They'll be working towards community-based recommendations on how to use that site as we redevelop there. And then the council, as you all know, just approved the Speer Boulevard pedestrian bridge to connect Lodo to Ball Arena, which is also scheduled to be done in 2028. So those are just some updated process on projects. We have a bond announcement this morning at Santa Fe for the Santa Fe streetscape that we'll be breaking ground on and updating it. All 59 of the bond projects are all already moving this year and so excited that those are on track. And you can also track progress in the bond online if you want to. Next one. And by the way, actually, maybe we'll do questions or comments at the end after we get through all of them. Here's a little bit of our affordability progress, both online affordable units plus new permits. I'll do permits first because that's very good news. As you know, we had a goal to make sure we have more units in the pipeline of all sorts because that helps That's what's helped to bring down costs in Denver. We have about a 14% drop in rental prices. That's in part because we're bringing on more new units. So we wanted to get 5,000 units permitted this year. We're already at 4,000 halfway through the year, and so that's a great step forward. Really grateful for City Council's efforts to extend this key deadline for developers to get building permits up. We had about 23,000 units stalled in the pipeline. Your extension of that deadline allows those projects to still come through, which could bring really much needed units online. So that's making progress. The other one that we're a little more worried about, it's on track currently, but is the number of new affordable units. Our goal here is to bring on 2,500 new units. As you know, federal government is cutting back on vouchers. State government has been cutting back on housing funding. And so we are on track at about 500 so far. It's because you can see from this graph, a lot of the biggest projects are set to open later on in the year but we're carefully watching that to make sure we get all of those in and thank you to the council's help in our first vibrant bond investment into real estate acquisition for us to use for the development of affordable housing in downtown and so that was close by over by by the state capitol so that's a little bit more on progress on the affordable front the One other thing, just some improvements on the Denver Permitting Office, two major process improvements here. One is there's a new quick permit for single unit, two unit, and townhome interior only projects. And so these no longer require building reviews and can now be much faster. And then we have a one and done concept site plan process change. Used to be you'd have multiple applications for revision on a concept plan. concept plan was supposed to be just that, a concept, not a permit. And so we've streamlined that to just be a one process application, which is much faster. So thanks to our permitting office for that improvement. Next one is safe. This is the one that we're tracking the most closely, and I want to give you updates on where we are here. I'll first focus on the shootings and high-risk areas on our right side our goal was to continue to reduce that by 20 that's really focused on our place network investigation sites where we have dedicated wraparound community efforts to reduce shootings and even after some historic drops last year these continue dropping very pleased to see that still a 33 drop in shootings there 43% drop in violent gun crime at those sites this and we also launched a new pain I location in q2 over here on Colfax and Pearl and so This strategy continues to be very very effective where we have broad community partnership around using all the tools we have from economic development to lighting and infrastructure to after-school programming to police presence and so those are on track places where we are off track right now but we're tracking very closely is on our homicide data right now in Denver you all probably tracked some of this data but just a couple of things to note right now we have seen reduction still further reductions in citywide violent gun crime down 25% still citywide reduction in total number of people that have been shot this year is still down We do have an increased number of folks that have died from firearm homicides. Smaller number of shootings, but more lethal shootings. I want to give you a little deeper dive on that data on the next slide so I can answer some of the questions you may have. This gives you a perspective of the last four years, 2022 to 2026. As you remember, 2025 was our lowest year of homicides, one of the lowest two years on record in the last 50 years in Denver. So it was a historic low. We know when you have a historic low, the chance that you get some correction back is high. So we were prepared for that. But what this will show you is if you look back to 2022 on things like homicide victims year to date, We were at 59 in 2022. We are at 35 this year, so still down about 40% on that. Total victims, 22. We're at 50. We're at 27, down almost 50%. So the three-year rolling average is still dramatically down. It's because 2025 was such a remarkably great year we are trending slightly higher than that but we're still tracking very closely we have full deployment and efforts here to intervene on some of the activations we're doing in these locations and so A lot happening here with the PD that we're very proud of to take direct action. This just shows that while we're up this year, we were at 29 at this time last year. We're at 35 this year. While that's only a six number difference, when the numbers get so small to be a 29 or 35 increase can be a 20% increase. So we're both very focused on it and also confident about the long-term trends, but working really hard to make sure we get a safe fall and winter. So that's a little bit of the data you see here on the safety slide, and the one we track is that percentage change over the last four years, which we feel good about, 40% to 50% drops in all these categories, but working hard to make sure we're intervening in the next several months as we head into fall. All right, a bit on all in updates. You know the overall point in time count. We're now at 64% drop in unsheltered homelessness since 2023. We have some forthcoming contracts that are continuing to leverage our performance-based contracting. You'll see still improving workforce training outcomes and job placement. DETO has really had some great success this year in getting more and more folks placed into jobs, as our real focus is on case management, mental health and addiction support services, and job training. And then we also have focused on a citywide public facing commitment on responsiveness to folks in need. And so our commitment is that we'll address all homeless reports within one business day. We're at about 1.8 days right now. 60% almost of those cases are at one day. We're going to keep working to this goal is by the end of the year to have that number be at one day. And one day is our median response time right now, but we're going to continue focusing on that. We have about 812 people exiting homelessness into permanent housing so far this year. Those are all good progress for us. Two more, then we'll jump into questions. Climate resilient and child-friendly. Our climate goal, as you know, is real focus on driving down carbon footprints. You may have seen the news that in The month of July, we had 29 days over 90 degrees. That is the first time in Denver history that has ever been the case. And so that's the hottest month in Denver history in some metrics. So the less we can use fossil fuels on these energy sources, the better. So these are 5,000 energy systems citywide. They include folks putting in water heating or space heating that's electric, new solar panels or EV chargers, battery storage. You'll see all of the... installations going in there, but we're over 2,500 already. And then a focus on more acres of green infrastructure. The purpose of this is to help keep temperatures lower throughout the city and prevent the heat islands we can have in some parts of the city where if you have too much asphalt, too much concrete, not enough permeable surfaces, you both don't have shade for people and you also get hotter and hotter neighborhoods. And so we are on track here. We thought we'd give you one example of some visuals of what this looks like or means in our community. If you go to the next slide. These are two examples. One is the 30th in California installation. Sometimes they might be permeable surfaces that both absorb water and absorb heat, so not to reflect heat like these you see on the left at 30th in California. And then the one over at Lowell and Evans on the right will be an actual green investment of a new grass and tree development that will create a wonderful kind of structure. shaded island there in the middle of Evans. So those are some projects happening in the city right now that are what we mean when we say, here's what more green infrastructure looks like in your neighborhood. And last but certainly not least, I want to check in on our young people. Our two big child-friendly goals, one is on delivering a comprehensive citywide framework to expand affordable, reliable child care. We have launched that process. Thank you to the council president who's sitting on the task force to work on that. We have our first community open house tonight to get feedback from you on things you would like and want and need in your child care system in the city. We'll be at Carla Madison tonight if you want to come join us for conversations there. with parents to hear about their needs, but excited to work on a plan and design for how we can get that promise of universal childcare accomplished. On our other half of our goal, we're focused on getting young people to work and to out of school programming and opportunities. And so our goal is to get 5,000 more young people. I'll give you some updates on what we've done through Q2. We have now almost 50,000 young people who are involved in out-of-school programming. That's through Office of Children's Affairs, through Parks and Rec, as well as through public library. And so that was all encouraging, and we are now at just over... 2,000 young people who are in various forms of summer and other work engagement. And so those are all, I think, good progress. We're on track to hit those goals of about 70,000 young people in out-of-school programming and work opportunities before this year is over. So that is a whirlwind tour of the six big citywide goals we're working on. I will stop there and love to take questions, comments, feedback from council members. Councilman Hines.

Thank you, Mayor. Your vibrant slide reminded me of something that I should have put in announcements. Tomorrow morning at 11 a.m., CU Denver is having a press event at the Independence Plaza. And I'm really excited about what they are intending to share. And I think that that's, you know, the vibrant slide really having that event or whatever they intend to reveal about Independence Plaza, I think will also definitely factor into this vibrant slide. So I'm really happy that we are, that moat of Speer, you know, kind of divides the largest higher education campus in the state of Colorado from the largest business center in the state of Colorado. And wouldn't it be great if we just did something with Spear or somehow was able to better merge those two campuses so that we had homegrown talent get jobs right here instead of going off to other states to get jobs. And we import some of our college-educated folks Get them right there from the Auraria campus. And so all I have to do is cross Spear and get jobs downtown. So thank you for your focus on the center city. It is everyone's neighborhood. And I just happen to represent it. So thank you, Mayor.

Thank you for sharing that. And you're right, Councilman, we're very excited tomorrow. As you know, that stretch of 16th Independence Plaza has been a priority for you and for us for the last couple of years to try to get that space occupied. Really excited about CU's potential partnership there that we'll talk through tomorrow. And you're right, that is not represented in these numbers. So that'll be a new addition for a new office space partner there that would, I think, has the potential to bring a lot of life to that block in downtown. And that's almost 600,000 square feet of empty office space right now in that building. And so it's a huge opportunity for the city. We're really excited.

And also, because there's a federal building right across the street, which is brutalist. Well, no, I mean, it's both brutal and brutalist. I actually like brutalist architecture, but because it is short, there's actually a lot of light on that block that gives a lot of opportunity for additional activation there and additional relief. And because Independence Plaza is brutal, at least underutilized. I think that CU Denver, whatever they intend to do with it, anything they plan to do with it will be better than what's there now. And there's just so much opportunity for the sun, the podium, and the university to kind of further move into blurring that line between the largest college campus in the state and the largest business center in the state.

Totally agree. I appreciate your glass-half-empty perspective because you're right. It is hard to activate the Federal Reserve because we can't do pop-ups and parties and events there, but it does give us a lot more sunlight. So we will take that as a chance that we really need this side of the street to carry that block, and this is a big chance to do that. Thank you for that reminder. Next, I have Councilman Cashman and then Councilman Gonzalez-Gutierrez. Thank you, Mayor.

I appreciate the update as far as climate. Hats off to Taser for the good work everyone and everyone else, all the other agencies participating. What it brings to my mind is I've been hearing a whole lot from the unhoused community that we need to do better on cooling filters. And I believe we do. I understand everything I'm gonna talk about comes down to money and so on, but they're all important and we need to figure that out. But yeah, I think we need to provide more options and comfort rather than a chair in a rec center lobby. The other thing, and it's not directly related to this other than city goals What my office here is about, I'm sure more than anything else, is traffic. You know, people speeding through our city. And I often say, I don't think we have too many people in Denver, because you can buy your groceries, get your hair cut, get some paint at Home Depot, and you're not in an endless line. But when you get in your car, the wheels come off. And, you know, people are cutting through neighborhoods and so on. We need to... I get so frustrated with DOTI, our Department of Transportation Infrastructure, because it takes them a long time to do projects. That said, there's no one working there that I don't think is competent or working their tail off to take care of all these issues. Again, somehow we need to get more bodies, and that comes down to more dough. As far as... child-friendly. I just wanted to tip a hat to Red Gutierrez, Jess Ridgeway, and all the folks at the Office of Children's Affairs for what they're doing to meet the requirements of the Child-Friendly Cities Initiative through UNICEF. One big thing that they've been doing recently that I love is they're We're working with boards and commissions to get youth representation on our city boards and commissions that have previously been the bailiwick of grow-ups. And you know, Grown-ups have got our world and the situation it is today, so I really think we need to open our minds to that youth voice. The last thing I wanted to talk about since—and it is a big part of vibrant— the Broncos and Burnham Yard and took a tour along with my colleague Councilman Gonzalez Gutierrez of that site. Really interesting. I love that they're planning on to keep the locomotive building or whatever it's called there. Amazingly huge facility. But my point being, I just need to say I was disappointed that to see some news articles come out with the Broncos talking about that, boy, this community benefit agreement process could derail things. And with the money that the Broncos have, I think they could take care of that in a New York minute. And I would hope... I've told them from the beginning, I am a shameless Bronco fan. I have been for decades. I hope I'm looking forward to the new stadium, the entertainment district and all that. But for me, that community benefit agreement is critical. And I just don't want to see that kind of press. It felt to me like they were trying to put pressure on the neighborhoods to bend. So if anyone needs to bend, I think it's the Broncos team. That's what I've got. I'm going to stick with it. Thank you, Mary.

Thank you so much, Councilman, for all that good feedback. One thing I want to underscore that you mentioned is we have come out with this priority to try to have a youth voice on every commission and board that we have in the city as a goal I've set over the next two years. And so as you come across people in your community young people who want to serve and want to be active we would love to have you have them apply for boards and commissions roles because we think that we do want to have a youth voice on every major decision-making body in the city and so um we're just double underscore your your point to please if you're watching or listening from home great if you're a council member that has people in your district that want to get involved we'd love to have them and yeah i mean what oca is telling me is with the mayor's youth commission especially the accelerated direction you're going in

Denver is ahead of a lot of other cities in some ways. So we've got some more work to do, but we're doing good things.

We think we can be leaders on this one. Thank you so much. Councilman Gonzales Gutierrez.

Thank you, and thank you for your words, Councilman Cashman, about the Bronco and Burnham Yards and all of that stuff, because I couldn't agree more. Our community members are there providing their time for free. And so it is a big deal. It's a big deal for them and it's a long, for a long period of time. So it's a lot for them to be able to take on. With that said, I had a couple of things I just wanted to lift up in the all in mile high goal. I do appreciate that if we can pull up that slide. I do appreciate the little disclaimer at the bottom because this was a question that I know I had asked last time and then even during my one-on-one briefing. about what does closed case mean or cases closed. And so just wanted to lift up, if you can't see it, it's very small at the bottom. It tells you what closed means. It means that those folks are no longer reported to be in that area. So it doesn't necessarily mean that the issue has been resolved. It just means that that person has either left or they might have taken up the offer to shelter or some other resource. So I just wanted to be very clear. It would be great to be able to tease that out to know, like, are people being connected to services or are they just no longer in the location? I think those are just important pieces of information that I think would be helpful for this goal. When it comes to the child-friendly goal and the safe goal, I think there's an intersection between the two as we continue to see our young people struggling in our community and how that is playing out when it comes to safety in our community and for everyone. And I know along with Councilwoman Torres and Councilwoman Lewis, we've been working on the community-led safety grant, and that's in partnership with the Office of Children's Affairs. This came out of the... last budget cycle to be able to utilize dollars to pilot a program where there are grant funds going out into community to serve some of our highest needs areas and young people that are struggling and so I just wanted to lift that up as something that we see that intersection between child friendly goals and the safety goals. And then only the last question that I had on the child-friendly goal, do we have a breakdown of the ages that are being served of the numbers reported here?

I believe we do. Can we send that information as follow-up or unless you have it with you, Joshua?

Absolutely, yeah. We can send that out. The jobs data can get up to 24 years old, but the out-of-school programming is up to 18 years old.

Right, but do you have an age breakdown?

You want to know how many middle school kids, high school kids? Yeah, we can check on that and get back to you.

So I would say if we could get a breakdown of the ages and then also neighborhoods. Where do these kids live? Where are they coming from? If they don't live in Denver, because I can imagine we also know like DPS, there are a lot of kids who go to school in the city and county of Denver but may not live in Denver, and that's fine, but just out of curiosity where these kids are coming from.

Good question.

Or young people, I should say.

Let us get back to you on that. I want to just underscore your point about the connection between our youth goals and our safety goals and mention, Councilwoman, thought of you on this. We met yesterday with our Office of Social Equity Innovation as well as Children's Affairs. And as you know, through Office of Neighborhood Safety, there are a number of young people that we provide services to that might be on diversion pathways or others. And what we've done is prioritize that population as our first target for all of our summer job opportunities. What we really want to do is get young kids access to work. And so anyone that's in connection to any one of the services we have in any places in the city, particularly in children's affairs or neighborhood safety, we're working to make sure that the kids that show up at the job program are not just the kids of parents who are forcing them out the door, like maybe Councilman Sawyer and I, but any kid in the city that needs services. And so I think that priority is really important for us. And we're trying to work with DPS on having them help identify for us any kids that they have that might want additional support over the summer so we can get them prioritized into these job placement programs. So great, great contribution. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Next, I think I have Councilman Watson.

I would say the voice of God and answer that question from President Pro Tem was Joshua Posner. He doesn't just speaks. I want to say first, it goes without saying to. the OCA team and Jess Ridgway and Red Gutierrez are superstars. And I wanna just call them out for the good work that they've been doing and the collaboration to ensure not only youth voices, but youth input is infused in all the work that we do. One of the great programs, the Mayor's Youth Employment Initiative, fantastic program. I wanna continue encouraging my colleagues. I'm very competitive, so I'm looking at how many folks are signed up per district. I won't say who's in the lead, but I'm very excited to find this. Let me ask to... I'm curious, Mayor Johnston, on the SAFE slide. The SAFE slide spoke specifically to what I would consider to be Department of Safety impacts. Is there a length within your goals for where it comes to SAFE when it impacts DOTI? Department of Transportation, Infrastructure and Crashes. I shared last night there was a deadly crash on 17th Avenue and they've been throughout the city. I'm curious where within this safe goal, if it's not in this safe goal, how are we tracking really the success in reducing car crashes that could be reduced based on infrastructure changes on those streets, whether it's road diets, bollards, whatever else. Curious on that.

Yeah, great question, Councilman. And we had this conversation pretty deeply with both our DOTI team and our SAFE team when we set this goal about where would that live. And what we have done is that explicitly lives as a DOTI goal that is focused on street safety and both fatal accidents as well as accidents of all sorts that we track. And the locations where those happen, as you know, are high injury networks. Others are areas of focus. And so that is, and that includes both strategies around high-injury networks. It includes road diets. It includes infrastructure building that make those roads safer. It includes safe crosswalks budgeting. It also includes some of the speed camera monitoring, which we know is an effective strategy. It includes some of the policy changes like rest at red, so lights stay at red as a default in the evening so we don't have folks running. Places like federal at high rates of speed and so we are explicitly tracking that it's a key priority We launched the speed program last year focused on that with Dottie and that is a Dottie based goal that we track I could certainly have them come report to you or bring back to this mayor council conversation if you want to have an update on that data

Yeah, I think that's helpful. And I know you have your team that identifies kind of the subcategories for goals, but folks in community feel less safe on our streets and it would. My encouragement would be some way of using those two. Once again, you run your teams. I know this is an explicit goal for DOTI. However, under SAFE, when I speak to my communities, what they're talking about when they say safety is safety to get their kids to and from school, safety to get to and from places of work, to bike safely. And so I know you're aware of that. Looking forward to hearing from DOTI on that. some of those outcomes. I wanted to speak a little bit on all-in mile high on the point-in-time numbers and appreciate the fact that the numbers as a comparison for point-in-time are still decreasing or holding strong. And I applaud your team for all the good work. I know I work collaboratively with them, with all the service providers that are in District 9, and they are extremely responsive. I think Jeff Kaczynski is doing a great job. I think Cole has been doing this work for a while and in his new role as well. I wanted to ask you a question on the thought process around possibly transitioning from simply a point in time count to more of a more measurable count, like a quarterly count of folks who are living unhoused and transitioning through the spectrum of housing care. The point in time Usually one of the coldest nights of the year gives you one number that HUD requires. Has there been any discussion within the city to actually target other points? I know there was a dashboard in post years back that we can still view stuff on. What are your thoughts as far as that being more of a metric instead of simply just a point in time?

It's a great question. There has been conversation at host about doing kind of pulse checks across the course of the year. They're not as scientific as this. As you know, the point-in-time count operation is quite comprehensive. You have hundreds of people all out from 2 to 5 o'clock in the morning inventorying every single block of the city, and so it's quite a comprehensive effort. It's kind of like a census, essentially. And so it is hard to do, say, on a weekly. We'd love to have weekly data on this, but it's hard to do that every place. And so Host is looking at some, yeah, I'd call them pulse check reads that we could do quarterly at other times of the year. And I can have Jeff come back and talk to you about what that might look like. Because we do just want to know much more frequently and regularly where people are and what the needs are. What we use as the biggest tracker right now is, and to the members of the public, are people's 311 reporting. So we ask anytime you see someone in need, whether you're worried for their safety or worried for their services or if you're worried for your own safety. For us to know where people are each day, we really use that three-on-one tracker. And then every morning, our team meets to look at every report in the city and then send someone out to address those needs, as Councilman Gonzales-Gutierrez mentioned. Oftentimes, by the time we get there, they will have already been gone. But if we get there, then we're reporting what services can we offer, what options do they need, And in many of the places where you'll get questions, like Councilman and I have talked about 12th and Broadway, a great majority of those folks are housed. They are not unhoused. They are just folks that live in and around the neighborhood and choose to gather outdoors. And so different interventions based on what the behavior or activity is. But our best day-to-day tracker right now is the number of 311 calls reporting, seeing folks that are unhoused that need services. We would really encourage people to keep sending that in to us just so we can know where people are. And that is a weekly report I get, and I can share with you if you want to see that. That's our most daily update.

Look forward to maybe interjecting that into the five-year plan as that process begins for hosts. And final question on long-tenured folks that are in our shelters. What are the thoughts? How are we tracking folks who are, let's say, in crossroads? We have, I think, 40% plus of folks have jobs working full-time and are still residing in the shelters. Is there a metric that we're looking at as far as reducing that, meaning moving folks to more stable housing while they're working full time and possibly exiting the entire spectrum into housing stability? How are we tracking that and how are we looking at that?

We track very closely, and that is our priority for everybody, whether they're at a Crossroads or they're at an Aspen or at the Tamarack. The goal is always access to permanent housing. And so the top line data we track the most is now 9,000 people off of the streets into shelter, 8,000 people into permanent housing. And so that's the ultimate goal, is are those folks moving to and through. And so that permanent housing goal we track regularly, and you can see that on the dashboard all the time. And then in places... Like, you know, we also look at site by site. How strong is the throughput? How many folks are moving up and out from those sites into permanent housing? So that's also something we can break down for you by location if you want to see that.

My question is a little different. It's not just simply the throughput. It's the folks who are sticking or sticky in a system. So folks who have resided, let's say, for two years, three years. Continuously within the shelter system would love to see some information on that spectrum of change from being on house to housing stability. What does that look like? Because those impacts I think I think are important that folks are aren't simply trapped within our systems.

For our non-congregate sites, which are most of our all-in locations, we track that already and don't have any long-term stayers over a year. We have now explicit priorities and push to get them up and out. For our congregate shelters like Crossroads, I'll have to check on what the data is on long-term stayers to get to you because it's a good question. Yes. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. President. Madam President, I think you are next.

Yeah, thank you. I wanted to just, now that we're on the all-in mile high, the ability to be able to disaggregate some of the numbers here, specifically to family homelessness. And to the point earlier of really tracking who do we know and where they are, and we've been hearing a lot of feedback from families that, like within Tamarack, have kind of stagnated. and that exit to housing, a lot of issues also related to sustainable child care. And so I think linking where we are with addressing family homelessness and within family sheltering, I know there's short-term and also long-term sheltering, but tying that into the additional goal of child-friendly. So Again, there are some chicken and egg conversations, but just wanted to lift that up as far as thinking about what those strategies are that come out of the work group. So thank you. Excited to be a part of that work group. I know there's a whole series of conversations that are happening that are going to happen throughout the city. Actually, this is a question. I don't know if people can go online. Is there an online survey as well that people can go into? Yes, there is. Josh, you can close your mayor's office.

Cool.

There is a survey online, denvergov.org slash childcare for all. We have a few different survey options or paths in the survey for providers, for families, for parents to provide us information if they're not able to make our listening tours. The listening tours are also available to RSVP on that webpage as well. We have the five dates including this evening listed, and then we may add a few others as those conversations develop.

I appreciate that because parents, young children, they don't have a lot of time to go to a listening another meeting at night in their busy days. So having a way to be able to provide that input I think is going to be really helpful. So thank you for doing that. Do we all have that information or can you send it to us so that we can put it out in our newsletters and our communication across the city?

I believe OCA sent that information. to y'all at the end of last week. We will double check and make sure you have that information. In addition, on the listing tours, we have options in the evenings in August. And then in September, we have those on Saturday mornings to give families a little more flexibility. And we'll continue to evaluate what is best serving and most accessible for our families.

Thank you. I appreciate that. The other... The other issue that I'd like to talk about is Councilman Cashman brought it up, but also this speeding on our streets. We recently in District 4 have had, there was a fatality that was right between Denver and Englewood and kind of getting to the bottom of it took a lot of you know there's community that came out and you know there's a fatality right across your street or right across your you know in front of your house and trying to you know who's responsible and what is the strategy to be able to think about how we have a safer street, and this was on University. But I feel like this, a lot of our goals are thinking about safety. Denver, you know, we have our boundary lines, but what is our collaboration with our other counties, our other cities that border Denver to address big issues like speeding and safety?

We're in a number of conversations with our friends from Bomar about this variation. So fair question. I think, admittedly, our deep focus right now is on the policies and strategies we control around enforcement and infrastructure in the city to make traffic safer and move more smoothly and more slowly in a lot of cases. When we have major corridors like Colfax, you know, some of those are state highways that are maintained across multiple jurisdictions, so they do the upkeep for us. But we do partner on enforcement in those places, and sometimes we've had challenges around that. As you know, there are other cities that do have chase policies that we do not use. We've had situations where they chase folks, nonviolent offenders, into Denver and can create accidents or crashes in Denver with a So that's a problem for us. I think there's a reason why it doesn't make sense to chase nonviolent offenders and put people at risk. So I think that's most of the conversation right now. But we are focused really on enforcement within our county and how we look at major arteries as places to keep jointly safe, but always open to more partnership.

I get a lot of feedback around the stop speed racing now. I'm like, reportstreetracing.org or .com. It's, again, you know, in southeast Denver, I-25, 225, it's that intersection, and people are just, you know, they're in our jurisdiction for, you know, a half a mile. They go off, they come back, and it's just, I don't know how we solve the problem or how we address the issue, but I just... feel like we need to do more. We need to be able to either, I don't know if it's a collaboration. Tell me if you have got a solution because it is so frustrating.

So I will say I have to give a huge shout out to the Denver Police Department because they have done a really amazing job. In district 5, where we also have this challenge with multi jurisdictional and street racing at the end of the day, this is the responsibility of the state of Colorado, because it is multi jurisdictional. And it is 1 of those situations where the state of Colorado is not doing enough and they're not responsive enough and the local jurisdiction is left. holding the bag with frustrated residents who have every reason to be frustrated and every reason to be concerned. That said, I would recommend that you reach out to the Denver Police Department because there is an entire street racing task force that they have within. And part of what they did in District 5, for example, was work with Parks and Rec to close off, with a permanent gate, a street that was attracting street racing. And they were actually able to use halo cameras to identify the cars, the license plates of the cars that were street racing, and then work with the city attorney's office to use our nuisance laws to confiscate those vehicles. So it's seven of them, I think, or 11. It has been very successful. It's a lot of work and it takes a lot of different city agencies to get it done. But I would start there because we have seen that be very successful in District 5 over the last few years.

No, I appreciate that. And we have a collaboration with the District 3 DPD, and they've been great. A lot of the street racing has been congregating in, like, private parking lots. So Hampton, Monaco, Hampton, Tamarack, and all the way down, you know, within the DTC, oftentimes in some of the parking garages and parking lots. So... It doesn't matter if they're private.

They have license laws that do not allow that. With a little collaboration, I think DPD has done a great job of working with other agencies and getting creative to stop that kind of stuff.

I would just add to Councilman Sawyer's point. This conversation's come up more in the past, but this is one of the very practical applications of license plate readers, which is if you have folks that are street racing, we by definition are not going to get there by the time they are gone. And so what we need is information on a plate that was identified at that location. And often that car will have traveled outside of the city and county lines. If they're on South Broadway or they're on South Federal, Our ability to then know what the plate is we're looking for and know if they're in a different jurisdiction is a key partnership. But for us, that's one of those key places where you don't want to get in a street race with street racers and have DPD going 100 miles an hour down federal also. But you do want the chance to be able to find those people and hold them accountable.

Thank you.

That's all I have. All right. Without any further questions, thank you all so much. We are adjourned. Have a great Tuesday. Good to see you.

Thanks for your question.