Town Council - Regular Meeting

Town clerk please take roll.

Mayor Pro Tembel.

Here.

Council member Hoback.

Here.

Council member Baer. Present. Council member O'Connor.

Present.

Council member Mortolero.

Here.

Council member Peso Morelli?

Present.

And mayor Moore? Here. Mayor, you have a quorum.

Alright.

Great. Do we have a motion to approve the agenda tonight?

So move. Second. We have

a motion and a second. All in favor say aye. Aye. All opposed say no. Alright. We have an agenda. We have a few items, tonight on the consent agenda. Just so everybody knows when I read these, it can be lengthy, and I'm working with our town attorney to see if I could just read the numbers and I think we can but I got to get used to that. So tonight I'm going to do it the way we normally do it. The first item is twenty twenty six through twenty eight approval of 04/28/2026 Town Council meeting minutes.

The second item is twenty twenty six-twenty five Police Week and Peace Officers Memorial Day Proclamation sponsored by council members O'Connor and Pesaramelli. The next item is twenty twenty six, two twenty four Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month proclamation sponsored by Councilmembers Pesaramelli, O'Connor and Baer. Next item is twenty twenty six-two thirty a proclamation recognizing Public Works Week sponsored by Councilmember Baer. Next item is twenty twenty six-two eighty four proclamation which is a proclamation the twenty twenty six Building Safety Month sponsored by Mayor Pro Tem Bell and Councilmember Hoback. Next item is twenty twenty six one thirty one, a resolution of the town council of the town of Erie approving an agreement for professional services with Burns and McDonnell for the Zone three Tank Systems Improvement Project.

Item twenty twenty six-two 29, a resolution of the Towneyeurie approving a construction contract with Western Plains Construction for the 20 26th Street Maintenance Phase 2. Next item is twenty twenty six-two 58, a resolution of the Town Council of Town of Erie appointing members to the Airport Economic Development Advisory Board, the Historic Preservation Advisory Board, the Open Space and Trails Advisory Board, the Sustainability Advisory Board and the Tree Advisory Board. Item twenty twenty six-three zero two, a resolution of the Town Council of the Town of Erie approving an agreement for services under cooperative purchase agreement with STAR Playgrounds for playground equipment at Coal Miner Park. Item twenty twenty six-three zero six, the resolution of the Town Council of Town of Erie approving a second amendment to professional services agreement with D2C Architects for the Erie Police Department expansion and remodel project design, P24 to five nineteen. I think that's pages 24 to five nineteen.

And the last item is item twenty twenty six-three 18, a resolution of the town council of the town of Erie approving a data sharing and license agreement with the Colorado Department of Labor

and employment for quarterly census of employment and wages data.

Do we have a motion to approve the consent agenda?

So moved.

Second.

We have a

motion and second. All in favor say aye. Aye. All opposed say no. All right we'll move on to public comment tonight. Please remember that public comment is not an interactive question and answer forum, but rather a time for you to state your comments on a particular item or issue. Public comment provides the opportunity to discuss items that are not in public hearings. Please sign up using the kiosk in the lobby. If you have a handout, please hand it to the town clerk. They will distribute it to the council and include it into the meeting record.

When called upon, please state your full name and location for the record. Public comment is limited to three minutes per person. You'll be given a twenty second warning when your three minutes are almost up. At the three minute mark, you'll be asked to wrap up your final sentence. And all opinions are welcome, but please be respectful of each speaker. To ensure everyone feels welcome to share their comments, please refrain from any cheering, clapping, booing, or otherwise disruptive behavior. All right. With that, I'll look to our town clerk.

So our first speaker is Michael Cattlinich. And he's online. So Michael, you should be able to unmute and speak.

Michael, can you hear us?

Can you hear me now?

Yes. Yes.

Hello, mayor and council members. Thank you for this opportunity. I would just like to briefly about the the property, which is on the I'm I'm at 1324 Northridge Drive.

Hey, Michael. We're having a hard time hearing you. You're cutting in and out.

Apologies.

I think we've now lost. I think what we're gonna do is

we're gonna do

oop. Go ahead. Try again.

Sorry. This hopefully will only take one minute.

And that I wanna

talk about

We can hear you much better.

Perfect. It was a microphone issue on my my end. I believe the highest and best long term community value of the Page property is for it to remain open space. Preserving this land would help connect Coal Creek Park, Reliance Park, and the ongoing flood mitigation and trail restoration work along Coal Creek. And I I believe these assets together could form a continuous corridor that supports recreation, habitat, drainage, and and the community character through this part of Erie.

Development may provide short term benefits, but preservation would provide long lasting public value. And if this property were to be developed, the opportunity to create that connected open space corridor is gone. So I respectfully urge the council to prioritize preservation of the Page property and to explore every available partnership grant and funding option before moving towards any development. Thank you. That's all I had.

Alright. Thank you.

Next is Sherry Brimer, and she is online as well. Sherry, you should be able to unmute and speak.

Thank you, mayor Moore and the town council, for allowing me to speak. I'm also speaking in regards to the Page property. This is really a unique opportunity, and Erie has such a rich history. Why not establish ourselves as a destination to explore that history, the land, and the pioneers who built up this area? Erie has always begun developing this identity with the Sheffield Farm And Acreage.

Why not continue that innovative direction? Why not create an open space coupled with evolving interpretive center that highlights the past but also gives us an identity for the future? Erie could really position itself as a destination, a real historical marker for the area where families could visit and become engaged for decades to come. This area could not only provide a beautiful landscape with spectacular views, of course, but also have it available for community events too. This area is has so much beauty and possibilities.

We don't want to squander that. And starting simple, this open space for the community could double as a wonderful resource of land stewardship as well as paying homage to the mining and agricultural past. Erie could then become a centerpiece for the surrounding area with a living eco museum with a historical interpretive center to help explain not only Erie's colorful past, but that of the entire region. It could include a rustic area for lectures, volunteer docents for school visits, a covered perhaps musical venue, or act as a backdrop for the many eerie traditional community events it already houses. It could be a small scale living, working farm perhaps, a barn that houses space for an indoor farmer's market, a broad gathering space for local events with lawn seating, all intermingled within trails and nature.

And any of these could all be encompassed in the same wonderful open space with the lovely connection directly to downtown. So with this very unique opportunity, please envision a quaint historic feeling open space that captures the essence of the past, bringing with it commerce and energy and significance by promoting a strong identity for Erie and Erie's future in a very thoughtful and organic way. Thank you.

Alright. Thank you.

Next is okay. I'm gonna totally screw this one up. So Taymasp Chaudhry.

It's a Masb Chaudhry, Erie resident. Gonna be talking about the Erie Community Police Academy. I prepared a statement. Good evening, members of the town council and fellow Erie community members. I am honored to have a moment to speak tonight, and I wanna take this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude for the Erie Community Police Academy, program that I was privileged to participate in and one that I believe makes our town generally stronger.

Over the course of the nine week academy, I came away with a deep appreciation for the full breadth of the duties and responsibilities carried out every day by the men and women of the Erie Police Department. From criminal law and constitutional concepts to investigative techniques, officer safety, SWAT and canine operations, vehicle stops, DUI investigations, the scope of what our officers are trained for and responsible for is remarkable. Before this program, I only had a fraction of that picture. Now I have a much fuller one. I want to offer a heartfelt thank you to the staff and offers officers of the Erie Police Department who gave their time, their expertise, and their openness to make this program what it is.

Your willingness to pull back the curtain and share the real work of policing with your community speaks volumes about the kind of department you are. I was also generally moved by the diversity of my fellow participants, neighbors from all walks of life, backgrounds, and perspectives who came together with a shared desire to understand and engage with their community. That to me is eerie at its best. Programs like the Community Police Academy represent exactly the kind of investment that pays dividends far beyond what any budget line can capture in trust, in mutual understanding, and in civic pride. I strongly encourage this council to continue funding this program for the foreseeable future.

It is a benefit to every town resident of this town, whether they participate directly or simply live alongside those of us who have. Thank you. And, lastly, wanna give a shout out to Courtney Slama, who is our community outreach and training coordinator. And, chief Mathis is sitting back there. Had a really good time learning. He's a very funny guy too, so I had a very good time going to this academy. So thank you so much.

Yeah. Thank you for bringing a positive message to us tonight.

God bless you. Thank you.

Next is Megan Hughes.

Good

evening. My name is Megan Hughes, and I live in Northridge. I am here asking all of you to protect the Page property. As cited by the town's open space and trails advisory board recommendation, the Page property offers an unique opportunity for Erie to preserve for current and future generations many unique and valuable open space assets in one parcel. In particular, there's a large pond that provides a habitat for owls, herons herons, excuse me, hawks, and and aquatic wildlife.

It is also an ideal trail connection between Northridge and the Coal Creek Trail and Old Town using the upper irrigation Cottonwood Ditch. There is also no reason that we need to develop every open parcel in Erie. We need open space, and we need to protect this critical habitat. Thank you.

Thank you.

Next is Linden Hirschberger.

Good evening, and thanks for thanks for hearing us. I'm here to talk about the police academy also. A friend of mine told me he went to with the one in Brighton, and he was just surprised at all the information he got. So signed up, didn't know what to expect. Very, very interesting.

And the perspective that I came away with of how the town is growing and how we're affecting all that and the different things that the police officers go through was was just very eye open. And and I heard the diversity and that very much was the same. There was there was two thirds of the the participants were women. And we got to do really cool stuff. We got to shoot taser guns and drive the police cars and everything.

And it was it was made very interesting and it made it fun. But it also really humanized the officers. And we want to I definitely, whenever I see one, I hope to call them by their name, but to get to know and get better acquainted to the community. And and for that, that that was really good for me. Anyway, thank you for listening.

Very good. Thank you.

Next is Anne Mannette. Anne Se.

Hello. Thank you so much for giving us this opportunity to speak to you this evening. My name is Ann Minette Anse. I live on Northridge Drive. I believe that Erie deserves open space, and I even, with help with my neighbors, made a website called Erie Deserves Open Space.

And if you wanna understand why we feel so strongly about the Page property, there is a video, a drone flyover of the space, including the pond and the old growth trees. And I think the property speaks for itself. It is a unique opportunity to preserve Erie's heritage. I love some of the thoughtful ideas that are coming in about the ways that the existing structure might be developed and utilized to serve the community. But I guess my main feeling is this is something that can and should belong to us all, and I hope that you will preserve this space. Thank you.

All right. Is it .com, .org? Dotcom. Next

is Winfried Reichardt.

Good evening, mayor and town council members. My name is Winfrey Reichardt. I also live on Northridge Drive. And I think everybody agrees that Erie should have open space. We can see it. It's growing. It's wonderful. And I think the page property would be a great addition. Now here comes something I was really wondering whether I should say that, but I'm going to say it. I'm not an elitist.

I think very much we should have affordable housing. I as opposed to obviously the majority of citizens of Erie even think we should spend taxpayers' money on it. Always nice to help people. But I'm wondering a little bit whether we should put it in one of the best locations in Erie right next to the creek where everybody would want to live. Okay, that's number one.

Number two, the property speaks for itself and has been mentioned a few times. It would be a great addition to the open space in Erie and it would be a connection between the creek and the other open space farther north. No question about that. A little anecdote. Somebody who lives in the Northridge property or neighborhood for since the beginning, since it was built, told me just these days that there were the owl nests on on the public path, actually.

They're not there anymore. There's just too much too much going on. We had an owl sitting there on the back of our yard sleeping there the day away, not for a few years anymore. Too much traffic. Of course, people need to go somewhere. Now you have an owl nest, and it has been mentioned there next to the pond. Guess what's going to happen if you build there? They might even leave if a lot of people use the open space, but they will definitely leave if you you put any development in beyond open space. Some people don't care. I do.

Other people do. I think it's worth keeping some nature around us. It's beneficial for all of us. I think that's pretty much oh, there's one little thing. Of course, any development we put in there. And here, my concerns a little bit more general. Any development and that included needs more water. And I have mentioned that the last time I spoke here. I encourage everybody to look at the Colorado River where we get our water from. Get our water mainly from the Great Thompson project, don't we?

Yeah. I encourage everybody who hasn't done that yet to go over to Middle Park, Granby, and drive over the tiny little bridge, you will even miss the Colorado River. It's about as big, I would say, give or take, as Boulder Creek. And why would it be different in Boulder? And why would it be different? Because it's coming out of the same mountains, right? Maybe, yeah, that's what it is. So I encourage everybody to take a look at that. And if there's no snow in the mountains, that tiny little creek where the whole Great Thompson project gets its water from. It's scary. Anyway, that was all I wanted to say. Thanks.

Alright. Thank you.

Next is Carol Bunzey.

Thank you for allowing me to speak. My name is Carol Bunzey. Moved to Erie twenty years ago. And when we moved on to Northridge Drive, the Page property was occupied by buffalo.

Everybody remember that?

Very, very cool. Cool. I want to bring back the buffalo. Thank you.

That was it.

Next is Frank Straszabasco.

Good evening. My name is Frank Straszabasco. I live in Northridge as well. I'm just going to speak extemporaneously. I don't have any particular thing written down. But I want to just express my vehement opposition to taxpayer money going to a church of any kind, and especially a megachurch. Do we need another church? There's a church on every corner, basically. And as I understand it, the taxpayer money went for open space. And I don't see how allowing a church to come in has any benefit either to the tax base because they're nonprofits, right?

They're tax free or has any benefit for us as taxpayers paying into open space doesn't make any sense to me at all to have a church there. So that's what I want to mention. And I hope you could consider voting against it. Thank you.

All right. Thank you.

Next is Rose Butterworth.

Still on the agenda.

I know, but it's still in there.

Oh, how cute.

My name is Rose, and I am in second grade. I live in Pierce Street. In my opinion, I don't want you to develop this open space because the animals and plants need a spot to live. Another reason is I think we should keep Erie the same. My final reason is children should have a spot to run around. At least I wouldn't. I would anyway.

Very good. Thank you. Oh, yeah. We're not supposed to clap.

No problem violating the role

Next in this

is Kevin Van Oresdell.

Hello. Thank you for allowing me to speak. My name's Kevin Van Oresdell. I live in Northridge. I'm a twenty year resident of Erie, hardworking taxpayer for those twenty years.

Oftentimes, we as humans make decisions, as you know, and those decisions oftentimes have unintended consequences. And furthermore, oftentimes, unintended consequences pretty bad and almost impossible to reverse. What I'm concerned about with regards to the Page property is we've already seen a proposal for that property that I understand has been dismissed, but that had a number of unintended consequences that were kind of obvious, actually, especially with regards to traffic flow and traffic control. We have examples Erie making decisions with regards to traffic that aren't the greatest. Number one, from the point of view of Northridge, as I'm sure you know, is a poorly designed interface between Morgan Hill and Northridge.

It's had now years of consequences and concerns and legitimately documented safety issues. Shall I say the progressive lane design in front of that grade school over here has already had unintended

a question.

Property. Question. And I would think caution that's a very conservative approach to any kind of changes in that regard. I have yet to hear any good reasons to develop that property. And I urge you guys to follow the recommendation of the Open Space Board, or at least take that seriously and leave one of the last untouched properties in Erie as it is. Thank you for your time.

All right. Thank you.

Next is Maria Hughes. Thank you all for allowing me to speak. I don't really have anything prepared to I moved here two years ago.

If you say your name and Maria.

Maria Hughes.

Okay.

And I live in Erie.

Okay. That's it.

This is my second year here. And one of the reasons I liked this area in the first place was the open space and the trails. And I would really, really like you to consider leaving that page property as open space. That's all I have to say.

Thank you. Thank you.

Next is Dan Walker.

There's more people than me.

Hello, counsels. Dan Walker from another Northridge person. First time I talked to the town council, Vic Smith was sitting right there. Well, it wasn't downstairs. It was in a little tiny classroom over by the front door. Oh my gosh. I've been here a while.

Yes.

But I know the Page property fairly intimately. I trespass through there once a week or so and enjoy the beauty along the irrigation trail. And from when we first moved here, there was 3,000 people. And now there's 1,000 times more.

No, not that many. That would be It's 42,000 now. Okay.

So I've seen it fill in all these years. And I just want to say urge you you to keep this as open space. It's a very unique property. And that's all I have to say.

Alright. Thank you.

Next is Molly Rice.

Hi. Molly Rice and I live on Northridge Drive. I have lived in Erie for about twenty two years. Started in Country Meadows and moved over here to Northridge. And I didn't plan to speak today, but I just felt the need.

I would say that the Page property is probably the most special place that we have in Erie as far as wildlife, the views that we have, the beautiful trees. I myself walk through there on a regular basis. And I know a family of owls that lives right there and some of those big beautiful trees. I've come across coyotes, ducks, cranes, snakes, all of the wildlife that makes a big difference and really brings character to where we live. So I just wanted to say that I firsthand it would be just an absolute shame to see that go away.

So important for our community to still have these places that we can be proud of and spend time in. So thank you.

All right. Thank you.

It's being recorded on the phone.

I can always watch it afterwards to hear it. Adam, we can hear somebody talking over the speakers.

That was our last speaker.

Or I'm hearing voices, one of the two. That

was our

Chief, can I impose on you to see if the person out there is signing up to speak at public comment? Okay and she can come we'll hold and she can come straight to the podium. Your timing was exactly when we were ending.

When signed up a month ago online, I was feeling very brave. And now I'm not feeling so brave.

But that's fine. I'm here.

My name is Sarah Knighton. I live in Old Towne Erie. Actually, just down the road, I can see the page property from my front porch. And one of the things that brought me to Erie ten years ago was that beautiful open space that we all have access to. I've raised my son here, and he continues to spend a lot of time in the community. He's a teen without an e bike. So he just pedals his little self all around the place. And I love that we have access to that. I have a couple of concerns around developing the page property, the first one being around infrastructure in particular. I know Erie has grown a lot.

But really in the Old Town area, we've maintained that kind of small town infrastructure. And what that means is that when things get really busy, it can become incredibly dangerous. And again, as a resident of Old Town, I've experienced, you know, near vehicular crashes when I'm walking, when I'm driving, just because it's such, a tight area. And so if we get a lot of traffic, I'm concerned about what that will mean in terms of safety, for both pedestrians, cyclists, and also just the vehicles moving around town. I think that's a big concern.

I also really appreciate that the aesthetic of Erie, and I think that that's something that's really important and special, and it brings a lot of people to our community that we have all of these great open spaces. I'm concerned that if we develop that piece of Old Town, it's going to start to lose that vibe. And Old Town is really what gives Erie that feeling of, hey, you might live here with 42,000 other people, but it really is a small close knit community. And part of that comes from the fact that we have our Old Town area. So I really would urge the council to maintain that field.

And then, of course, as many people in Colorado love our natural spaces, I love walking around where they've put the trails, the old water treatment plant. That's been a new fun place to walk around. And I love just walking down the trails and seeing all of our beautiful open space. And I would hate to see that go away. So I would urge the the council to take action, and keep that page property as open space. Thank you.

Alright. Thank you.

So while while she was speaking, another person signed

up. Okay.

Jean Casalca.

Hi there. I'm Jean Kazzalka, Erie resident for twenty six years.

And I

agree with everything that everybody said about saving the page property. I think it's super important that we have open space that is actually open space that's natural. We've got a lot of space, and it's all been developed, and it continues to be developed. I was living here when you could see all the way to I-twenty 5. Well, you couldn't really see all the way to I-twenty 5, but

you know

what I'm saying.

There was nothing between Old Town and I-twenty 5, and it was lovely. I've actually seen elk back there, and I do know what elk are. There were elk back there. So coyotes, elk, foxes. Mountain lion was on my house one night, So I just think it is really, really important for us to have that open space stay as natural as possible and developing it while I also believe that I would like to see housing that's affordable for people.

I don't think that that is the correct place to build affordable housing. I think we need to balance our affordable housing with our open spaces. And right now, I think we need our open space most. And then the other thing is the water issue, which we're going to run out of water, folks. I mean, it's not a mystery. We're running out of water. And we keep on building, and we keep using more and more water. You build more, they're going to come. They're going to use more water. So please save the page property and leave it as open space. We really, really need our open space. Thank you very much.

All right. Thank you. Is there anybody else in the audience who would like to address this tonight? Come on up. And just name and location

My for name is Claire Scott. I live in Erie, have for twenty five years. I'm confused because I thought I couldn't talk about items on the agenda at this time, but I guess I can because everybody's talking about page property.

Yes. You can. It's only public hearings you can't talk about at this point. They're separate. But no public hearings tonight. You can address this on

Okay. So I agree that open space is great. I also agree that we need affordable housing. Now whatever you're gonna decide to do you're going to decide to do. My question to you and my comment is about the ARPA funds that were used to purchase that property.

Half of half of the property, half of it was open space funding, half of it was ARPA funds for affordable housing. So what does that do to the city having to repay those ARPA funds is my question. And maybe this is a question better kept till after the full presentation. I'm all for affordable housing. And we're running out of places to put it.

It needs to be accessible to downtown, to old town, where people can walk to work. You know, I'm I'm not against keeping the page property as open space. But what are you gonna do with those ARPA funds for affordable housing? They have to be spent by the end of the year. So that's my comment. Thank you.

All right. Thank you. Anybody else like to address this tonight?

I'm Steve Fracca. And I don't think we've heard from anybody on Northridge Drive. But I wouldn't share that perspective. I was a thirty one year resident in Broomfield, where I felt they did an exceptional job of balancing infrastructure development, housing development, and open space. And it was a hard fight to keep it there, but it was worth it. So we weren't that thrilled with Erie twenty five years ago because we thought we couldn't see the plan. We've been really pleased to see the plan in the last ten to fifteen years. And I hope you'll continue that good inertia and maintain the page property. Thanks. All right. Thank you.

I think I saw one more hand up.

Yeah. My name is Mike Katernik, and I'm a Northbridge resident. We've lived here about sixteen years and have really appreciated that open space down there. Seen a lot of changes that has happened in our town. But to take something and turn it into something that may not be conducive to what we would like remember, you're elected officials here.

We voted you in here to represent us. So what we're saying loud and clear if you can hear it from all these people tonight we want to leave that property as open space. And I want one other thing that I'd like you to consider is a method to codify the results of what happens here so that future boards don't turn around and make a change, and we're back here again repeating ourselves. Thank you. Thank you.

All right. Last chance.

All

right. Seeing, no other, participants in the public comment section, we'll go on to our general business. And the first item is not the page property. That'll be the second item. But you'll get to hear about water. So with that, we'll move on to item twenty twenty six three nineteen. This is a resolution of the town council of the town of Erie declaring a stage two water condition under Erie's drought and water supply storage plan. And hopefully there's somebody oh, okay. Here we go.

Hello, mayor, town council. My name is Dylan King, sustainability and water conservation specialist here at the town.

Go ahead and introduce yourself over to

Yes.

Erica Thorley, sustainability manager.

I always forget that you don't know. So a quick run through the agenda. I wanted to talk about drought response to date, a little background behind the plan itself, the drought stage two response measures, and then talk through any questions or concerns that folks may have. So for those of you that don't remember, we did declare the water assure shortage emergency back on March 20. Since that time, we've continued to see the ongoing snow drought and record high temperatures.

Those high temperatures have persisted through March, but, obviously, things have cooled down a little bit since then. March was the hottest March on record, in one hundred and thirty one years of record keeping. After we lifted the water shortage emergency at the beginning of April, we're talking around the third or the April 4. We were recommending a two day a week watering schedule for all water users. The map that you see here is dated Thursday, May 7.

It's just showing the drought situation statewide. I looked today to see if it had been updated, see if I could give you all a better one. It's not been updated, so we're dealing with week old data, but I'm assuming that things have not changed dramatically even though we did see that large moisture event here last week. So the drought and water supply shortage plan is essentially just a plan to help us with resiliency in making sure that we have the water supply that we need here in town. It's a dynamic plan that has four different measures.

It allows us to increase or decrease the actions that we're taking by looking at regional concerns, regional situations, as well as a calculated index. The stage two that we're talking to you all about tonight calls for increased conservation measures and outdoor irrigation reductions. It also calls the plan itself calls for a formation of staff led drought response task force for ongoing monitoring, especially in these dry years. The plan itself talks about how monitoring in most years will be heavily focused on early spring, about March to May. However, it does call for increased monitoring and ongoing monitoring throughout the irrigation season as well as even beyond that in dry years like we're seeing now.

So that would be one of the things that that task force would be taking on. I wanted to run through the stage two response measures or actions. There are a lot of them, but I tried to boil it down to a couple of bullet points because it's a slideshow and nobody wants to look through a million tables. However, we did attach those tables as a separate slideshow if we do want to go through it at any point this evening. So what the town is doing on our active parks and rec areas as well well, not just active.

We are reducing irrigation use across all town owned land. Specifically, in these active areas, we will still be seeing water. A lot of the reduction that we're seeing is across the more passive areas in town. So areas that don't see as much traffic, basically. We have decided that we're targeting a 20% savings relative to the historical irrigation average across a five year rolling average for the reduction on town owned land.

When it comes to high residential water users, we've done this action item in the past, but it calls for it in the plan. We will provide outreach to our highest water users. So that's folks that are built in their tier three and tier four rates, to try to figure out how we can help them reduce water, including free irrigation audits that we offer to all residents, but that's one of the easy levers that we can pull. For the large public irrigators, like the golf club, school districts, large HOAs, things like that, we do targeted outreach to those folks and start to have meetings with them. Todd and I met with the golf Course this afternoon.

He's had ongoing conversations with them as well as other metro districts and large HOAs across town. And then specifically around residents, businesses, HOA schools, really all users when it comes to that turf grass areas, we are asking for voluntary reductions in outdoor water usage. So essentially that is eliminating the waste of water, and watering should not exceed two times per week and only occur from 8PM to 8AM, obviously to dodge losses to evaporation and transpiration and all that fun stuff. And then last little page here, commercial actions when that when it comes to these this stage two. Car washes without recycled water.

So every time you see voluntary in this language, it's a little bit confusing. It's just meant to say these actions are voluntary. So we're just trying to promote best practices across all of these different commercial car washes. And then with construction water, we're reaching out to those construction firms to, again, encourage the most efficient use of water possible. Again, I know that you guys have seen this in a previous slide, but wanted to touch on it.

This is roughly how this two day watering schedule works. So it's an even odd breakdown by address, and that's how you decide your watering days. We need to talk as a group, and I should say we'll be meeting as our first meeting as a group, a Tesla group, will be this Friday for this drought response to run through some things, that I think could clean this up even more. Right? So for large irrigation controllers and HOAs, for example, they may not have an exact address.

How are we dealing with those accounts? And so I think there's a little of cleanup to be done just to say that out loud. But this is essentially how the two day a week watering schedule works. With this third day that could come into play later as things continue to stay hot and dry potentially, it's something we'll talk about as a group moving forward. And then just wanted to, again, to give some regional context. This two day week watering schedule is largely considered to be a best practice, not only on the Front Range but across the state and many other parts of the Mountain West generally. We would not be the only ones doing it. We've seen Denver do it. We've seen Aurora do it. We've seen Thornton start to do it in Golden and so on down the line.

We also participate in regional drought conversations, and we'll continue to do so. So. So we've really got our finger on the pulse about what other folks are doing and what's happening in a regional context, especially close to home but also statewide. And then these groups are developing and encouraging regional collaborations. Some of you all may have seen the Boulder County note that went out today talking about this. Northern Water has a similar press release that's going out. And so we're starting to see this momentum build across not only our town but many other towns around us and providers around us. And that brings us to the questions and discussions.

All right. Thank you. I'll bring it back to counsel for any clarifying questions.

Council member O'Connor. Thank you. Thank you for bringing that chart out of the plan. And I think I don't know if you can bring that up. Can I do that?

I can't.

I didn't

think so. I can't. The which chart?

It I attached the second slide show that just had Oh.

And Adam may be able to Adam is the man behind the curtain.

Yeah. And Adam may be. Yeah. I think it's the Yeah, the drought stage response measures tables will be slides that has all the tables.

I find that chart is very helpful for at least understanding if you say bring up page three. Because page three to seven is on the demand side. Yes. And pages before that are in the supply side. I think it's just helpful for the residents to see like we're moving from column one to potentially column two.

Here's maybe where we're headed if we need to head that way. And it gives them an idea of, well, maybe we should make an effort to conserve on our side because we don't want to necessarily get into column three and column four. So I appreciate you bringing that that up, and hopefully it helps to provide more context for what it means to be in stage two or moving into stage two. Thank you. Yeah. You're welcome.

Okay. Other comments, questions? Councilor Rivera?

I was just curious. You called out car washes and best management practices. Do we have recommendations for them? Or they just they'll they'll tell us? Or

Yeah. So in the industry, the best management practices is recycled water systems. And we did talk with our public works folks about who has them and who doesn't in town. There's only a handful that don't, and only one of them is operable in town. You'll also notice that in stage three, we talk about for those that don't have recycled watering systems, it needs to use less than 40 gallons per vehicle. So I guess that would be another point where we're making this recommendation about what a best management practice is. So it's not necessarily written down in this plan from our point of view. However, the industry pleases itself pretty well, and recycled systems are starting to become more and more ubiquitous across the industry.

Okay. And then the two days a week for residents and homeowners, does that include hand watering, like, for gardens, flower pots, and that kind of thing all all across?

So that's for your turf grass areas. And then we're strongly recommending hand watering ing of those shrubs, trees, flower beds, things like that. It does not need to adhere to that two day a week watering schedule. So water those things as needed. Those are the more important pieces of

Mhmm.

Landscape infrastructure that we're really trying to maintain and take care of at a high level. And so we're encouraging people to hand water as needed for those pieces of landscape.

Okay. Thank you.

Alright. Council member Mortalero.

Thanks for the presentation and and for being proactive. And just for clarity, we're formalizing moving into stage three tonight, and that's why we're talking about it. It's already on our website recommending to move to two days a week voluntarily. And right now, we're on a voluntary voluntary standpoint. Standpoint.

Yes. So to clarify, we're trying to formalize stage two. And yes, so we have taken a lot of actions that are basically the recommendations of the response measures noted in stage mainly around the two day a week watering schedule and things like that. So in the grand scheme of things it does not really change much from the status quo since we've had we've come out of the water shortage emergency like I said early April third or or fourth or so. So yes, it's formalizing these things so that we're actually in a drought stage, which I believe will help us to actually implement this plan moving forward.

Yeah, I appreciate that. And I think all of our residents understand all of Colorado and a lot of the West is going through the same challenges. But in a voluntary stage, to council member O'Connor's point, if we all volunteer and we do the right things, hopefully we can stay out of stage three and beyond. Thanks again, and thanks for bringing this up so that we can formalize it.

Thank you. A lot of great information in the packet. And guess my question is a lot of the residents were surprised by our sudden emergency. Understandable, but we had to do it. What's our communication plan going forward for

these

recommendations and then any restrictions? We've got a town fair coming up. Are we gonna be out there communicating about some of this?

Yeah, that's a good question. Erica will be at the town fair, so she can take care of it there. And then in terms of a formal communication plan, obviously as the wheels have started really turning and getting this stage declared and things like that, we've been working with the staff communications team to make sure that we have materials that will start going out through all the various different channels that will be trying to communicate where we're at, why we're doing what we're doing, what the expectations are and things like that. So the hope is that we don't catch anybody by surprise like we did in late March. We're trying to make sure that everybody knows exactly what's going on.

And then also, quite frankly, there are a lot of phone numbers emails out there and different ways of getting ahold of us, we're just encouraging people to reach out to us with any questions or concerns. But if and when this were to be declared, the communications team is ready to go with getting the word out through social media and bill inserts and any way else that we can start talking about it we'll hopefully be taking advantage of all this.

Okay thank you. More sooner is better right?

Exactly.

Councilmember Petzormelli. So my question is, have you run any models of if we go at the same pace or if the usage is more, how long do we have until we hit stage three?

Or No is the easy answer. We don't have any concrete modeling to say, you know, we'll take these response measures. It'll reduce it by this much. And if we don't, this is where we end up. I think that the important thing to remember is that this plan is an iterative one. It allows us to continue to move and and make decisions based on what we're seeing on the ground, what kind of reductions we're seeing from these response measures, what that drought index is doing, what other municipalities and providers are doing around us. So while we don't have a concrete model of if this, then this, we do have the ability to move relatively quickly to make sure that we're meeting whatever demands that we see.

Yeah. That was a point of what is a contingency plan. If it increases or if it decreases simple statistical model of how soon or how much time do we have until we hit stage three. Yep. So just to point.

Yep. Yeah. And we'll keep the these meetings from the staff perspective will continue to happen, I would guess, on a weekly basis at this point just to make sure we're really staying on top of it. And then if anything changes, we're back here talking to all you fine folk. Thank you.

All right. Go ahead. You're hear Pro Tem?

Thank you. I think most of my questions were answered. Thank you for the presentation. Yeah. I appreciate being proactive on this. I think it's certainly on everyone's mind. I guess my only main question. So again, I understand we moved to stage three. There might be another declaration. But with this particular one, is this just in perpetuity until we declare that we're no longer in this? Or what what

Yeah. The section eight dash one dash 10 of the Erie Municipal Code provides that the restrictions shall continue in full force and effect until the utilities director has determined that the water shortage response level has changed or that the projected water supply shortage has ended. So the the code sets it up where the utilities director has the authority to make the decision to lift this restriction.

Okay.

Yep. Alright. Thank you. Yep. Good. That's all I had. Yep.

Alright. So just a a couple questions here. You mentioned car washing on the commercial side. Can you wash your hand your car by hand?

You can. We're asking folks to think about not. So there's it's a voluntary prohibition. So we're just trying to say, hey. Because there are these facilities that utilize recycled water and things like that, please do so. Know, I just candidly, I talked to a lot of folks during the water shortage emergency that were trying to sell houses and clean them off or things like It's like hey, not right now, we're in an emergency, but in this stage two, obviously you could. We're just voluntarily asking folks to choose different options.

Yeah, I think one of the key parts of that message is it's more effective to go to a car wash than it is to wash your car in your driveway. Alright. And then I imagine we will have some residents that are calling in maybe to the police department, maybe to town hall, saying that somebody isn't following something here. And so what is our response reaction, to those that likely will do that?

Yeah. So we have a waste of water ordinance. That's eight one eleven. Elliot can double check me. But the when it comes to the enforcement of that ordinance, there's still some work to be done, frankly. And I think that that's a lot of the work that will start to come out once this drought team of the staff drought team starts to get together to figure out, you know, what does this enforcement mechanism look like. We do have the loose structure of warning, warning, fine, you know, that's in place. Elliot again, correct me if I'm wrong. And so, you know, we have the loose framework and a skeleton of how this will work. And then we also have, like, the see click fix stuff where people can report problems that are happening.

So that'll be another tool in the water waste tool belt. To answer your question specifically, it's a work in progress.

All right. And so our code enforcement officer may be sent out. And I think, you know, this is one of these things that I'm hopeful most people will say, I get it. I need to dial back. And, you know, my lawn does not have to be perfectly green. I get it for those that really like a perfectly green lawn that that may be hard, but this is where we're at. It's it's getting everybody to be part of the team here. Alright. With that, I'll see if there's a motion to approve resolution twenty six zero nine seven. So moved. Second. Do a motion and a second. All in favor say aye. Aye. All opposed say no. Motion carries. Ordinance is in or resolution is in place.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right we'll move forward to the next item which is item twenty twenty six-three 17 the page property update and discussion. You take the lead Sarah. All right. I'll turn it over to Sarah Nirmala, our director of community development.

All right. Thank you, mayor, mayor pro tem, council members. My name is Sarah Director of Planning and Development, and I am joined by Luke Bollinger, our Director of Parks and Recreation.

Let's see.

Tonight, we are seeking direction from the Council for the future of the Page property. I'm going to provide just a very brief history of our relationship with the Page property, walk you through the alternatives that you've seen in the past year plus, and hopefully get some direction from you and talk about next steps. I'll just say over on the right part of this slide, this is a good visual of where this property is. A lot of folks have talked about it being next to the Northridge neighborhood. You can see it's just Southeast of that neighborhood, and it's just Northeast of our Old Town neighborhood.

And it's approximately 50 acres. It used to be in Weld County. And that's kind of where the history started. The property, at the time that we began engaging with it, was actually under code enforcement with Weld County. It had a lot of complaints about the uses that were on the site, which included some industrial uses, even though it should have been agriculture.

And it also had it has a home on the site as well as associated barns. But the biggest issues were the illegal activity of soils and rock cleaning on the site as well as a lot of storage and warehousing. So that's when we came into discussions with the owner and ultimately decided to purchase the property with the hopes of hitting a couple of different goals, including creating a mixed income neighborhood that would forward some of our affordable housing efforts, as well as creating an amazing opportunity for open space and trails. So that was the intent of the purchase. And so the purchase was actually split between our American Rescue Fund dollars, the ARPA dollars, and our TNAC dollars.

And so the total cost was about $6,600,000 for the acquisition that happened in October 2023. So again, that was in Weld County, so we did need to annex it into the town. And we annexed it into the town in January 2024 with agricultural holding zoning, which allowed us to just have some time with figuring out what to do with the property. In December 2024, we initiated a contract with DIG Studios to help develop a concept plan for how the area might look if it were to be developed, as well as have open space and trails. So we went through a number of iterations of just testing the site.

And really, the site has some pretty distinct areas and views and some flood zones and some big infrastructure. So it has a finite area of where it can actually be developed, which is really on the South Side. And then the area on the North, the East, and really on the West were the areas envisioned for more open space and trails. And through the conversations that we had with council in April 2025, as well as September 2025, when we brought some graphics to and some testing of concept plans to counsel. The ideas of particular view corridors were established and tested.

And I would say that we also had some conversations with our OSAB board. And so it was in November 2025 when you saw these last that we had been asked to bring two additional concepts with no development for council to consider. And that was going to be testing some parks and open space and potentially a parks and open space facility on the site. So I'm going to just show you these were some of the alternatives that were shown earlier in 2025, which tested where development could go and where open space could go on the site. And the red area was the footprint for potential development, where the dark green area was for our parks and open space facility, and the light green area was just pure open space.

So these were the alternatives corridors that were also identified and carried forward. And then these were the additional open space options that were brought to council. And the one on the left included an open space facility, and the one on the right was just purely all open space. So as a reminder, we did an evaluation of what do these entail in terms of achieving some of our original goals in terms of housing, and open space, and facilities, and what each one of those options meant in terms of potential traffic considerations and costs. So this table was presented to counsel back in November.

Hopefully your memory is jogged with all of this. And no particular decision was made in the November conversation. So we're back to you today to get your input. I did want to just give you an overview quickly of the project costs to date, because money has been spent here. So that will be one of your considerations.

Again, the property purchase is probably a little bit closer to $6,700,000 We had TNAC $3,400,000 ARPA $3,300,000 There was some site evaluation that was conducted, particularly around the environmental resources. And we did some demolition as well of some of the existing buildings. That's why it looks a little bit better than it did originally when we bought it. And then the concept planning, we had a total contract cost of about $172,000 with DIG. And we have about $67,000 remaining after those concepts and the time spent in 2025.

So here we are today. We're happy to answer any questions you may have. I know this was a quick overview, but we're hoping to get your direction on future use of the page property and kind of wrap up some of the conversation around the TNAC and ARPA funds.

Alright. And ultimately, we wanna give you just some type of direction so we get it off to kinda we don't know what we're doing phase. Alright. Then I'll bring it back to council to see if anybody would like to start. Councilmember Mortolero?

Alright. Well well, thanks. I know this has

been a

long project with with us. I think I took the tour with OSTAB a year ago, March, when when we walked the property as a group. But first, I want to kind of I know Sarah Hancock's not here tonight, but I kind of want to clarify the ARPA money. So Erie received about $6,700,000 in ARPA money, which is basically money from the federal government to help spur the economy. Correct. And it was around 6,700,000.

Yes, I think about that. And director Hancock is online if you want to ask questions. She can hear you.

Okay, great. Thanks. And so the money was used to purchase Cheesben and the Page property plus demolition on the Page property and also the for the DIGGS study was also paid for out of that?

Initially it was. At a certain point once the DIGGS studios contract had the scope updated to not include housing, then we paid for it out of general fund dollars and any work that was done after that scope update.

Okay, thanks. So I know it's been mentioned, but just to reiterate, because not everybody was here for all the other meetings that we had. So the requirements of ARPA money needed to be spent by a certain date. And we, Erie, propose that the funds would be used for affordable housing and other government services. Is that correct?

Yes.

And so as far as Erie's concerned and the federal government's concerned, this project is closed. There's no more reporting on it. The money's been spent. We we held up our our requirement to spend it by a certain date. So that that's all free and clear. No question. And there's no payback.

Correct. We did expend it all per the requirements.

Thanks. I just wanted to clarify that before I asked some of the questions about the property. The detention pawn or there's going to be required detention on this property. Has that been determined where that would go yet?

Only if we develop the property would additional detention be required. The Angel Pond, the pond that's on-site, that's a seepage pond that's fed by the nearby ditch. That's not a storm water facility.

Okay. So options one through three, we would have to come up with a detention area.

Yes that would be part of the development process.

And then I think at the last meeting we asked if there were any planned number of units or an AMI range, and that's not been sorted out yet at this time if it were to be housing.

No. We were that was gonna be part of the analysis. So we had not come up with any finite numbers.

Okay.

So I'm lucky enough to be the liaison for OSTAP, the council liaison. So I appreciate what they've provided in the direction. I echo that. But I would suggest that options one through three, that we should also have not only we show in options four and five reimbursement of some sort. I would say options one through three, we should be talking about a reimbursement to the OSTAP or the TNAC funds.

Those are taxpayer dollars that go into that fund. And if we don't feel the open space value is preserved with housing on that property, then there should be some form of payment back to the taxpayers, back to the TNAC fund. So I think that's something that I'd like to see included if this were to go to housing. And I just did some rough calculations if it was in the middle of the density range or whatnot. Could be anywhere from $1,800,000 to the full $3,400,000 that TNAC funds were paid into this.

That's my $02 on options one through three. If we were to go that way, I would like to see a proposal for, paying back some of the TNAC dollars.

Alright. Other comments? Go ahead, Councilmember Hoback.

Just real quick, following up on Councilmember Morton Earl's question about the ARPA funds. What's our certainty that there would not be a later audit that might check up on these funds? I I know the project closed, but I also know sometimes there are post activity audits that as to the use of the funds.

Don't know if director Hancock would like to answer that.

Yes. Can you all hear me?

Yes. Yes.

Yes. Sarah Hancock, director of finance. And I'm so sorry. Council member Hoback, can you lean into the mic a bit more and repeat your question? I apologize. I couldn't hear you very well.

Sure. Sorry about that. Yeah, I was just curious, even though the project is completely closed, the funds have been dispersed, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, Do we have what's our level of comfort that there won't be some sort of an audit at a later date saying just following up on how we spent the funds?

That's a great question. We have had our auditors do single audit reviews of the ARPA funds every year since we received those funds and expended any of them. So what they do is they check the expended funds against what we report back to the federal government, which are very short, simple reports that basically state what the funds were intended for, what we spent them on, and if we've met that obligation, which for this was to purchase the property was the obligation met. I, of course, because ARPA is, you know, a a very lightning in a bottle kind of thing where we haven't seen anything like it before or since, there is always a chance that, you know, the IRS could come in and say, hey. We wanna see how you spent those funds.

But from a reporting standpoint and from prior review from auditors, we have met those obligations. So I think even if that happened, we would still have documentation to say that we met those obligations and reported them appropriately to the federal government.

Great. Thank you.

No problem.

Okay. Councilmember Baer?

Thank you. Yeah. So I I know we see that sometimes happen with FEMA funds where there's, you know, used, and then the government will come back and say, we didn't like how you used that. You have to pay us back. So I do have some concern about that. I don't think we can ever be a 100% sure, but I think I totally trust our finance team and that we have met our obligations there as far as we know how to meet it since it's a lightning in a bottle situation. I did want to mention, I think the page property, if I remember right, has 54 encumbrances. Does that sound right? So a lot. Yeah.

Between floodplain, wastewater access, water. So the buildability of that property is really less than half or 50 percentage 50% of the property. And so to council member Mortalaro's concern about refunding the the funds to TNAC. It's I think that half of the property was paid for with TNAC funds, and more than half would end up being open space. But I I'm totally open to considering that.

But I I do think that it's just it's not feasible to use a 100% of the land. So for for affordable housing, should we do that? Also, we never mentioned the church, and so I bet some folks are like, wait. Why did we all get so upset about a church and then there's no church mentioned? So that was a situation that came forward that a church was in swapping land with the town and to build to locate a church, a campus there, and they have withdrawn that pre application. Correct?

Yes. We did one pre app with them, and they did not move forward.

Okay. So I just want to set everyone's mind at ease there. And then so, you know, we certainly heard from the Northridge neighborhood, and, you know, there's a lot of interest in keeping this open space. I think I think if that's what we should do, then we can do that. But I do believe we need to continue our commitment to meet the community's desires.

And we know that affordable housing is a top four priority for the community based on last year's snapshot survey questionnaire that we did, and also confirming the long term, decade long survey that was statistically relevant. So because of those things, think that we do need to look at refunding ARPA funds to or not they're spent they're no longer ARPA funds. But refunding the funds spent on this piece of land with the intention to develop affordable housing so that those can be spent in on actual housing and affordability in some capacity, whether that's purchasing other land, whether that's helping with down payment assistance or maintaining a permanently affordable development. I think that that's important. I also wonder, Lou director Bollinger, if you could talk about we've heard lots of ideas from folks about what this could look like and so many wonderful ideas.

But I wonder from a just feasibility, how does this work in our capital improvement funds and our work plan? Can you talk to us about that a little bit?

Yeah. Absolutely. So I think our first step would be we're planning on doing an open space management plan refresh in 2027 with all of our properties. And if this property be all open space, then this would be a property on our list that we would evaluate as part of that plan to figure out what do we need to do with it in terms of reclamation, Where do trails go? So sort of almost like a small conceptual plan for it, but really focused on rehabilitating the natural areas.

As far as the two structures on the site, that all comes down to availability of funds, priority of different projects. Right now, we're just using it as storage for equipment because we're short of space at the Leone World Service Center. And I'll just be honest, it's not long in term CIP budget. It's not in our project queue to do anything with those structures at this time just because of the competing priorities that we do have among the towns. So yes, we've heard environmental center.

We've heard offices. We've heard a lot of the same things. But it just comes down to funding availability with a number of other projects that we have in our queue in terms of parks and facilities.

Thank you. Because I think it's important to level set expectations that should this property be open space, it's likely to sit for a while. I also hear and know that people utilize the land currently, and they've thought of it as open space for a long time. Is it possible to open existing trails? I think there's one that goes to the east side of that pond in particular. Formal trails?

Yes, that's a possibility. Obviously, a possibility for formal trails to open up the property. We'd have to evaluate it to make sure that it's safe, to make sure that it's accessible. So there'd have to be a little bit of investigation to make sure that it's an appropriate trail corridor for everybody, it meets our standards, and it meets our maintenance standards. Think of the Northridge Trail. For a lot of years, it was this community maintained trail. And then when we took it over, we have certain standards to make sure that it meets appropriate standards for a maintained trail. So we would have to do some probably a little bit of work to make it accessible.

Okay. Yeah. Okay. Thank you.

Follow-up to that, if I may?

Yes. Go ahead. Short of

a a major plan, knowing that residents do use it anyway, should we have some signage that says walk with the coyotes at your own risk or something?

Would treat it just like any other open

space that we have in our system where we'd put signage up, say, on designated paths and watch for wildlife and things like that. So although it's not technically open to the public, we would have to install some signage as well to make sure that people knew to stay on designated paths. But just like any other open space property is people may use it when they're not supposed to, and that just comes down to enforcement. And hopefully, people are at least being safe and using it where they're supposed to be using it.

Alright. Thank you. Councilman Pitzer Malley.

Yeah. We see options one to three and loud and clear open spaces. I agree it should be. And the second half is where we need to think more, where we need the facilities to have a house. We need to buy either a land or make best use of this. And question I have is that, is it 19,000,000, like, on the high end? Or we just stopped looking at it, right, from last time when we said it was

So when we did present to council, we received direction not to pursue any more design for the parks and open space facilities. So at the time that Ascenza presented that information, that was the estimated cost at that time was the $19,000,000 So we have not pursued any further design on that facility. So I couldn't tell with any certainty on if those costs have gone up or down because we haven't done any more work on it.

Right. And what alternatives do we have for that? We know we need to build it somewhere, right?

I'm sorry. Could you

What what alternatives do we have

for the Alternatives? Well, I I think what we're gonna be start looking at is the Leone Leone World Service Center to expand in that facility through the Public Facilities Impact Fund.

Okay. So moving on with the affordable housing, I think what we are missing in the town is housing needs assessment kind of an advisory board to look at is there a demand or what kind of housing should be there. We are just going off of this location is not good or whatever inventory we have is not selling or these are all hypothetical derivations, but I think it's better to have community involved as an advisory board and come up with what is necessary for the town. Do we need affordable housing? If so, what are the options?

If so, if we have this ARPA funds, how do we better use them? Like, if this property is not the ideal location, where do we have this housing?

And we do have a housing needs assessment that we conducted in 2022 and brought to the council in 2023 along with an associated affordable housing strategy and policy. So we still have those. The affordable housing policy was adopted at that time. The housing needs assessment could probably use a refresh That's good. You know, to help inform us.

And also include it, like, a formal board, advisory board. That way, the board will advise the council of what what are the needs, and it'll take the survey as an input and also, you know, come up with ideas. And that's one idea I had or a solution for this. And I like to have the facilities in there plus the open space. And affordable housing, which is starter homes, and also agree with the an inventory of small homes where people can get started.

And we see the middle housing is missing, and the ladder is not there anymore in Erie. So options one, two, three with facilities. Which one is that?

Either one. Yeah. Yeah.

Thank you.

Thank you. Okay. I'm looking to councilor O'Connor or or mayor pro tem bell before I speak. I'm I'm good.

So between option four and five, what is the zoning difference, if there is any, between the two different shades of green?

So go up to

here. We would have the open space I'm trying to remember.

We just adopted it. What is it called? It's reserved

open space. So reserved open space would be the light green, and then PLI would be the facility portion. So depending on right now the dark green kind of could be that, but it could be smaller.

Okay. And is the PLI treated the same way as open space? As in Okay.

Oh. Well, I'm sorry.

You're the director of

the meeting.

Gives you more flexibility, obviously, to have you could have open space on it, but it gives you the flexibility to have some type of facility on there as well.

And if all of it is zoned open space, can the house be used for something like a nature center or the other ideas that were proposed?

Yes, absolutely. The open space designation does allow some limited facilities. So think of Schofield is a great example of open space that has facilities on it. They're just very limited on what they can be.

And is the barn in good enough condition to use for the foreseeable future?

For storage.

For storage, yes. But for the foreseeable future, it's fairly It's structurally Okay. Enough storage, yes. Fair enough. All right. Thank you.

Thank

you. And thank you for the presentation. Know there's been a long discussion on this. I'm trying to, like, I think just for the public. I mean, obviously, this originated back with the prior council.

And then with the DIG studio, we hired them to do and look at that was I'm trying to think February or March '25. So we're several years into this. But just going back to the maps that we have here, the work that Dick did to do this. And somebody asked the question about how do we codify this. And essentially the codification is in the zoning designation, correct? When we When we ultimately zone this as, that's what uses we can have there.

Correct. It's currently ag holding, so it gives us a lot of flexibility to just keep it as it is, rehabilitate the land. But yes, to finalize the direction would be to zone it something specific.

Yeah. So I think when we hired on DIG, we weren't really sure what the delineations of where we could build housings. And that's why these maps that are presented here tonight were done. So I guess there were a lot of great comments up here from my colleagues. Just kind of circling back on this whole thing.

I think one of the issues well, there are two big issues that I had and I kind of suspected before we got the maps. But kind of when I saw the maps of how we could have maybe the housing area designated, I think there were two issues that I was concerned about. The first was that the ingress egress out of here and one of the issues we have with that bridge on Cheesman Street, I think public works director Pasek was saying that that bridge needed significant improvements to really use that as kind of an ingress, egress access. Maybe you could do an emergency out of there. So that kind of funnels everything onto to County Road one and a half.

And

I realize we're not necessarily talking about a huge development in here, but it was a concern. And I think also just the geography here with the ditches, the pond, and the floodplain. And I know we did try to on the map there, that little green strip, we were trying to protect those view corridors. But essentially, you still kind of have housing kind of going in the middle of this area. So I guess that's where I've kind of come back to where I think this probably best is preserved as open space.

As far as you know, I understand, you know, I'm certainly concerned about affordability. I mean, I've I've got kids in their twenties, and my son's telling me, you know, he doesn't know if he'll ever be able to buy a house. And and and that concerns me because, you know, we want our kids to have the same opportunities that that we had.

And,

you know, so on the flip side, I think that that's kind of a macroeconomic problem. And I'd certainly want to partner in what we can. One of the things that I would like to see whatever we decide to do monetarily wise, I guess, with the funding, Since I've been on the board, the focus has always been in partnering with Boulder County on affordable housing. And one of the issues that I have with that is I always talk about who are we helping. And there's kind of two parts to this is that one is we're able to use a higher AGI when we partner with Boulder County because the AGI is higher there.

But then does does that really help the teachers that are making 50,060 thousand dollars a year that our achievement states they wouldn't even be able to qualify at those income levels. So I would personally like this board and I've only got seven months left on here. But I would hope going forward we would concentrate maybe partnering with some of the Weld County communities, especially maybe some of the Tri Town areas to look at can we come up with a solution that maybe helps a lower income designation. And also, think that rather than trying to do everything ourselves, we have our metro district policy that may be another tool we could I know that's in there, the affordable housing thing, but maybe we could utilize a little more. Really partnering with the people that build the housing to do that.

So I kind of view money as unless it's like an enterprise fund, you know, where we have to use it for a certain thing, money is fungible. So if there's some other designation that we could move this around, I'm okay with that, trying to honor the original intentions of this. But, yeah, I I think I would go with with option five at this point.

Can I ask if I'm not sure? So

instead of depending just on Boulder County, maybe we can open it up as an RFP and see if Habitat or some others can come and build starter homes. And we can move out of the AGI part, and it, in a way, enable people to have be able to build equity in a way they can move up the ladder when it allows, and we don't have to be restricted with the Boulder County.

On the alright. I guess I'll get started with my questions. On the affordable housing side, we're gonna have a joint session with the Planning Commission to talk about a few things. Prop one, two, three is one of them, which is along those lines of affordable housing and using state funds to help us. The survey that we got back did say that affordable housing is important but they don't want us using local money.

If we can get state and federal money then that's that was supported in the survey. And so I think this conversation is not done with affordable housing. There's a lot more to be said, and I think the next opportunity will be this joint session with the Planning Commission. Alright. I wanna, just say a few words around the church because I got that whole debacle, off the ground, and I did address it at the state of the town, but so it's on the record here as well.

There are many moving pieces in Erie on things that are happening. And when Saint Scholastica approached me, they approached me because they have a piece of land on Highway 52 right next to our water treatment facility, and they wanted to get annexed into Erie up there. And there are challenges to that on sewer and water and road access and many things. And so it was at that time that this discussion was getting started with the page property. And I got thinking, well hold it.

Catholic Charities separate from the Catholic Church. It's a five zero one three c. They do affordable housing at that lower level, 32 I think it's 80% AMI. Maybe it's 60% AMI. And they do it for free if you provide the land. And so the thought was, could we get affordable housing, find a place to preserve the 125 year old church that's already in Old Town, do some type of land deal with them to get the land up at the North for Erie and then make this all work out here. They did open the pre app. And through the pre app process, how many encumbrances are there?

Think it was 54.

Yes.

I'm just trying to remember what Patrick said a long time ago.

It's a lot, right? You just think of the power lines, you think of the bridge if you want cars to go over it. You've ditches on there. So all of that, they withdrew and are now refocused up on 52 to the best of my knowledge on that. So that is how that came into the equation and then out of the equation.

Also during that time, OSTAB, our Open Space Trails Advisory Board, got involved and was looking at this and they sent us a letter basically highly encouraging us, imploring us to make this 100% open space. And about that same time, the public started to become more aware and we've been getting emails for the last couple months on this. And I would say the vast majority of those are about open space. There are a few in there to preserve the affordable housing but overall I would say it's at least 60% or 70% that is open space as the primary. And so for me, I think what I'd like to see is a number of things.

First off, zone it as open space for the whole thing. I love the Schofield analogy. The whole development around Schofield, the maker space and the barn, it's really coming together. And you could see the open space and the new trail connections connecting Erie Lake. It is a place that will be both open space but will have facilities there as well.

And so zoning it for open space, I would love to see support to direct staff to study the feasibility of using the house for either and, either or and, an interpretive center, nature center of some sort, and history center. Right now we have historical memorabilia in Erie and it gets shipped to Lafayette is my understanding. And so a lot of our history is actually leaving Erie and going to Lafayette simply because we don't have a place to put it. And so can we do something with the house to be able to create both this nature center and the historical place as well. I would love to see the trail connections come in there.

When I think about the dog park across the street, I think about Coal Creek Trail coming up. I think I think it's Cottonwood is it called the Cottonwood Ditch Trail or Cottonwood Trail? It comes out of Northridge, right? And it's on the levee that is around.

Oh, yeah. It's along the I think it's the Cottonwood Extension Ditch. But yes, you're more or less correct.

All right. And people are using that to get in.

Yeah. You're talking about the trail through the middle of Northridge? Yes. Yes, yeah. And the town maintains that.

And somehow connecting that into here so if you're on Coal Creek Trail, you can easily get up onto the Cottonwood Ditch Trail and continue around. One of the other advantages that I saw with the church was that they had a parking lot that was going to be open a lot of the time. And one of our challenges in Old Town is that we don't have enough parking. And so I thought, well if we can get affordable housing, church, blah blah blah blah, we can also help Old Town as well. When that fell apart, I got thinking about this, and if we created a trailhead basically, where you have parking so people can go there, park, and get on all these trails we're talking about.

And then, this is new to me about the retention pond. I suspect if we pave over it, then you might need a retention pond. So another piece of this that I would like to get support is direct staff to study the feasibility of a parking lot for the trailhead that can also then it's close enough to walk to Old Town. It's right next to Coal Creek Park to see whether that's feasible. And so then that comes to the money part of all this.

We've already got the TNAC funds in there and or excuse me, ARPA funds. Well, we have TNAC for half of it, basically half of it for ARPA. But the ARPA funds could be used for other government services. So since we're going to make this potentially, if we have support up here, all open space, can we use TNAC funds, of which we have a pretty good healthy budget right now? Can we use that to do the design and hopefully the construction of this nature center, historical center?

Can we use the TNAAC funds to create the parking lot for the trails system? Can we use that to oh, the last thing in here is to rehabilitate the land to whatever the state was one hundred years ago. Could we use TNAAC funds to do that as well? That way, it leaves the ARPA funds already used and paid for it and solid on that land. We don't have to worry about audits.

It's already done. And we tap into the TNAAC fund to do all of these, essentially creating I don't want to say a second Schofield because it's a different type of thing, but a similar thing in the sense it would be a destination place to go and enjoy. All right. That was a lot of words. I'd love to hear from staff if anything I said there was like, oh, no, we can't do that. Sarah, for you too, online as far as the money side of things.

So Mayor, I think a lot of those amenities that you mentioned are certainly eligible under TNF, especially since we with Trails and Natural Areas Fund, especially since voters decided to diversify that fund. I would just say that it would fall where it would fall on the priority list. We have a lot of projects that are in design or under construction. Sunset, Compass to Coal Creek Trail, Schofield is a great example. So we have a lot of projects that are encumbering some of the TNAF dollars.

So we would obviously look at that as part of an annual budget cycle. Trail connections, parking, rehabilitation, the nature history center, I think all those are acceptable uses for 14F. We'd have to go back and look at the ballot language to make sure if that falls under Parkland infrastructure or not. So I'm kind of looking over at Elliot. So just to kind of flag something maybe for us to discuss in the future. But I think for the most part, yeah, all those are feasible. It just comes down to where do they fall on the priority list of other projects that we have forecasted in our five year plan for use of the TNAF. Okay.

Oh, go ahead, Sarah.

I would also add. So if we do zone the site reserved open space, then a parking lot would actually be a special review use. That was a part of that new district requirement. So we would have to just do some extra zoning.

It's doable.

Periods for that. Yes.

I would rather make it simple now so long as we have the capability to do it in the future. And if it doesn't work out, for whatever reason, it doesn't work out.

Mayor, if you if you don't mind, I'd add on to what Luke was saying. I think as far as adding extra amenities out there, be it a museum or a natural site or whatever, just want to be careful about setting expectations that someone doesn't leave and go, oh, they're building a museum tomorrow. That's something that would really have to go into our capital budget planning, into our staffing planning. And it could be many, many years out. So I just want to set that expectation that all of that can be looked at. It's just not a snap your fingers thing and it's done tomorrow, even if you have the funding right now.

Okay. Good point. And that's why I was trying to use the word feasibility and understanding that. But I want to if I make a motion to this so that we can get further council input on it I want to be very clear on what we're doing. Maybe what I do is I go through council again and just you know comments on what I just said and any anything else and then I'll probably pause the meeting and then we'll figure out how to make a motion one way or the other. Okay. Council member Rivera?

Thank you. Yeah. So that's why I asked all those questions earlier about setting expectations for what's possible. Should this land be designated as open space and all the wonderful ideas and all the great things that could be. It just seems like we can't just drop it into our work plan and everything. I mean, that would take a lot of planning. And I I love all of those ideas. I think they're all great. I wish we could do everything. And I think back to all the kids that would come to council and tell us that I just want a park in my neighborhood in Morgan Hill and in Compass, and, I wanna be able to walk to school.

And so I you know, we have to think about trade offs, and what are we not doing if we do something else. So, keeping that in mind. I also saw in the presentation that we still have $67,000 for a feasibility study left with DIG Studios. I think we could use that. But I also am hearing from constituents that they're concerned about all the money that we're spending on studies and and things.

So I I also wanna respect that feedback and recognize that, again, we need to look at trade offs and be careful with how we're spending taxpayer dollars. And then also looking at the funds, ARPA funds are spent. They're done. We met our requirements. What I'm talking about is looking at this through a lens of these these were funds that we committed to the community.

We're going to be invested in affordable housing, and that's what I'm saying needs to go back to the affordable housing fund so that we can use those and invest those dollars into affordable housing like we promised the community we would and in in whatever way that opportunity comes forward in the future. This was very high on Ostab's list of the page property when it came available, and so it was really important to them. And so we but it was too expensive to spend. It would have wiped out, I think, the TNAF fund at the time. So we found a way to be able to acquire the land, to keep promises and expectations to the community, and to also acquire a really important piece of land to OSAP.

And so while also creating trail connections and maintaining the pond, if we can I think think we don't even know that for sure yet on the pond? I also want to set that expectation. Have we done a feasibility study on the pond? It's sound and it's staying?

We did actually do that. We looked at the structural integrity of it, and it is good.

It's staying. The owls are staying. So anyway, I just want to reiterate, it's really important that we are investing in affordable housing. That's a top priority for our community and that we're being careful and considerate of future studies. I think it's wise for us to utilize the $67,000 that we have remaining with Dick's Studios, and we can look at whether a parking lot is feasible or if the house is feasible or look at that in in future years.

But it's very important to me that we are also investing in affordable housing, and we're putting those dollars back into that fund. So I think I've iterated and reiterated. So I'll stop talking.

So let me ask a question of Sarah Hancock. If we wanted to move the money back into because of the general fund but really just designated I think for affordable housing, Can we do that with TNAC funds? I mean, here's here's the dilemma. You've got a $7,000,000 property, 3.5 roughly was paid for with TNAC funds, open space fund, and three and a half roughly paid with ARPA funds. If we use TNAC funds, which there's enough of, to purchase the whole land as open space and then to free up that $3,500,000 can we put it back in the general fund? So that's a question to you, Sarah Hancock.

Yes. Thank you. My understanding from my discussions with legal as well as Luke and I have kind of bounced this one around as well. I think that what we would have to do was to create some sort of transfer from the TNAT into the general fund specifying that it's for the purchase of a property that is partially owned through the purchase of ARPA funds. So I think it's possible.

I would just want to triple check that with Brina and Elliot to make sure that there wouldn't be any issues. But from an accounting perspective, I I don't see any reason why we couldn't essentially make that a an internal purchase and transfer. Elliot, I will look to you if I misspoke on that at all.

No. I I think you are spot on. I think we would need to look at the permissible uses and and how the funds could be shifted with with potential changes or the the dollars being allocated from what the original purpose of the purchase was versus replacing those funds with TNAC funds and shifting the ARPA dollars back to general funds just to look at SLFRF regulations.

I'll just I'll just add as well. In terms of fund balance, I could probably tell you with a fair level of confidence that team the the balance wouldn't support a a onetime transfer. I think I'd like to have a discussion with Director Hancock on setting up a payment plan over time so that we don't drain the fund, which is why we didn't do it in the first place because we didn't want to drain the fund because there are other open space acquisition opportunities out there. There's existing projects that utilize that funding. We want to make sure we get those completed.

So I think any future discussion on transferring that, I'd like to propose maybe something like a payment plan with Director Hancock and see if that would be possible and repay it over time versus a one lump sum payment so we don't drain the fund down to a low balance to where we can't do any projects acquire any other open space.

I'm trying to capture that. Hold on one second.

I also, just as the final thing, wanted to mention. I I think council member Pesmarielli had a great idea to utilize a community housing needs, not assessment, but an affordable housing advisory board. I think that that is something other communities have. And whether that's a permanent thing or just for a season, I think that's a really great way to utilize community feedback.

So good point. Let's make sure that we talk about that on the joint session. Okay, I'm going go left here so I don't miss anybody. Councillor Hoback any other comments? I'm going to take a break by the way once we get through everybody. We'll have another bite at the apple.

As to your suggestion?

Yeah. Just all the stuff I was saying, right? If there's Yeah.

I mean, when I look at the map and think about Old Town in the interest of best use of funds and staff resources. I would like to put the idea of a parking lot on a back burner. I just don't see that as being we can't just cram it in the bottom corner where it would be convenient. And I just think locating it and having it actually get used for access to the Old Town is a

stretch. Okay. Councilor Martellaro.

Yeah. So I'm fully supportive of the open space. It being all open space and that we look at ways to use the house productive, functional, community educational way, that would be great. Like I said, I've always been on the since we walked it over a year ago in March, I've I've been fully supportive of it being open space and working being on the liaison also put me I saw it from their point of view as well. I certainly was willing to look at the St.

Scholastica proposal, even though I was very pro open space, because they were going to provide 80 to 120 affordable housing units through Catholic charities. And I'm always if I have time, I always rather have more data than less data. And like you mentioned, their typical AMI is 30% to 60% or 80%, not in the 100% to 120% like we typically see. And that's based on Boulder County. And it would be no cost to the Erie residents.

They would do that. All we had to do is provide the land. So did I think this was the best location? Absolutely not. But I was still willing to to listen to their proposal because I thought that it brought value. And I think it was important information for us to hear and know. So I'm I'm glad, that they did put in, a pre application. And I'm also glad that they pulled their pre application. So, I'm, you know, in support of of what you mentioned.

Okay. Let me come to this side. Councilman Pesperani, any other thoughts?

Yeah. This question is for Sarah online.

I'm here. I'm ready.

Yeah. Sarah, so the question is if we transfer the money back to general fund, it can be used for other purposes. Right? So is there a way to create a bucket for affordable housing and then move it and lock it there? And Yeah. Make it used only for future affordable housing projects?

Yes. So what we could do is create a project for it and appropriated it much like we did on some previous funds. I think that that Sarah, our director, Normella, has has mentioned. And then we would essentially it was it's kind of informal because it would be attached to a project. It's not fully restricted the way that voter approved restrictions would be, but we would be restricting them through the appropriation into that project.

And then any movement from from that to other places would have to be approved by council through budget appropriations and transfers. So we could treat it like a a restriction on that project if that was how the council wanted to proceed in moving those funds out of TNAC and into the general fund. We could essentially earmark them with a project and have them at the ready for whatever direction the council wanted to go.

Alright. Thank you.

You're welcome.

Councilmember O'Connor. Thank you. So I've had a chance to walk the property a few times, and each time I see the vision of it being open space. I'm certainly not opposed to the idea of honoring the reason why the the funds were taken the ARPA funds were taken. I made a suggestion about a year ago and then made it again a couple months ago, and that one was deemed not viable.

But I'm certainly not opposed to that idea. But I wrote over here on the way to the meeting tonight, looked at the land again, and I just see it as a continuation of the, you know, I printed out the green open space running up through the center of town. It's a it would be a great continuation of that open space. So that's where I'm at at this point.

Okay. Peter Proton? Yeah. Thank you. Just a couple things here.

So first off, yeah, I agree that if there is a transfer back, I like the idea of doing a payment plan over time and not exhausting those funds. I guess I also throw out the question of does that necessarily need to be done right away? Or if there is I mean, we have a future identifiable affordable housing project, can we do it at that time that we if there's money allocated for that, depending on how much it is, that we could set a loan from TNAAC back into that. Don't know if that makes this any easier to do now. The thing I'm worried about is that there's a lot of moving pieces here, and I don't want to necessarily overcomplicate this.

I agree that the additional whatever was 67,000 for DIG if there is potential feasibility thing that we could allocate that for that. I don't know if that'll be sufficient funds, but at least maybe that will offset some of it. I would say as far as the parking, looking at this and again, the one thing that I would be curious about on the feasibility is that I know we did some environmental cleanup at the site. There was a lot of issues out there. The area where the outbuilding is just off Cheesman there, that area around there I think was where a lot of that was.

I would think if there is a potential parking lot that would be the place to do it. The issue that you're going run as I said before, is from the bridge at Cheesman. You can't really have that be the ingress. But what I'm wondering is for like overflow parking for events like the town fair or something like that, that possibly there's already that dirt road off from 1.5 going into that area. If maybe for a special event or like a concert in Coal Creek Park that maybe could have traffic come in there, but then have the foot traffic come out off Cheeseman into Coal Creek Park, those types of things.

And then, oh, I did have another question because there was a cell tower on the property, right? That's correct. Okay. Were we collecting revenue off that? We are. Okay.

Yes. I'd have to go back and look at what the exact amounts are. But yes, we are collecting a lease payment from that, Okay. Crown

Does that go into any particular fund?

Is it just I believe that goes to into TNAF. I can double check that. But I I think that's where we directed that those lease payments to go to.

Okay. Cool. I'm just wondering if there's maybe another fund there to kinda help out with some of this. Do you about how much do we collect out that? Do you know?

Yeah. It's somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000. But I can we can go back and look. I know exactly where the spreadsheet is, but my computer's updating right now.

So So

yeah, agree. Think best left is open space. Think we've heard from the neighbors out in Northridge and other areas too. And I think there are other opportunities we can do with affordable housing. I think as far as I I don't know if there's maybe like a a task force.

I know you said we'll probably talk about this at the joint session, so maybe it's time to do it. But I don't know that a full time advisory board would would you know, depending on how much work there was, I I could I could definitely see maybe, like, a task force that that we've done that the past with various things. So it's more ad hoc and focused. But anyway, that's my thoughts. Okay.

Let's Let's take a break until twenty to the hour. I'm working on a motion based upon the general feedback I'm hearing, but I want to run it by both of you and maybe both of you, just to make sure that what I'm saying here, you guys are like, oh, no, you can't

do that.

So we'll take a break.

I have one more question for Sarah. Sure. Sarah, if we could do a land swap opportunity, less than the impact to TNAC funds, is that a possibility to do some land swap as well if we found a a good location for affordable housing?

I know that I had previously spoken with our prior town attorney, Kendra, on the possibility of land swap. That is something we would have to explore a little bit further. We thought that it might be allowable, but much like the transfer, we just have to make sure that all of the the the code and everything behind the funds would allow something like that. So I don't wanna say definitively, but we did explore it as an option, and we can look into that further if the council would like us to.

Okay. Great. One thing I didn't mention is I met with the chamber this morning, and I brought up the parking lot. And it was one of the things that lit them up because they're always trying to figure out how do you get more parking for the businesses. And I was at Azteca last night and Omar who is one of the family members that owns Azteca, he recognized me and we got talking about the challenges of parking when there are events, specifically the farmers market.

And I mentioned that we were going to be talking about the Page property and it was also a positive discussion with the potential for a parking lot, understanding that there will be challenges if we go down that path. All right. We're going to break until twenty two, so just seven minutes here. And then if maybe I can get the four of you just for a question here. Okay.

We're gonna reconvene the meeting, and the topic is the page property and what direction would we like to give staff. So, after listening to the discussions up here and then, talking with our attorney, our, acting town manager, and our, presenters tonight, I'm I move to, number one, bring back an ordinance to the council to zone the page property as ag open space, sometime this summer. Number two, bring back in 2020 in the 2027 budget process a funding plan for ARPA funds revenue replacement for affordable housing with a payment plan from TNAAC. Number three, in 2027, assuming funding is approved in the budget, determine the feasibility of future uses that may include items such as but not limited to creating a nature center historical center, a trailhead where all trails in the area come together, and a paved or gravel parking lot for the trailhead and old town overflow parking. Do I have a second?

Second. I think councilman Mortalero beat you to that. All right. So we have a motion second. Now we can discuss this kind of overall trying to meet everybody's needs, but knowing that maybe not everybody gets everything. Councilor Behr.

First of all, I wanna thank you for trying to get everything in there. And I appreciate that you've tried to figure out a way. I don't want to to deplete the TNAF fund. That is not what I'm going for, but I'm trying to I I do think it's important for us to sort of keep our promises to the community and what are whatever that looks like so we're able to make those investments in the future for affordable housing. I I think that should be a priority.

And, you know, whether that's a payment plan or a land swap, I think we can remain open to ideas and possibilities. And then zoning for ag open space, I I think that sounds like a good idea unless there's something we haven't thought of. But I I would hope that if that ordinance comes back to council, anything we haven't thought of also comes with it. If just in case there's a use case that we would need that to be I don't know. Consider something else.

And then the feasibility for uses, hope that we would be able to use the $67,000 that we already have spent or on reserve or whatever with Stig Studios.

Alright. And while we were in the break, apparently, that money's already been put back into the general fund and is no longer obligated for that purpose. Right.

Is that it? I think I can support this motion.

Alright. Thank you.

Yeah. I'm I'm fully supportive of the motion. Again, council member. I don't want to, late the, team that fund. So payment plan, land swap, whatever we can do to, you know, move this forward and preserve the dollars, would be great. But yeah, fully supportive.

Any other comments? Councilor Repetzar? Yeah.

Let me put this there. So I'm okay with the open space and all of the other ideas, but I want to see a housing needs advisory board, which will make sure the efforts are continued. And also when when the money is transferred, if it is in a dedicated project, we will have the next steps in motion and not like start because this is something that came up in the survey, and I want to keep it moving.

Alright. And the right time to have that conversation, I think, or start that conversation is with the joint session with the Planning Commission, which is scheduled. I think it's scheduled.

Councilmember O'Connor? Thank you. Just for the residents, can you go through what ag hold open space means as a zoning designation?

So it's not ag holding. It's agriculturalopen space Sorry. Which I know because we have it's currently designated ag holding. But the agricultural open space district definition essentially allows you could have farming, grazing, growing of crops, as well as trails, recreational activities. So it gives you a lot of flexibility on how you might utilize the land.

I don't know if like gravel parking lots in it. But we will look at and make sure as we come back with the ordinance for a zoning change that we'd be able to tell you, here's what you can and can't do out of those feasibility items. But for example, Schofield Farms, that is ag open space. So you can sort of envision that you can do pretty broad amount of things on that.

And to ease a resident's concern about, how this is locked in, basically, to change it in the future, it would have to go to the residents for a vote.

So reserve open space would be the vote. I'm gonna go to our deputy

Yeah. I believe the the charter provides that and and I think it's it's a disposition of Mhmm. Property that has been reserved as open space. So I I'm pulling up the charter provision now, bear with me for one moment. But I believe the ag holding or ag open space is separate and distinct from Reserve. The reserved open space, yes.

So then if in the future, how would that if it was ever there was ever a push to convert that back from open space, how would that happen? Through this same process and not go in front of the

president? It would not be a vote. It would be a public hearing.

Okay.

So most of our property most of our open space property right now is ag open space.

Schofield is ag open space as well? Yes.

Yes, it

is. Okay. I'm good. Yeah. I'm good. Okay.

I guess my concern is that reserve space would go to a vote of the residents. Ag open space does not. So I'd like to see a reserve open space.

Yeah. And so this was part of the conversation. If we do reserve open space, we could do that. But some of these other uses may not be available to us. Is that right? I understand you.

For which zoning? We did the reserve. Yeah, the reserved open space is pretty restrictive. And that's what Sarah's looking at right now. Think it's pretty much just parking lot. But I'll let Sarah confirm that.

Scrolling through our giant table. It's open space, park, and then as I mentioned earlier, a parking lot would be a special review use. So it would have to come back through public hearing. And that is all we have in there.

So potentially we can do a nature center historical

Not on reserved open space. On ag open space, Based it does

on the 36 acres of Tahoe and ag

Yes, you could split it.

I'd like to make a friendly motion to my own motion to split the property, ag open space for the lower section and reserve excuse me, reserve for the lower section and ag open space for the top lot

acres up top. I don't know how else

to describe it. I guess that would be the east the northeast high part of the land.

All right. So I just scrolled

us to the two

open space maps. If you want to keep it pretty tight around the existing buildings,

you know, we could

do even less than what's shown in the dark green on the left.

But we could. I mean, we're not talking any of these other it seems to me the dark green, we would be okay by doing that, the ag open and the lower reserve

Well, I think depending on what your definition of of lower is. So The light green. So So the light green. So we're looking at the left image option four here. Yes. I think your ideas of an access road in a parking lot, would that be allowed in the reserved open space in that light green?

The parking lot would have to be a special review use. Regarding a road, probably an access road would be permitted.

I have

to look. We could come back, confirm if a road's allowed.

Mayor, if I might make a suggestion so we don't have to hash it out here from the dais. Yeah. You could make a motion to ask staff to bring back an open space zoning designation later this summer with a suggestion at that time of which parts of it should be kept as Ag Reserve and which should be Ag open space.

Alright. I accept that friendly amendment to my own motion that our acting town manager just made. If I have a second to that amendment. Second. Alright. Back to councilor McDonough. Got some more questions. Okay. Yeah. Go for it.

So, what other areas in Erie are reserved open space just as examples to compare this to?

None.

Okay. So k. Maybe that answers that question. Bringing back options.

I think we're to the point. So we have a a motion. We have an amendment to the motion to give you flexibility on to bring back us either ag open space or reserve open space. With that, I'll call the vote. All in favor, aye. Aye. All opposed, say no. Motion carries. Thank you. Look forward to seeing it come back to us.

Thank you. All

right. And with that, we will move on. Know we're not you see if I allow clapping for the positive things, then I got to allow it for all the not so positive things. We can all be happy, though. Okay. We're still, going here. Hold on. We still have board reports and stuff. I know some people Councilmember Pesramelli, we're still in session. And with that, I'll turn it over to council reports. Do we have anybody who would like to start tonight? You start often. You're organized. Alright. Councilman I

got it written down. I'm ready to go. This last week, I had the opportunity to go to Seattle with doctor Cog, and we were there. I think there were 20 or so of us on the trip from different municipalities and jurisdictions and county commissioners and Doctor. Cogs' staff. And we were able to go and learn about housing and transit and transportation and ride the train from Seattle out to Redmond. And it was just it was a really great trip. We learned so much. We got to interview and talk with a lot of local electeds there in the Seattle region, mayors and commissioners. And we met with their equivalent of Doctor.

Cog, which is the Puget Sound Regional Council, I believe. And then, you know, just tour around some it was just really fun to nerd out about infrastructure. And they took us through the whole planning process for removing the viaduct, which was the double decker road that was separating Seattle from kind of the waterfront in 2019. They took that down and built a tunnel underneath Seattle. It's a double decker road through a pipe, basically.

It was fascinating. Anyway, I don't think we have a viaduct or a tunnel in our future. But it was great to be there with other electeds and learn so much about the process they've been through. The legislative session ends tomorrow, and I cannot be more excited for it to be over. I'm so tired. I'm not even I just am trying to pay attention. I can't imagine how they feel. But I'm looking forward to that. And I had the opportunity to serve as the second vice chair for our legislative committee and CC4CA this session. And I think that's why I'm so tired, because we've been paying such close attention.

But that was a really great experience. If anyone in the community wants to talk to me about what I learned, please come ask me. I won't bore you now. But I wanted to mention that the Erie b is up and running, and I hope we've all had the opportunity to take it. And I'd love to hear your stories. It will be running during the town fair. So if you don't wanna deal with parking in Old Town, that's a really super great, option. You can book it from your house. It's also I think they'll have a circulator running back to the ECC parking lot. So, check out the b.

And then just wanna reiterate community awareness around the drought situation. None of us are excited to be there, but I I really appreciated the idea of coming together and voluntarily cutting back our water usage so that we can benefit as a community and really just look forward to ways. In fact, council member Hoback was telling me about how he was collecting water in the shower to water plants with. I brilliant. I love that.

What else are we doing? Like, let's come up with some great ideas. And then thanks to Luke for the or director Bollinger for the tour of Schofield. That was amazing, and can't wait for the whole community to get to do that. So thank you so much.

Keep the

good dogs on a leash.

So I'm gonna mix things up. Normally, go this way, but I'll come this way, and then we'll go all the way around. Just trying to mix it up a little bit. Go ahead, Mayor Pro

Tem. Yep. Thank you. Don't really have anything. Erie Town Fairs this weekend, so hopefully everybody may get unfortunately, I won't be there because I'm going be in Grand Junction helping my son move out of college for first semester. So but yep. Everyone's out there. Alright.

I just wanted to give a shout out to the town forestry team and the sustainability team for all of their efforts, from last week's snowstorm. And, the town forestry team is out there trimming trees, making sure that they were, first, they went over the the most hazardous areas where the trees were, like hanging over sidewalks and entrances of buildings. Sustainability team coordinated bringing in, 30 or 40 yard dumpsters. I think they brought four in at the recycling center. And what the town force told me was that, they were filling them at a rate of, one every thirty minutes.

It's probably slowed down now. But and then found out tonight, I was wondering where it was going, and apparently it is going to, going to be composted. So it doesn't go to the landfill. It gets reused. So shout out to the forestry team and the sustainability team. Nice work. Thank you for doing this for the town residents.

Alright. Councilmember Pesramelli. Yeah. Shout out to the same teams again. And councilmember Hoebeck and I went to the Schofield tour. It was amazing, and we really liked everything that's going. That's all I had. All right. Great. Thank

you. Yeah. Thank you, Luke, Director Bollinger, for the tour of Schofield.

That is going to be

a gem, a real gem. It's going to be beautiful. Makerspace is going to be ready in a couple of months. Well, probably be ready before that, and then Makerspace has to get their ducks in a row to actually have it utilized. But the entire facility is gonna be really special. Can't wait to see the finished thing. Enjoyed the pump track races on Saturday morning. I was only there for the qualifying rounds. Didn't wasn't there for the knockout rounds in the finals, but a lot of fun, especially the little kids on the Striders.

Man, those kids are fearless. And

for the last six weeks, I attended the Mountain View Fire District Fire Protection District Community Academy, learned a bit about what they do on a day to day basis. Their EMS and they're week on EMS, paramedic stuff. There was a week on hazmat, wildland fires. Got to use some of the gear and the equipment and tear apart a car with what we call the jaws of life. They call splitters or spreaders and cutters, some stuff like that. So next year, the Police Academy.

Yeah.

I'd like to echo, you know, thanks to Luke and Andrew. I I took the Schofield tour with council member, Bear this afternoon. Yeah. It's gonna be a pretty spectacular, event center, and the views off of there are incredible. Also, yeah, shout out to the staff, and everybody who helped out with the Velo Solutions pump track, qualifications.

They we they sent four women and four men qualified for the Beijing, championships. And, first place of each elite category got a all expense paid, trip, to to Beijing. So, so pretty pretty impressive. This second year that they came here, we're the only repeat in recent history that they've come to. So, yeah, it's pretty exciting. Awesome. All right. I'll wrap it up.

So Western disposal and everything you said with the bins. We had a lot of tree damage at our house. It's 28 years old, beautiful trees. Ash trees got especially hit hard in our neighborhood. Three loads, on my trailer, down there. And every time I was down there well, the first time was Friday. It was pretty calm. Saturday, though, was down there. And every time I was there, they were taking a bin and putting a new bin down. So somebody was on top of it. So I appreciate that. The Police Academy 2002, I think, is when I went through. And I I think you were here or close to it. I'm looking at our police.

But It has

changed a lot.

It has changed. I should go back through it. Maybe. Alright. And then the last thing is, the name change for Erie Parkway. For those that know that Erie Parkway goes all the way to I 25, but it stops, pretty, I don't know, maybe less than a quarter mile shy of 287. Meredith, told me, I think yesterday, that the paperwork will be in on May 25, but that is Memorial Day. So hopefully, they'll take it on the twenty

twenty sixth.