Finance & Services Committee - Regular Meeting

Welcome back to this biweekly meeting of the Budget and Policy Committee of Denver City Council. Join us for the discussion as the Budget and Policy Committee starts now.

Hi, everyone. I'm all reading for you now. It's like I need readers. Good afternoon. Happy Monday, March 23. Welcome to budget and policy. I think we have two really great briefings before us this afternoon. And before we get started, let's go to announcements on my right.

Kevin Flynn, Southwest Denver District 2.

Jamie Torres, West Denver District 3. Amanda Sawyer, District 5. Senator Gonzalez Gutierrez, one of

your council members at large.

Paul Cashman, South Denver District 6.

Sarah Purdy, your other council member at large.

Darrell Watson, fine district nine.

Laura Alvidrez, lucky district nine.

Alright. So

I'm going to pass it. The first question we have is the our no ordinance community engagement update and I'll pass it to all of our mighty fine council aides. Floor is yours.

Thank you. Do the council members wanna make any remarks before we get started? Well,

we'll have you guys introduce yourselves before you start with the presentation, but I just wanna thank all the work that that you all have done in collaboration with Radian. It's been a long, long haul. It's been probably over a year now at this point since we started this journey. And so I think we've learned a lot of really good information, and hopeful that the recommendations and outcomes that we'll be seeing from this.

Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. What she said, I want to thank the team. In addition, Claire Kelly, one of my aides who's with us as well, won't be presenting today.

They've really set a new high bar for where true community engagement amounts to fifty, sixty events and and in person forums they've engaged in, gathered over 1,100 survey responses. It really is shows where you need to go if you're serious about finding out what the community has to say. So with that, do introduce yourselves and take it away.

Hi, everyone. Masha Lior, senior council aide for councilman Cashman.

Senior council aide for councilwoman Gonzales Gutierrez.

Elise Bob, chief of staff for councilman Paul Cashman.

Senior aide for councilman Gonzalez Gutierrez, and then as the councilman mentioned, senior aide for his office. Claire Kelly is in the audience today. So thank you again for joining us. We also wanna give a shout out to Radian who have partnered with us on this project. They were involved in all the phases of engagement and also collaborated with our offices to write the report.

So we'll go ahead and get started. So here's a look at today's agenda. We're gonna look into the purpose of our project, look at a timeline of our efforts, and do a quick interview sorry. A quick overview of the report, look at the community informed considerations that derive from all of our engagement work, look at next steps, and leave time at the end for any questions and discussions. Our goal is to reform the r and o ordinance, but before we do that, we wanted to engage with a wide spectrum of community from RNO members to people who don't normally engage with RNOs and local government.

We wanted the community's feedback to inform us on any proposed changes we would make to this ordinance. And through this throughout this entire process, we have co designing any potential new policy with community. So the next couple slides are the timeline of all the work that we've done so far. We presented this at mayor's council. So for the sake of time, I'm not gonna go over everything but we can go back to this slide if you all need that at the very end.

So as you can see and as the councilman had mentioned, this project started about a year ago, March. In this next slide you can see where we are today in the process. We spent the last three months writing and finalizing the report and presenting at mayor council in February. Later on in this presentation you'll see a timeline for what our next steps are. Here's a look at our report that we published on Thursday and is now available for the public to read. I sent an email to all of you all and your aides on Thursday as well and I hope you all had a chance to give it a look before today. And if not, then you'll get a pretty good overview of what it's about. So I'll go ahead and pass it on to Moshe. So

just to jump into the report, this is we start off with an overview, and we wanted to really define what policy co design is at the beginning. And so policy co design enables people affected by a policy to shape it from the beginning. The community knowledge, lived experience, and civic insight actively inform policy development. That was a big priority for us throughout this whole project. The initiative also employed a citywide multi phase engagement strategy that was grounded in public participation frameworks.

Residents, R and O members and leaders, city staff, community partners, we all collaborated with them to identify the challenges and opportunities within the current R and O framework and to explore ideas for strengthening transparency, accessibility, accountability, and support for neighborhood participation in city governance. Then we jump into a section where we really encourage folks to get a better understanding of registered neighborhood organizations. So we provide an outline of the existing ordinance as well as a high level summary of some previous reports and studies that have to do with RNOs and community engagement at large with the city. Those studies include the 2020 RNO survey, survey and analysis commissioned by council member Cashman, the 2023 study on improving community engagement and constituent services, and the 2024 urban leaders fellowship report. Then we jump into looking at the community outreach and engagement approach for the Your City, Your Voice project, and a lot of this is going to sound really familiar.

We really grounded our community engagement and outreach in equity and policy co design principles, So that included creating a toolkit that we shared across all social media platforms sent through newsletters within the council offices, but also the Your City, Your Voice newsletter list. We distributed information and the survey to libraries, rec centers, community hubs, different businesses across the city, translated the survey and our project materials into Denver's top five languages. We attended over 40 in person outreach events throughout the summer and the fall, and those were really to encourage folks to participate in the survey. We held five community conversations and two R and O specific meetings, and so that map is a showcase of where we were physically in the city.

The next section in the report is the community participation section. This is the largest section of the report. This is where we listen to community, where we present all the findings from all of our outreach and feedback from the community. Fun fact, we listened so much that Claire Kelly got an ear infection, which is why he's not presenting today. So we need proof to be fast enough there.

I won't quit my day job. So these are the four ways that we Sorry. Got this feedback. It was the survey findings, the neighborhood engagement workshops, the neighborhood registered neighborhood organization focus groups, and then perspectives from city departments and external partners. Here is an example of how we represent the data in the report. Apologies. You might see that the color scheme of the map does not match the legend of the map. We are fixing that. That was an oversight. So deepest apologies.

That will be fixed soon, and the report will be amended. But this gives you an idea of how many folks in each neighborhood responded to the survey. This question was, in which neighborhood do you live in? This next one is a pie chart. This was another example of how we represented data collected from the survey. If you recall, our survey had four sort of choose your adventure type navigations. These are reflected here with segments a through d. A is residents with no awareness of RNOs, b with some awareness of RNOs. C is RNO members. D, RNO leaders.

This chart represents the number of respondents and how they identified with those four segments. This is another chart that we use to represent the survey data. This question asks, how would you rate your current feelings about RNOs? We grouped the segments together and represented them together in one chart to allow for comparison between segments. Segment a is not reflected in this chart because normally when one does not have one does not have an opinion of a topic if they're unfamiliar with it, and that is what segment a is, people unfamiliar with RNOs.

As for the rest, we see that residents with awareness of RNOs members are trending neutral to positive, and RNO leaders have trended very positive.

Okay. Now we're jumping into each of these segments, starting with residents that have no awareness of RNOs. The key themes were people expressed their personal views on citywide politics and policies. They desire infrastructure improvements, flagged safety concerns, and had a strong desire to support and participate in their community. I'm gonna read an example, and that is the middle one.

It's not really clear to me what value an RNO has. It'd be concerned that it would be just another token organization that politicians don't pay attention to until they want help or support. For that reason, I'd be hesitant to be involved until I saw and understood its effectiveness. Now we're going to the residents with awareness of RNOs. Some key themes are the RNO effectiveness, representation, engagement, city responsiveness, and neighborhood conditions.

Some concerns about RNOs being composed by retired affluent homeowners, relying on RNO members who don't have that much awareness of city processes due to the lack of responsiveness from city departments. An example here is someone that said, I live as a young woman of color in a neighborhood, and I don't feel like RNOs are welcoming. My perspective is often dismissed. Next, we go to the members of RNOs. Some mentioned areas of improvement are broader and more diverse participation, better communication and information sharing, city support and resources, and a stronger leadership and governance.

An example is better and bilingual communication with all residents. It seems that many residents, including long time, don't even know about r and o or its or its meetings. R and o board members are newer white residents, not representative of neighborhood makeup. Finally, we go to the r and o leadership section where some of the common priorities were increased membership, volunteers, and and board participation, improving outreach and engagement, enhancing diversity and representation of the neighborhoods, and have city support, meaning having guidance and liaison access. An example here is reaching neighbors to get involved.

In a large neighborhood, it is extremely challenging to engage many, anyone.

So those were some findings from the survey. Next, we're going to jump into the findings from the other community engagement efforts that we held. So between September 10 and October 29, we held four in person and one virtual two hour neighborhood engagement workshops where approximately 140 residents participated. Those are just some pictures from those workshops. But we talked with throughout all of these different workshops, we've talked a lot about the low awareness and confusion about RNOs, the communication and outreach challenges that RNOs have, a disconnect between city government and neighborhoods, the resources, funding, and support needs that RNOs have, participation and motivation, how to engage with your community.

So we heard very common themes from the survey and these in person conversations.

The third community participation method that we used was the R and O focus groups. Here's some insights from those. So Radian hosted two virtual sessions to gain feedback from our members. These focus groups began to build on some of the feedback we received from the survey and the neighborhood engagement sessions. City council members and their staff were not present for these sessions as we wanted to ensure that r and o members felt they could speak freely and honestly about their experiences.

Some of the themes that came up are communication with the city, representation and inclusion, governance, accountability, and structure, resources and support, awareness, and identity. And we've summed up the key takeaways here as participants identified needed changes and most frequently cited resources and support followed closely by clear communication and accountability from the city. Many expressed a desire for deeper ongoing involvement of RNO members and leaders in drafting ordinance updates. Participants repeatedly emphasized the value of RNOs as spaces for neighbors. The final community engagement tactic was the perspectives from city departments and external partners.

This is the list of city departments and external external partners that we interviewed. Some of these city departments are actually, all of them and more are listed in the notification chart within the r n o ordinance. We felt this was an additional perspective we needed to hear from since these entities often work with, reach out to, and hear from RNOs. 24 themes were identified, and much of what we learned echoed what we heard from community, which was a a nice surprise.

Okay. Now we're going to the section where we're gonna share the community informed considerations. And overall, we learned that people want RNOs to to remain community driven, but be better connected, supportive, and more inclusive in their communities. And there was a general agreement that the RNO system is valuable but very outdated. These are the five considerations.

We're gonna jump into each of them individually, but for now, identity and framework, membership, governance, and recognition standards, outreach and communication infrastructure, training, funding, equity support, and neighborhood liaisons, and accountability and collaborative conflict resolution. Alright.

So to jump into the identity and framework, the way that we're gonna kinda talk about these community informed considerations is to look at what we heard our desired outcomes and then the proposed approach for each of these. So what we heard overall from all of these engagement strategies is that, due to RNOs being housed in community planning development, many residents view them as resources only for taking positions on rezonings when that is not the original intent of the RNO system. Residents who are not familiar with RNOs often confuse them with homeowners associations, general improvement districts, business improvement districts, other groups, which also limits participation in R and Os. In the current ordinance, overlapping boundaries are discouraged, but they do exist. Overlapping boundaries further contribute to confusion, questions about neighborhood identity or the intent of the organization, and low participation or membership.

The desired outcome from these community informed considerations include greater clarity, reduced conflict, stronger legitimacy, improved coordination, and more equitable participation. So here are the proposed approaches for this community informed consideration. The first one is reposition and rename. So transitioning the RNOs from community planning and development to the newly created division of community empowerment within the Human Rights and Community Partnerships office, as well as renaming registered neighborhood organizations to better reflect their role in neighborhoods. Clarifying the purpose of RNOs and defining them as representative bodies of neighborhood residents, not stand alone advocacy groups.

Also clearly distinguishing them from those HOAs and business improvement districts and so on. Then we also talk about establishing a capacity based framework. So that could include creating a flexible, non hierarchical R and O categories that reflect varying goals and capacity levels of organizations, but still really establishing that community building is the foundation of this system. Then we jump into the boundaries. So we heard that there could be a long term goal of eliminating overlapping or no boundaries through a phased transparent process that also engages community throughout.

The inconsistency among RNOs for membership and governance exists. There's a lack of transparency and understanding to from the community that they represent. Some of the desired outcomes, we can sum it up with greater accountability, reduced conflict, stronger public trust, and more consistent citywide representation. Proposed approaches, I'll just highlight a few, require RNOs to maintain documentation, establish baseline election standards, and creating city support for these approaches. The third consideration was outreach and communication infrastructure.

We heard that residents often do not know who their neighborhood organization is or what they are. There's no centralized user friendly space where either community members or or RNOs can find all city information that they need. And communication between the city and RNOs is inconsistent. Sometimes there's unclear messaging or language is too technical, and it's hard for them to impart that to them. Desired outcomes on this one is greater public awareness, improved participation, reduced miscommunication, reduced miscommunication and stronger alignment between the city and neighborhood organizations.

And the proposed approaches on these are to launch a citywide awareness and access strategy just to let people know what RNOs is. Basically, educate the residents of Denver. Build a centralized infrastructure, which is definitely partnering with the city to build upon that, creating citywide notification system, which is already in the works that any resident can access, not just RNOs, and then standardize city notices. So we want to make sure that all the city notifications are communicated, use plain language, they're accessible. If it's a topic that's hard to understand, there's ways where they can learn about that topic or learn how to navigate through what is being asked of them.

The fourth is training, funding, equity supports, and neighborhood liaisons. What we heard is that RNOs are volunteer led and don't receive much support, funding, training, or resources from the city. Some neighbor neighbors can't join due to daily life barriers such as lack of childcare, language access, or digital accessibility among others, and the lack of support with troubleshooting and relationship building. For this, the desired outcomes are essentially for RNOs to play an essential role, and expectations must be matched with the resources and support. With that comes training, equitable funding, direct support, and stronger relationship with the city, potentially through liaison, which leads me to the proposed approach.

Some of them some highlights are creating and managing trainings such as equity and inclusion, outreach and engagement, and CD one zero one among others. Onboarding training for new board members have a toolkit that provides guidelines and templates to make their engagement easier, administer a centralized grant based funding program and offering stipends, coordinating coordinating and funding translation and interpretation, hybrid engagement options among other things that would make being a member more accessible, and having a team of dedicated people within the division of community empowerment to support RNOs and build trust. The fifth and last and last one is accountability and collaborative conflict resolution. What we heard is that there is no clear pathway to raise concerns about governance, representation, and engagement with the city. They also flagged dispute and sorry.

Sorry. Another piece is, like, dispute and conflict management, which sometimes lead to the creation of new r and o's causing more confusion. If you move to a neighborhood, you wanna join an r and o, you look it up, and you see that there's three that you could be a part of. You don't know which why there's different groups which one to join. Some people feel like there are no gatekeep information and decision making opportunities.

Current accountability mechanisms are unclear and can feel punitive rather than supportive. And with that, some of the desired outcomes are greater transparency, less conflict, clear boundaries, and a stronger collaboration alongside clear grievance and mediation systems. The proposed approach for this is to establish an accountability process by having a clear process for residents to raise any sort of concerns and have an incentive based accountability process rather than punitive enforcement, and provide mediation and conflict resolution by encouraging and supporting RNOs in developing their own community agreements, which promotes proactive conflict resolution when they all sit on a table and come together with the rules they wanna be in the same space under. Also, city supported mediation and conflict resolution and provide grants technical assistance to encourage collaboration. The report also has an appendix, and that's where you can find all the additional information, all the reports, the data.

Anything and everything you can think of should be in there.

Alright. So part of our next step is to continue to gather community feedback, specifically on the community informed considerations. So these are some we're doing four in person again and one virtual, hoping to, again, hit, like, all four corners of the city, and then anyone who can't participate in person, hopefully, can participate virtually. So we'll be definitely sharing this out and asking you all to share this out with your communities as well. And then we also have an online form for people to engage with community informed consideration and provide feedback, on their own time.

This will be launched this week, we'll have it stay open through April. So, again, we're bringing the report and the community informed considerations back to community to continue to gather feedback. That will help us draft any policy changes, which will happen in April, May. So we'll offer briefings to council members and circle back with city agencies and departments as well. And then, fingers crossed, bring this ordinance through the council process late spring,

early summer. Thank you so much for listening to us. Welcome. We have

let me put okay. So I'm gonna go in order. I have council member Flynn Sawyer, Alvidrez, Pertur Romero Campbell, Parody Torres. Am I missing anyone? Alright. Council member Flynn, take it away.

Thank you, madam president. First, I have an in person meeting downtown on the sixteenth that doesn't end until six. Is it possible to push back your Southwest for a half hour so that I can be there at the beginning, 06:30? The College View RNO typically starts their meeting at 06:30 to begin with.

Yeah. I'll get to that.

Well, we we have started advertising this. I will say the format of these feedback meetings are gonna be more open house. There's not going to be, you know, a presentation. It will be we'll have boards with all the recommendations and have people be able to ask questions or comment or highlight what they like, but we can can definitely talk about that.

Understood. But I'd still like to be there Yeah. At the beginning. How how have you started promoting it? Because I haven't seen anything yet if it's not too late.

We sent it out through the Your City, Your Voice newsletter list. And then a few community members and RNOs that have been asking us for updates, we've sent it out to them as well. But maybe we can extend I'd

like to request that one adjustment. Okay. It it shouldn't be too hard to send it out to the list again that this one's Well,

we'll just

make it a half an hour longer.

Don't wanna be there at the beginning. I was at I was at an r and o on Saturday in Marley Brentwood and they had a great presentation from the green infrastructure team because there's a fabulous project that's been in the works for about eight years that's finally getting underway and is very well received. So I really like that engagement with different city agencies. It's not all just zoning and and stuff like that. I'm not sure how I feel yet about the geographic boundaries and not allowing overlapping.

In one sense, I don't. I wish we didn't do that. But in another sense, I see that creating some problems, and that is, for instance, Harvey Park, RNO. I believe they ex their boundaries include Harvey Park and Harvey Park South, but not, thankfully, not the Brentwood side between Lowell and and Federal. And but there's a lot of confusion because the city calls it all Harvey Park even though on Federal it's Brentwood, totally different neighborhood, totally different needs.

And to the point that Hipco, Harvey Park Community Organization, actually had some board members who didn't live in Harvey Park, they lived in Brentwood, and they were in the South Marley Brentwood RNL. But within the Harvey Park greater registered neighborhood organization boundaries are neighborhoods that have their also have registered and are unique or not unique, they are different than Harvey Park. There's Green Meadows, totally isolated on the Jefferson County side of Federal of Sheridan behind the old Target store. Feel very isolated. They're cut off from even from Lakewood because Lakewood won't allow our streets to connect to theirs.

And there's Dartmouth Heights R R And 0, the Lake Ridge Association R and O, and and a couple others aren't coming spring to mind right away. So I'd like to find a way maybe if maybe the Harvey Park R excludes the Green Meadows and the Dartmouth Heights and the Lake Ridge from their boundaries so that they have their own because they definitely would feel lost within the greater Harvey Park group.

Can I respond to that, Madam Yeah? It's a great point and what you see in the work they've done, it talks about things we can do right now, things we can do in the near term, things that need to get done down the road. And that's kind of a down the road discussion because as I I consider and and debate with you the reasons why having it match with with the statistical neighborhood boundaries makes sense, but there's, as as you said, other points valid as you're making. But that's not something that's gonna get done or even discussed immediately.

Right. Well, thank you. Yeah. The because the statistical neighborhood boundaries are so arbitrary in in where I live. For instance, I belong to Grand Ranch. My neighbor has no Okay. Thing in common with Grand Ranch. I I think that's all I had. Thank you.

Thank you. Next up, we have councilman Shire. Thanks, madam president.

Thanks, you guys. Great job on this. That was a ton of information that you pulled together into something that was totally understandable. I a couple of pieces of feedback. So, the first one I would say, I I think I am glad that you are moving kind of the boundary conversation to a long term conversation because there are most people don't understand statistical neighborhoods, and they don't consider themselves a resident of their statistical neighborhood.

They consider themselves a resident of their neighborhood. And I think that it would be very counterproductive to change that. So I think that, you know, statistical neighborhoods exist to track data since the nineteen seventies over time without changing those boundaries so that the data remains the same. And that makes a lot of sense. I totally get it.

But I do think our residents identify as living in their neighborhood, and that is a part of who they are. And it's a part of why even they chose to, you know, purchase the home or rent the apartment in the location where they do. And so changing that to a structure that, like, works better for us, I think, is a bad idea. So I feel like let's push that one down the road a little bit. The biggest issues that we run into in our RNOs, you guys didn't touch here.

You touch a little bit on the, in the report, but it's more around two sets of things. So the first one is, the struggle to get volunteers to actually do the work and the struggle to understand, and have,

like, a a

standard framework for how RNOs run. So you guys talk about it a little bit here, but I do think that that is something like, that's the kind of number one thing that we see all the time in District 5 because we have some RNOs who are just like a group of friends and they get together with their glass of wine and they chat about things going on in the neighborhood and it's great. There are other RNOs that are very formalized but maybe don't use Robert's rules of order, you know, those different kinds of things. And so when there's a disagreement, the first thing the disagreeing party does is come in and say, well, you didn't ask the right questions of the right people and determine it in the right way to, like, be able to take a position as a registered neighborhood organization with the city. So I think that is like a piece of, like, these are volunteers.

They have a limited amount of time, and, you know, what they wanna do is make their neighborhood a wonderful place to live. But the, like, formal business side of things makes that really hard to do without additional support. So I hope that that is, like, in the first kind of bucket of stuff to be addressed. The second thing we see a lot, and I didn't see them on your community partners list, but I might have just missed it, is around events. So our office of special events has been moved into arts and venues now.

Great. Our office of special events was extraordinary difficult extraordinarily difficult to work with. They created the rules that they functioned under for festivals. Right? Street festivals, very large events.

The problem is that they were then very inflexible about moving some of those rules or relaxing some of those rules for small neighborhood events. So if you were having a movie in the park as a neighborhood association, you had to you know, that where kids would, like, bike around. That meant there were two agencies involved, and then the office of special events would get involved, and they just burnt it all down to the point where, like, in my neighborhoods, we used to have multiple neighborhoods doing multiple things, hosting multiple events every year, and it was so difficult and so unrealistic to do it between the trash regulations and the AED regulations and the road closure regulations and the money that it costs and all the things, they just stop doing them. Like, we as a city have literally forced our neighborhood organizations, our volunteers who want to just create a lovely community into a space where they aren't even willing to do it anymore because it's so difficult to do. So I think that piece is like needs to be at the front of the list, to address because otherwise, like, once they get out of the habit of doing these events, volunteers fade away, they start focusing on other things, they disappear, and the events stop and they don't come back.

And that is a 100% what we are seeing right now. So I do think I would say, like, awesome job. I would love for you guys to focus on those things, in the first bucket of short term things that you're gonna fix because we need to we need to fix those. The last piece, I would say did you wanna say something to that first?

To the previous point? Yeah. Go ahead. Regular business. Okay. That that ideally would be covered under the fourth consideration, the training funding equity supports and neighborhood liaison. Okay. The trainings ideally would guide people to say, this is how we we want our notes to function as Like, this is the regular business that you would conduct, and this is how you would engage everyone in the process. Like, ideally, all those trainings would be a resource for our NO board members to support everyone in their community and have, like, more structure in all Arnolds while they still have some independence to run the Arnolds the way the neighborhood wants to run it. So it's like a balance.

Yeah. I think it'll be interesting to see how that balance shakes out because at the end of the day what happens is they're maybe not gonna spend twenty minutes watching a training. They're gonna call the council office. Like, you know, because they're volunteers. They have short no one's paying them, and they have a very short period of everybody has to work in order to live in Denver. So it's not like the nineteen seventies when our r and o ordinance was written where there was a stay at home mom who volunteered and, you know, like, it's just a very different world that we live in now. So

Just to add a little bit to that, a part of that would be to have stipends for like, if you take the trainings, like, these are the stipends to also compensate for people's sins. So yeah. That's that's, like, built into the report. I know finances are tricky right now. It's in the report. We'll see where that leads in the future.

Awesome. No. I really appreciate that. And then the last thing is the requirement that there be at least an annual meeting and a vote every year. So it's written into our ordinance. It is something that a lot of our neighborhood organizations struggle with, especially the vote part where you get to the part where they don't do the vote right and then somebody else who doesn't want to be in the r and o or under the leadership of the person who got the vote because they had all their friends come out or whatever. Like, it gets true story.

Happens in your district too. Right? So

that happened. So I feel like there's a there's just a we have to find a better way to I mean, there has to be some trigger. Right? Everybody just can't be like, we're an RNO now. There has to be some sort of way to make a determination about who is a formal RNO and and how they qualify. I just think that I didn't see a ton about, like, kind of the feedback on that in there. And, again, maybe I just missed it.

It's in there.

But I yeah. That one, I think, is a really, like, a tough one that we need to address kind of right up at the beginning, especially if you're gonna rewrite the ordinance because it's in the ordinance right now.

So thanks. Thank you.

Awesome. Next up we have I just wanna do a time check. Council member Flynn and Parity, do you need forty five minutes?

No. I think Okay. Forty two.

Okay. A little over. Council member Alvidrez?

In gracious

Thank

you so much. Thank you all for your work on this and all of the information. I will share what I what I did share in mayor council which is just disappointing to see some lower. I mean, the map really represents on page slide 14 where people already come out and speak out and where people don't and to see that continue is disappointing. So like Baker's super active, super dark, lots of turnout, lots of responses.

I see College View, not District 7, but close to got not like nothing, NA. Ruby Hill, one to six, know, Overland, one to six, and Overland has three RNOs now. And so the need for figuring that out, like I'd love to have support in figuring out what do we do now. The third one just started. There's been a lot of conflict there and I'm excited to see solutions to these issues.

I think it's very hard to have an R and I admire the R and O presidents in my district because they they are they are facing challenges right now because quite frankly, the administration isn't doing the leadership or engagement that they need to be doing. You know, I know you all go to the r and o meetings. I go to the r and o meetings. The mayor's office isn't there. The decision makers aren't there.

And so when I have Overland which has the tiny home village, has urban peak shelter for youth, which has the second chance center and each neighborhood and people that live next to it feel one way, people that live a few blocks away from it feel another, and then there's other problems like the playground got burned down at the playground in Overland and doesn't sound like it is ever gonna get replaced. I'm not sure. And so I I'm really excited about this because of the partnership and the care for the issues that we're having with these RNOs and I worry about their safety and I have worried about their safety. They've gotten threats, Some of these are no leaders and I mean that's something we sign up for not something I expect the neighborhood person to sign up for. So I'd like to see like some of this participation, you know, evolve over time where we are hitting those more of those people that aren't involved in their r and o, more of those neighborhoods that are not having struck that are struggling and I've talked to my neighborhood, Athmar Park has always struggled to get engagement from non English speakers which is a high immigrant neighborhood and this sounds great like being able to provide translation at all the events.

I think providing food is huge. Excited about the ability to pay people for their time. I think requiring maybe some turn over could be something that you all could look at. I didn't see that on any other notes, but I think when you have the same r and o leader for twenty years, God bless them for wanting to do it for that long, but also it does it does create a silo effect where it is like one voice or one community. And I and I will say I relate to the going to your R and O and your concerns not being addressed because some of my neighborhoods are very diverse where you have people that have a high quality of life that don't see problems with access to food that are gonna complain about certain things that they see are important and you have people that have real life issues like they're about to get evicted that don't have access to food or transportation.

And and those concerns, a lot of the ardentally just may not relate to them. So I I would share that as a hope, a wish to see more equitable distribution in the feedback. And then one of the comments that was made, I appreciate the grant too because I'm hoping that would lead to an you said equitable funding, so I'm sure it means like lower income neighborhoods might get some more support because, for example, in my district, West Wash Park wants a bunch of money so they could do three mailed newsletters this year. Whereas, many other neighborhoods don't have the capability of mailing a newsletter ever. So curious how we can help balance that and grateful for the work together.

One of the things that was mentioned is stronger alignment with RNOs and the city, and I was confused on what does that mean.

First, thank you for those comments. And to your first comment, we would love to pick your brain or partner with you if you could connect us with those communities that haven't been represented in the previous round of engagement. We tried our best to, you know, get to to every neighborhood. We weren't quite successful with that, but every area. But, you know, that's why we we reached out to all the council offices asking for any event. So let us know. We are happy to, like, engage in some way and and walk people through it.

I'll just say low income neighborhoods don't have a lot of events. So that's also part of the struggle. I think what my office has found is door knocking has been the best, but I'm happy to sit down and have a conversation about that.

Great. Yeah. And I I to that point, I think one of the the the issues that we kept on being confronted with was we were trying to find solutions for a problem while hitting up against those struggles as we were doing it, if that makes sense of, you know, how do we reach every single building in Denver? I don't think anybody working for the city knows how to do that. To to the alignment piece that that you asked about, it there seems to be confusion with on a variety of of levels.

So it could be what the purpose of RNOs are, what notifications mean, what the city expects for feedback from RNOs on a certain notification, like the license for marijuana. Confusion from we we heard this a lot from folks. You know, Dottie goes out, gets community input. They come back. They start doing the work, and then people ask, well, this is not what we thought was gonna happen.

I think there's some really relevant examples right now that the city are are trying to struggle through. So it's that it's it's that sort of alignment. There's a lot of different levels of alignment that that just they were not meeting community members. And not meeting them in the sense of the way that they view things, their perspective. They might interpret something differently than the city.

So I think as a city, we need to meet people where they're at and we need to figure out a way to engage them with how they understand a certain issue. This also came up when we were talking to the mayor's youth commission. They basically basically said said in in very in a very kind way, you are failing, know, communicating with the youth of Denver. The ways that you guys, you know, try to connect with is not working. We don't know, like, what you guys are doing. So there's a lot of and and that's across the board, city council included. I think we can all do a lot better job.

Thank you. Thank you, committee chair. Yep. Council President. Meeting set, Pro Temera Kemble.

Thank you. Thank you for the presentation and to the council members that have been working on this. I just appreciate that we are having this conversation because for many reasons, statistical neighborhoods in Southeast Denver are there. People don't always know what neighborhood they live in. Things are often you talk to five different people, they give you five different names of the place where they live.

Sometimes it's even just the builder for those neighborhoods. Being able to identify and have that sense of place, I think, is an ongoing challenge. So what I do I think there are a lot of things in the report and what you shared that are also very confirming for the RNOs that we do have that exist. For folks who have been leading those and new voices at the table, it's really difficult to get more and new voices in. And so however a process happens for the elections and the communication or whatever standard that's put out there, I think that that would be really helpful for some of the RNOs.

In Southeast Denver we have a

lot of

HOAs, and so HOAs often get confused with RNOs, and there are groups that are very robust that are HOAs, but because they're not RNOs they don't get that information about the zoning, about different city issues. They're not on the approved list of who people need to reach out to. So any thoughts that you have of being able to bridge that for RNOs and HOAs would be incredibly helpful in Southeast Denver. That statement, I don't know, you'd look like you were

going to say

something too, but

That is something, setting up notifications for people that want to register and know what's happening. We're working through it.

Okay. That's great. So I'm glad that you guys are looking into that. And in the map that was shown, it was more of, like, who responded? And you talked about overlapping boundaries. I would be curious as to what neighborhoods or parts of the city are what we're seeing for who isn't represented. Like, where do we have those gaps? Because I can think of some in, you know, in my district of places that don't have any representation. Or, you know, an R and O said, hey, you know, they kind of pulled in people, but they don't know that they're part of that R and O. So do you have any thoughts or have you guys looked into that?

Are you talking about sorry. I want clarification. Are you talking about where we received responses to that,

or are talking about where RNOs currently exist? Where RNOs currently exist, what I understood was that there are some RNO boundaries that overlap, but I would be curious. I can think of strips or places within my district where I know they're not represented by an HOA or an R and O. I don't

think we have a of that.

Yeah, I don't think we have a map of that either, but I just wanna highlight, if if any of you that read this report and and especially reading the considerations portion have any ideas of how to start affecting

Mhmm.

These ideas. These are not policy recommendations. That's the next step, and we look to all of you as thought partners in that process. Process. So if you do start reading through these considerations and start thinking of, oh, this is a really this this is how this could translate into policy reform or something to add to to the ordinance, would love to hear it. Just wanna reiterate that that these are not final policy recommendations. This is just what we've heard from community, and we need to start, you know, moving these into that

realm. Great.

I don't have any other questions, but I appreciate the offer to think about specifically like the HOAs and where we don't have any representation, because statistical neighborhood thing is real, and it's a real challenge that we have happening in Southeast Denver. But thank you, Gal, for your work. Appreciate it.

There's just one comment I'll make on that front, that the intention behind gathering the feedback from not only people who are involved in RNOs, we were very intentional making sure that we heard from community members who have never even heard of an RNO, who have never been a part of them. So we might have captured some of that in from those folks, and think I it was, like, 29%, it said, right, that had never been part of an r and o. And so I feel like that's a pretty big amount of large amount of people that, you know, percentage wise of the whole that we did get feedback on, like, why in you know, some of those questions were, like, you know, what are the barriers? What keeps you from being involved? Or, you know, how do you just their their knowledge of what an R and O is.

And that is that helped kind of guide, you know, the information that we've received and then is gonna guide what we can see as possible outcomes of that in policy. There was some of that captured, I think it's noted, and so we can see what we can find out. Great. Remind me,

in the questions that were asked, did you ask people to identify whether they are homeowners or renters? Okay. Thank you.

Alright. We have six minutes and we have still like five people in the queue. So if you could if you have thoughts on like, I believe heard engagement several times, if you could reach out to the council members to keep that. Because I know I'm having you at my R and O dinner. Right? So council member Parody, Watson, and then council member Parody, Torres Watson, and myself. Councilmember Parody?

I cannot ask questions because a lot of them are covered and just say thank you.

That's it. Thank you. Councilmember Torres?

Thank you so much. Good job, everyone. I know I saw you a lot in events in District 3, so thank you for coming out. Just a few things I think that I want to bring up, because I think it is what you're aiming to do is trying to bring order to what feels like is a lot of chaos, right? And I think it's really hard to figure out where does a line exist between true neighborhood autonomy and being able to drive your own direction and it being way too closely associated or run by a government agency.

And that's a hard balance sometimes. So I appreciate trying to figure that out. What I am wondering, I don't know if it's in the report, is there any, like, an asset based assessment of RNOs where folks feel like, I feel like my RNO does a great job, or here's positive experience when it comes to grants management, things like that. Because I know a lot of our RNOs end up becoming nonprofits, basically, so they can get money in and just manage finances in a lot of ways. So I don't know if that's a trend of a successful or an efficient running nonprofit no.

But if it is, it creates a different kind of relationship, too, with governance. But I also feel like the RNOs in my district, those who do not have that, are better able to meet some of the demands and the need than others who do not. Just an observation. But I am interested in did you come across any folks that said, here's I think what we do well, especially R and O interviews. The other is there's a lot in here about things that should

be

funded. Were you implying should be funded by the city or just in general should be funded or should have

funding? Yeah. I think when you look at funding and support, sometimes the the lines get really blurred and they're intertwined. Funding could mean that here is a sum of money to, you know, do community community benefit work. It could also be one idea that that came up multiple times was the sis the city providing a website for all RNOs where just like our offices have a web page on the city web page, you create that within the city. They have their own OpenCities login, and they don't have to spend money on somebody to manage their website or to buy a domain. The city can provide that for them. Yeah.

Okay. I think that's really helpful. I was thinking, too, even about newsletters and is there or can we identify you provide your list of emails, you drop in content, and an auto formatted newsletter goes out so you don't have to spend time formatting and cleaning up your list. But a lot of that, somebody has to do it. And I find that volunteer fatigue to be one of the biggest factors of success or failure in who's able to stay on in leadership.

So appreciate being able to think about what are maybe low hanging fruit to help support RNOs now. I will say the biggest issue that I've seen since having come onto council are other people in the city who think they know best what my district needs or my neighborhoods need. And that happened a lot after the George Floyd protests and the pandemic, where I had somebody from Council District ten creating RNOs in my district, didn't even live there, but felt like we were underrepresented and nobody was voices. It was like, it was so rude. And my community didn't even know them.

Like, it was just such an imprecise way of talking about the issue that we all want to talk about, which is getting information out, feeling like you have a representative way of making your voice heard. I appreciate you taking it on. It's definitely a challenge, and I look forward to kind of where you take it. Thank you.

Thank you. Councilmember Watson?

Thank you so much. Two quick points. So thank you to each of you and the good work you did within your council offices as council aides, your outreach, and your community engaged process. I know I heard about it on East Side. And then also thanks to Radian if they're watching as well. First question, what was your engagement with INC if any, inter neighborhood cooperative?

You want take that one?

We engaged with individuals. I I had lunch with a couple of people in leadership. We they were members of INC. We're at number of events. We have offered repeatedly to meet Well, I take meetings with anybody that wants to meet and have made that available.

We've asked them directly as far as what are your recommendations, what do you want and what you do not want, what do you not want. Haven't heard from them yet on it. INC is an an important part of the I n of the r n o structure. We look forward to working with them as this moves forward.

I'll just Can

I

just add to that? So, our staff did attend an INC meeting and presented to them as well about the process and what we were doing. Many INC members actually attended there was there was I don't know. You guys probably know how exactly how many INC members were at each of the neighborhood workshops we had. So they've had a lot of access, and then we also met with the leadership councilman Cashman and I also met with their leadership as well.

And so I feel like there's been quite a bit of engagement. I think the one thing that we should note because, you know, we have heard from them. They they want to continue to be involved. We said, great, we are having additional opportunities for that involvement to provide feedback of the recommendations. But I will just say that you have to pay to be a member of INC. Right? RNOs have to, you know right? They have to pay a fee to be part of it. So they do not necessarily equally represent all of the RNOs in the city and county of Denver because unless your RNO can afford to pay and send somebody to the INC meetings, you're not represented there. And so I just want to be clear about, like, that part.

Like, yes, they are important, and yes, we need their feedback, and yes, they've been a part of it through this entire process so far. Excellent.

And I have no discussions with the INC, just was curious a question of curiosity. And the INC fee can be waived for neighborhood associations, so I think that is important. I at least wanted to say that on the record. I think that's a great step, but my my next question is I'm a I'm a two times Arnold president. And one of the things that I felt that was really important, I was curious from your research, when you're thinking of funding and you're looking at asset based community development type work that communities, nonprofits do in community, We always and we we had a grant writer, and we did grants from whether it was Denver Foundation or it was from whomever.

I'm curious as to that intersection and if you are looking at kind of the utility of building skills that part of the work of the whatever the organization is in the city that overlay would provide grant writing support or grant support for that. Was that something y'all discovered or considered?

Yeah. That was something that came up talking to community. Community had a bunch of really great ideas. And, you know, the the report is very lengthy. We wanted to put as much of that in as possible, but that definitely came up. I mean, they Arnolds, they want trainings. They want templates. The word template was used a million times. They want templates. They want guidance. They want to be able to reach their neighbors. So, yes. Awesome.

And what I would say, if I can just comment, early on in my research, other cities are providing legal assistance. Yes. They're providing grant writing assistance. There seven, eight years ago, Empower LA had a budget of like $7,000,000 for their 99 district councils and they didn't send them blank checks, but it you have a worthy project submitted to us and we've got this budget. Once again, we're late to the dance as a city.

We're we're looking at other cities that are far better structured to do this. So this is our time to do it and I I think the team's given us a great jumping off point. Thank you all.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all for this work. Thank you for coming to Northwest Denver. Thank you for agreeing to come to the IHOSA Neighborhood Association. I don't even call it Arnos because people don't even know what that means. So I just started getting away from it and calling it Neighborhood Association dinner. And you all we invited you. So thank you all for coming. My one comment, and then I'll I'll provide more later, is when I was looking at the muni code on your section section twelve twelve through through ninety ninety six six notification it seems like it's overwhelmingly CPD that has notifications there and I don't remember what the new office of excise and licenses but it seems like it's equally divided between the two.

I understand the thought process of moving it over to HRCP. I'm concerned about that because HRCP doesn't have a comps team whereas and they were just recently added to the charter. I think that that was in they were put under CPD because at the time that this was written CPD was a charter agency and so when you have a charter agency you're mandated to make sure that they're funded right. That's why I don't like writing host in ordinances because when I started at the city there was no there was no agency called host. When I started the city, the mayor created the North Denver Cornerstone Collaborative.

That doesn't even exist anymore and so we have some of that written in. So then it creates ambiguity of who's in charge and who actually is in charge of it. So now that HRCP is part of the charter, they just don't have huge staff. They don't have a communications person like they do like CPD does. They don't have they have a small monthly newsletter.

So I am always thinking about who- like when I'm thinking about things, I follow the money. Who has the biggest pot of money to make sure that they get the information that they need? And so it made sense to me that it is CPD, right, at the time. But I do when I was looking at that notification I was like, oh yeah, it's CPD because it's Board of Adjustment, it's licenses, it's all the things that happen.

Madam Press. Yeah. I always so the office the division of community empowerment is one one person now. Stephanie Lang, the great hires director. I I equate it to when the office of sustainability was created with Jerry Tignano and a couple of aides struggling to get a budget, struggling to do work.

Now they're CASR with dozens and dozens of folks doing incredible work. I hope this that's how I'm you may be right that today, maybe it it stays for a few minutes in one location. Ultimately, I do hope it all becomes a much more robust community on charter.

So that could totally go away in whole cloth. Right? Not while I'm alive. Yeah. So but thank you all for the work. I would say in it's I found your map detail exactly how I have issues in my neighborhood. I can't get ahold of certain people. I can't get people to pay attention to unhoused locking housing choices right now in exactly the neighborhoods that you didn't get high turnout for. Exactly. So, it wasn't a surprise to me.

I just have to I even have the movie in the park in Chaffee Park and we still only got like six responses and I think you all were there, which is a sad day. But I will say that some of the unintended consequences that we see in our city when we don't get engaged, that's when we get the biggest complaints like when we were doing group living. Man, that whole thing exploded when I became on council and it was like, oh, this is and one of the sponsors, like Councilman Black, really stepped in and helped guide that conversation. And it was a lot of the RNOs who had issues. Right?

And then they were like, I never heard about this. The only thing what we did when I was a council aide was we changed the rule where if you're an applicant and you're rezoning, you have to mail to the 200 feet Mhmm. Because it used to be the onus was on the Red Neighborhood Association to get to the 200 feet. And I was like, that's ridiculous. Make the applicant pay for that.

So that did get better responses. I do think people you don't hear as many people coming to city council right now saying, I didn't know about the rezoning. You do, but not as often as in my lived history working for Espanola. So I think that these are really important and I'll just say the council person who wrote that was Sal Carpio and it was really important. We had predatory practices in Northwest Denver.

We had liquor stores going on in the North Side and then we had cash checking places. And that's why he wrote this ordinance is because we had all these they were predatory practices because people were just going there and losing. They would go they'd go to their go cash the check, and then they'd go to the bar next door or the liquor store next door, which sold all the shooters, and it just was predatory. And you saw all of that happening in the areas that were redlined. So he wanted to make a notification to actually empower the people. And I think that's what you all are doing. That's my philosophy lately is power to the people. So thank you for giving it back to the people and I look forward to next steps. Thank you all. Thank you.

Next up, we have council member Parity and Flynn on a single unit development in certain zone districts.

This could be relatively quick because this is we're introducing the concept. It's more like a concept plan. It's not even on the stove yet to cook. We're still opening

I thought you don't cook.

We're still opening the Why do Harriet though?

New stove. That's great. Okay. I've heard. Just

as an introduction, we came across this inspiration during the one of the planning board joint sessions on unlocking housing choices, and councilwoman Parady was sitting across from me. And I don't know who did who first, but it was like, why are we why have we up zoned areas for duplex and greater, but we still have single unit as as a as an allowed use. So we pursued this and this is sort of just to introduce the concept. Councilwoman, do you wanna Yeah. Chime in also?

I also just I like something that I have learned thoroughly since joining this body is just that there's so much complexity into changing anything in our zoning code that I always see the way forward as, like, just finding every overlap that we can kind of. And, you know, councilmember Flynn and I probably have different opinions about some of the recommendations from the unlocking housing choices committee. I think this is a concept that feeds into some of those concepts. But where we have overlaps, we should take advantage of those. And I think that this reminds me a little bit, actually, of the single stair policy in that it's a way to try to add growth that is already Zone 4, as council member Flynn said.

And I I see the value of doing that even though I also think we probably need some more density where it's not yet Zone 4. So yeah. Thank you.

You want to

do this Yeah.

So this is just the slide that, to the point that I was just making, that identifies how many new households we need. It's this staggering that seems like it goes up every time we this is blueprint, so this number has been the same, but every time we do a needs assessment, and there will be a new one coming to committee soon, this number grows because people want to live here. And then the salient point here is sort of that Blueprint attempted to project and plan for where that growth could go. And so I am really interested in the conversation about, like, what is preventing growth in the areas where Blueprint identified that it would primarily grow. And, of course, that's 80% in regional centers, community centers, corridors, high, high medium residential downtown and urban center.

And then this is the map of what was referred to as all other areas of the city. It's the yellow on the map. I just noticed I don't know when Kyle and Rob snuck in the room, but They did hear. I noticed that they were sitting there

We were

here the whole time.

I'm just noticing them. So I wanna thank and and Andrew also for meeting with me in January to provide this first overview. So many residential areas that still have single family units as used by Wright, although they're they're where we intentionally plan to have greater density. This happened, you know, when the 2010 code and actually way before that. This is just we put the zoning in place that reflected what the neighborhood typically looked like.

So if there were a lot of duplexes in the area like an Overland, it got r two or now the TU zoning. So there are 28,000 dwelling units built in Denver since 2019, so the last seven years six years, actually. Thirty three seventy four of them citywide were single family homes. So of the that's about 12% of the total housing units built in Denver were single family homes. 247 of those three thirty three seventy four were built in zone districts that call for higher density.

A 150 of them were in the duplex zone, and 97 were in row house and mixed use zones. This is a map that shows where they are, where those where we've planned for added density, mostly and most of it being the middle miss middle housing types. Antoine, don't if you wanna grab this one.

Yeah. So this is just the same sort of by by land area of the city, which I think is really interesting to look at that two unit zoning. It's little higher than multi or row house. It's 3% of the city, so it's not a huge part of the city. Collectively, those three altogether, which this would apply to, covers about 7% of numbers by land area. It'd be interesting to see that by units. Yeah.

Maybe

we just did. Anyway, so it's a tokenizable chunk, not not huge, but a

chunk. And

of those, I found this very interesting that in the duplex zone, 57% of the units in duplex zone are actually single units. In the row house zone, 40% of housing units are single family homes, And even in the multiple the multi unit zones, a little over 16% are single family homes.

Are those new builds or are those pre established? Because I have real house

Generally, you're exactly right. They're generally we overlaid the basically, the what existed in the neighborhood. There was a lot of multiunit homes already, so we gave it multiunit. But a lot of the homes were single family. Not many of them are new at all. K. So there's gradually the point of this the concept behind this is to encourage that transition Yeah. To continue by disallowing new single family Okay. When a house is when a house is demolished. We'll get into that here.

So the the question that the the councilwoman and I are looking at is should Denver consider either a limit or a prohibition on new single unit dwellings in areas where the city planned and zoned for higher density? And with the help of Rob and Andrew and Kyle, we came up with they came up and we're presenting it as a concept. Two different approaches. One is simply remove single unit as a permitted use in the table. When I went through all the different zone districts we have outside of just SU that still have a little dot that you can still build SU here, it was phenomenal to see how widespread it was.

The other approach is to keep SU as a permitted use, but disallow new single unit, and there's a reason for that. But this approach, one, would prevent any new single unit home in TU, RH, or MU. The problem is it would make existing homes non conforming, which presents a problem to the homeowner going forward. If they want to finance any improvements, if they want to add on a little bit, it's considered a new unit if you demolish, from what I understand from my briefing, 40% of the exterior wall or more, it counts as a new single unit. So you could add a bedroom or a family room on the back of an existing house and it's okay.

But if we were to do approach one, just remove it from the from the use table, it would cause a lot of problems for homeowners because it would be nonconforming. So, councilwoman, you said this was your favorite.

Yes. Well, so I do think that the right thing to do is that this should only be forward looking. And part of the reason for that is because one of the, like, balances that I think we're always trying to strike is figuring out how to make sure that we're not just incentivizing a scrape and rebuild of, you know, a bigger, like, more lot filling single family home. And so instead, we're balancing between, okay. This can be the existing single family or it can be duplex, and those are the choices.

And so, hopefully, that gets us one of those two outcomes which we want more than the big new, you know, lot filler. Right? That's happened on my block, actually, and I wish that my block were still my block is now single family only, but I live in a duplex on that block, and we've seen several small houses get scraped and turned into gigantic houses when they probably otherwise would have been turned into two unit if we had two unit zoning in this rule. So

So the next step, now that we've introduced the concept and you've seen what we're doing, as I said, we're just at the starting line. In fact, we're just coming up to the gate more than anything else. But we'd love to hear your feedback, suggestions on how we can work this engagement in cooperation with CPD. I I believe we're gonna present this to the advisory committee for UHC at some point down the line and get their feedback as well. But this goes beyond unlocking housing choices. This is this talks about intentionally directing and incentivizing densification where we actually planned it. So with that

Yes. Yeah. The well, the other thing I will say before we

go to you can go to

the questions slide. We can show that we're going to questions. But I just want to say that I do think it's really important to understand, as the chair of the housing committee, I've definitely seen the capacity issues with NCB. So just calling out that we want to think really carefully about all of these different pieces and, in my mind, try to move a lot of them together at the same time. But I think this is an interesting piece, and I just also think it's I'm really curious to hear what you all think and have to say about it.

Thank Councilwoman Sawyer and pro temer Merrill Campbell and myself.

Thanks. Really appreciate this. This is, I think, a totally worthwhile concept for us to consider because it does make a lot of sense if we have zoned something for additional use, then we should be using that land for that. Right? We should build to the zoning that exists as opposed to, you know, all of the many, many other things that we're doing.

I am curious if anyone has ever looked in CPD to see what the difference is between what we could build if we built to the zoning that already exists and what is there now. We had this conversation along Colfax. So because Colfax the vast majority of Colfax is zoned for three stories. Some of it is zoned for five stories. When you get closer to Downtown Heinz's, it's zoned for eight stories or even 12.

But with on that land, almost all of it right now is one story buildings. And so I'm very curious to see if anyone has ever done that work because I think it would be really valuable to be able to show as we're having a conversation about this what the potential is in our city right now versus what is actually on the ground in our city right now?

Yeah. Actually asked that question, but it was years ago when I was at the newspaper. And so I'm sure it's changed since then. Kyle, I don't know if are you able to say whether that's a data point that we can derive?

I'm Kyle Dalton with CPD. Yeah. So it's a it's a complex way thing to study, but it's possible to study it. A lot of the areas that you see on that map are designated as landmark districts. Right? So tearing down a single unit house and replacing with row homes is is far more challenging than it is in areas that don't. And, of course, there's also also market considerations, lot sizes factor into, you know, can I fit more than one unit on a lot? There's a lot more variety of lots. Configurations are allowed in these districts than in single unit zone districts. So it would be possible to put together a market study, a historic study, a zoning capacity study to kind of try to forecast and and guess.

But it's not as straightforward as, you know, looking at existing height, maximum height, what's the delta to be able to figure out would someone be able to or or be financially incentivized to scrape that one story building and put in two or three story building and put more units in.

Great. Thank you. I really appreciate that. The other thing I will note is just I added up and divided your information. There's no slide number, but I think it's slide four.

And what it showed is that 15% of the new homes that have new single family homes that have been built in the city and county of Denver since since 2019 were built on lots that could have held more than that have been zoned for denser use than what was built on there. So I think that that's really that 15% number, I think, is really powerful because a lot of the things that we're looking at, like, with expanding housing choices, the the percentages we're looking at for some of the fixes are significantly smaller than 15%, way smaller. So I do think that this is something that is really worth us considering because it it looks like if you just compare the numbers between the two, this would have a bigger impact than unlocking housing choices. So

just really appreciate that. Thanks.

Pro Tem Romero Kimmel. Thank you, Madam Chair,

and thank you for the presentation. You touched on it a little bit more of like how is this does this have any impact or does this change anything with unlocking housing choices or just is in addition to how do you

I think it lives independently of it. Okay. I mean if that weren't happening, I think we'd still be this would have dawned on us eventually. And if it is happening, we don't have to do this either, but I think it's a standalone effort.

It's related to the other concept about, you know, making sure that when area plans talk about corridors that could have some multiunit, but then they're in suburban and there's no form for that. That's another similar kind of

concept, I think. Thank you. Is there any thought around things

that

are already in the pipeline? Have you thought of a timeline that things would be grandfathered? I'm thinking of two different developments that somebody is thinking about in in my district that they're moving forward with some multi unit and some single family homes. So is there some thought of what might be grandfathered in? No. Or is there a date or

No, literally, we do This

is like

submitting a concept plan to

start a meeting.

So it's gonna take like there, it's gonna take two years to do. No.

Well, then

I don't think I still don't think that have them built by then. But maybe we can talk a little bit more offline because I think that there's there are two developments that are happening. Again, they're taking land that has not been developed, and

some of it

is single family homes and some of it is multi family. So maybe we can talk a little

bit more about that one.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Benning er.

Thank Thank you for this work. I think it's interesting also that you all talk about how what has been built, that 28,000 dwelling units have been since 2019. And only it seems like we have this conversation about single unit zoning all the time, and it takes most of the conversation. And only 12% of the units have been built out of the 28,000 that are single family. Is that correct? Say that again. So if you go to slide 412%. It's just 12% of the 28,000. Right?

Thirty thirty eight thousand, I think.

28. 28.

The single family homes are 12% of the 28,000 people that have been built in Denver. The other 24,000, right, have been something other than a single family home. That's a really good point.

And And so I feel like we spend a lot of at least in my council district, I spend all my time talking about single family zoning. And I'm like, actually, that's not the majority of development that has happened since 2019. That's just my point. At least in it's my lived experience. I've had I and I trust me.

I have big mansions in my council district, but I feel like this proves my point as well. For your approach, I prefer approach one. And the reason why is because these nonconforming, noncompliant I've had I've rezoned a couple things and I've created nonconforming structures. And then something happened to them and they couldn't get funding to to fix what they needed. And it was really detrimental.

One was an apartment that had some affordable housing units in it and the HOA went to go get funding and they couldn't get the funding because I I had changed the zoning. And so I'm really I'm always cognizant now about existing homes becoming non conforming, non compliant. So that would be my preference, but I do really like this proposal. I could if you look at that map a lot, my council District has two unit zoning, r h zoning. I think Council District 3 I think Council District 3 and Council District 1 are the only ones that have r h zoning.

I think councilwoman or maybe a couple more. Remember we did an amendment on it or we were going to do something on it? You and I pulled all kinds of data, and it was La on the Lincoln Park. It was West Colfax and then scattered just a little bit more.

Yeah. I'll get in queue to talk about that.

Yeah. So but I really like this approach, and I hope it doesn't take a long time. I think that you could easily pull what book building permits are in the queue for Pro Tem's council district. And I had a question, Pro Tem. Is the areas that you're talking about, do they have higher density zoning throughout the whole thing, or is it a PUD?

They have actually, it's a site where they have it. It's single family. It is zoned for single family homes, and they are putting multi they're dividing it and putting multifamily on a portion of it and then single family, like, smaller single family. What's the zoning, though?

It's I can look it up exactly, but

it's zoned for single family homes right now.

Okay. So this wouldn't impact it then. Right?

Well, yeah. It well, no. They would be fine, I think.

That's why I was trying to figure out what's r h and Yeah.

It's for t u r h and m u. That's why I was trying to figure out if is it if it's a PUD because you can have a PUD and you could have sections of that for a single family zoning like what we did with Elich's. I have some single family zoning in Elich's, the old Elich site, but then I have multi zoning. And it's very prescriptive where the single family zoning went. So that's why I was wondering what your zoning would be that you think it might impact. Okay. Council Matures?

Yeah. Just real quick. The RH zoning that we were concerned about is that on corner lots of a certain size, it's allowed to choose the apartment building form. And that was a bit of a concern on because it was kind of this, like, asterisk kind of a thing. But I will say that West Colfax, when it came out of the last kind of rezoning effort, had a lot of zoning entitlement that it was afforded, and it's built to that, which has fully turned over that neighborhood.

And in good ways, I mean, there's a lot of housing, but it's a lot of really expensive housing because it's all duplexes or row homes where there was an affordable home. So there is, I think, and I think about that with the corridor along Morrison Road where you have that diagonal yellow patch. Those are really big lots, and they don't really have alleys. And one of the things that I know is coming out of unlocking housing choices is trying to preserve an existing affordable property. So I just don't want this to become looked at like an incentive for here's where we want you to develop duplexes, where there might be a single family home along Morrison Road right now.

But it's not really where we're seeing single family homes getting scraped and just rebuilt as a single family home, but that's one of the eyes that I've got in terms of property acquisition and how that might be happening in Westwood. But I don't have a problem with this. I think it is different than what we're seeing both why we have the West Area memo and what Unlocking Housing Choices is trying to address.

Think it is important to note that this change, whenever it would be put into effect, if it were, would not require any change to any existing property. If a homeowner wanted to expand their house within that 40%, it's it's all fine. You don't have to do a thing with your single family house. But if someone wanted to come in and scrape it, they couldn't put it replace it with another sing a huge single.

Yeah. I think it'd be very I like it.

Alright. So we'll just see you back here once you have something drafted. Alright. See no other further business. I'll see you in, like, twenty eight minutes.