City Council - Regular Meeting

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Just for council, just a few things before we get started. We're going to hear from everyone, but I'll turn it over to our city manager.

Thank you, Mayor and Council. Good evening. We're really excited to be here. If you know me at all, you know I do love a good budget meeting. So excited to dive into the 2027 recommended budget in anticipation of our public hearings that occur in October. So this is really to set the stage for high-level kind of what we're seeing as far as revenues coming in, some of the trends we're seeing with our major revenue sources. talk a little bit about our expenses and the large driving forces behind our expenses. And then, yeah, we tried to switch it up this year for the first time that I've been here at least and give the stage over to all of our department heads so you hear less of me and Heather talking and more of them. So they're going to be going over each of their kind of departments, how they're funded, which is kind of always interesting to see where their expenses largely lay, and then some of their priorities and anticipated 2027 budget requests. So yes, I would greatly appreciate it and hopefully the sheet helps you kind of get your thoughts organized. If we can get through all the departments, we practice this, it'll go just as smoothly as it will having 15 people come up and present. But I first want to thank all of the staff that here and also behind the scenes that went into doing this budget, it takes a village, as they say, to put something together. And so we have finance staff that led a large portion of all the number crunching. Obviously, the department has played a huge role in this, but also people within their departments that you don't see. So just thanks to everyone that got us to this point. So real briefly, as you have seen, but it's always very important to set out how the charter lays out what our responsibilities are. So as the city manager, I'm responsible in working with the department heads, everyone here behind you, in preparing a balanced budget. And then as council, you get to decide and adopt on that budget any budget adjustments throughout the year. You also set various revenue streams. So you set the mill levies and you set various fees. And if you recall, late last year we also updated those so that you guys have a discrete set of fees that you set by ordinance. So that will be the first time we're doing this holistically this year. You know, for a philosophy, I like to always say that the first thing is really reflecting what the council is looking for, making sure that it aligns with our community values. I always give the example as each community has different values. For example, like the arts and sustainability for a size R city is a little bit more investment than maybe another city. But that's what our community values. And so we really want to make sure that we maintain those services. I never want to go to budget jail. I don't know what it looks like, but I don't imagine it's very fun. So we want to make sure that we and you all stay in legal compliance by balancing our budget. And then really maintaining it to be a flexible document. I like to say it's a living document. Things happen throughout the year. And so we always are monitoring those revenue streams, expenses, making sure and pivoting if we need to and coming back to counsel. And looking in 2027, really focusing on core services here, maintaining what we have. And then I think if you recall in our June workshop, we presented a chart where over the last several years we had been using in the general funds and fund balance to draw that down. We're really proud that this budget does not touch into the one-time fund balance. And so we really align those ongoing with ongoing. So aligning those to maintain our means. And then we do have several restricted funds. So we really evaluated making sure that any item that's eligible for restricted funds is being used by restricted funds. And then obviously balancing affordability. CFO Balzer is going to touch on a little bit about some of the economic uncertainty that we're facing. So we really want to make sure that we're balancing affordability with the cost of running our city. So here's where we are at tonight. We're in August, so the budget seemingly lasts almost all year for us, but for council and for the community, this is really the first daylight of the annual budget. In September, you will receive the budget book that's outlined in charter. It'll be by Friday, September 18th. We'll also be doing a CIP tour at your workshop in September, so more to come on that. And then your public hearings are held in October, and you have a requirement to adopt a budget by the last fourth Thursday of the month.

So with that, I'm going to turn it over to CFO Folsom. All right.

So here's just an overview. Our 2027 projected revenue is $128 million. You can see That's largely revenue by type, sales and use tax, utility fees, property taxes. And then revenue by funds. So the largest fund with revenue is general fund. Then the utilities as well as special revenue funds and capital projects. And then this is a breakdown of the general fund revenue. So as you can see, the majority of this is sales and use tax and property tax and other revenues, which is largely charges for services. So the tax piece is the largest portion of our general fund revenue. And then sales tax summary. So focusing on sales tax now. 2026 sales tax overview. The city expects a 7% increase in sales tax in 2026 as compared to 2025 actuals. And then we're projecting an increase of 3% in 2027. The 2026 increase is primarily due to the nine mile revenue sharing agreement. 2026 is the first full year of distributions related to that agreement, which is why 2026 is a little bit larger there. The city forecast again, the 3% for 2027, which is moderate as consumers, we anticipate consumers pulling back on discretionary spending. Use tax summary. This is an overview of the use tax components. So we have building use tax, motor vehicle use tax, and business use tax. The base budget is anticipated annually, but the amount projected over the base is very much volatile and variable, changes often, as you can see by the numbers and the year-to-year change. So we're forecasting it to increase in 2027 over 2026, as 2026 was down, or is projected to be down over those actuals. audit revenue summary. So this includes sales and use tax, other excise taxes like marijuana, storage, and lodging tax. Again, we have a base budget for this, which is anticipated annually. But the amount projected over that, again, is also highly variable. We're forecasting that to increase in 2027 over 2026. So if you remember in 2025 when we presented the ACFA, we had significant audit revenue in 2025, so we're kind of leveling up in 2026 and then being fully staffed in 2027 in our audit department, expecting that to go up. And then the property tax summary, 2024 and 2025. In 2024, the assessment values increased significantly, close to 30%. And then in 2025, there was minimal growth in assessment values, and the state no longer provided the backfill for property tax lost due to recent legislative changes. And then there's the overview moving forward. Minimal growth is projected over the next few years due to implementation of further recent changes in the state property tax law. So we anticipate being slightly down in 2027 after a projection of 2.3 for 2026. And then this is our fees for services, so recreation fees. We had a large decline during the pandemic. The cost recovery model, which was recently adopted in January, assessed a non-resident fee for admission to the Great Outdoors Water Park this summer in 2026 and is planned for the BBRC in the fall. Staff is also working to transition the current reduced rate recreation program to new financial assistance program for income qualified residents to be rolled out this fall. Planning and building fees, pretty volatile. It's largely based on development in the city. The fees are projected to decline in 2026, but increase in 2027. So we're projecting a 9% increase in 2027, which we also, I believe there was an increase of 9% in 2026 as well, to continue to account for increased costs and charges. And then fire code fees. We have a plan review process participation and routine inspections. We have some new fees established in 2027 to cover existing services provided. And then utility rates and fees. So these are our enterprise funds. There was a rate study done in 2025 that looked at all the enterprise funds, water, water reclamation, stormwater, and came back with some recommendations, if you remember. For those of you that were involved in the 2026 budget, we made projections around those rates for 26 and for 27. And so these rates reflect what was produced through the 2025 rate study, 16% for water, 9% for water reclamation, 8% for stormwater. And then we make some tap fee adjustments as well based on regional comparisons. So we plan to do a new rate study in 2027, and that will inform moving forward 2028 beyond and If you have any specific questions, Jeff can respond to those when he's talking to you about public works. And then, so just a revenue summary. So we expect moderate growth in 2026 and 2027 across all categories. 2027 revenue projections are conservative as there's still much uncertainty regarding prices, wages, and future consumption patterns. The economic conditions and the forecast can change very quickly. The city continues to monitor potential impacts from federal policy changes, including the effects on the supply chain, capital infrastructure costs, and consumer spending patterns. So no one, including the city, can be certain of what will happen unless the city's really trying to be fiscally responsible and cautious as we move forward with our projections and budgets for 2027. So here is our expenditure overview. So again, overall funds, we expect to spend $130 million. As you can see, expenses, biggest two are personnel and operating, and then capital, some debt. And then by fund, expenses most are out of the general fund and utilities, as well as the capital fund and special revenue funds. And then here's the general fund. So again, if you look at this, 91% of that is personnel and operating out of the general fund. And as city managers referenced earlier, General fund expenses are slightly less than general fund revenues if you remove the restricted fund usage. And so the budget does not include use of unrestricted fund balance in the general fund, which we have done in the past, but we worked really hard this year to not dip into that fund balance in the general fund. Operating expenditure overview. 2027 recommended budget reflects concerted effort to assess the base operating budgets. The review was conducted to determine if budgeted funds were necessary, so really seeing if all the things we're doing are critical, in comparison to historical trends of actual expenditures, so how we actually have spent our money, and repurposing of existing funding and reevaluation of past one-time and ongoing requests, which led to a reduction in budgeting of operating expenses in 2027. And now I'm going to hand it over to Sarah to talk about some more operating expenses and personnel and all those benefits.

Yeah. So I'm going to go over what we have in the budget for our salaries and benefits. Before I do, though, just kind of give a little information of where we've come from. So ultimately, traditionally, if you go back 20 years, the city of Lafayette has kind of been known as a place that has excellent benefits. We've always given the best benefits in the market. And in the past, it was that our pay was not as competitive. So really starting late 2021, the city's made a real effort to try to balance that and balance those two and put more money in salaries. And this led to the formal adoption of our compensation philosophy in 2024. So our philosophy is guided by these three principles. The first one is financial sustainability. Ultimately, we can't spend more than we have. We need to make sure that any compensation that we provide to our employees are supported by ongoing revenues. The second is market competitiveness. What we do is we look at agencies around us that are similar to us and see, hey, what do they pay in total compensation? And what does that mean is, what do they pay in base pay? What do they provide in health benefits? And what do they provide in retirement benefits? We kind of take these three buckets and put them together, and that's total comp. And so what we do is, based on our financial means, we try to provide the average of our relative market. And finally, we really focus on internal equity. We are really proud of all the services we provide. And we want to make sure that when we're talking about a police officer's compensation or a librarian's compensation, that while their pay might be different, the methodology we use to set that pay is consistent and equitable. What we did is we were always monitoring this, but this year we did a pretty in-depth look to see how are we doing? Are we aligned with our philosophy? It's been a couple of years. And so overall, our total comp remains aligned with our philosophy that we are being competitive. We are being the average of our relevant market. What's interesting, though, is when we look at the individual buckets and we compare ourselves to our agencies, essentially the city is providing a little bit less pay than other agencies since 2024, but more in benefits. So if you think of it as a scale, since 2024, we're a little bit behind in pay, a little bit higher in benefits, and these kind of offset each other. As I said, starting in 2021, we put a real effort behind increasing salaries. So to see that it's kind of slipping again was a big deal for us, and we saw it as an opportunity to kind of have a broader conversation about rebalancing our total comp to strengthen salaries while preserving our high-quality benefits. But that's not the only reason we looked at our benefits. As I said, from an employer standpoint, if you put too much in your benefits bucket, it's going to impact your ability to recruit and retain individuals. And that aligns with what we've heard from our employees. Employees have been pretty clear for us that they love their benefits, but the most important bucket to them is salary. And where they want their compensation put is in salary. Another thing we've always heard from employees is lack of choice. So Citi offers a great Kaiser HMO, but that's it. We have one plan. Some employees have said, hey, you know, depending on their health or family situation, they like options, especially if people come from other organizations that have more choice. And finally, we've seen a lot of rising health care costs in the last few years. As I stated, we have a great health plan. It's essentially the best HMO Kaiser plan you're going to find. And so what our broker has told us is, and Kaiser, because you have this kind of specialized plan that's a little bit outdated and not aligned with best practices, you're going to have to expect large double-digit increases moving forward if you don't make changes. And finally, there's this concept of benefits versus utilization. So our planned coverage kind of exceeds what's best practice, what other agencies are providing. And when we look at the data, what employees are actually utilizing. So it's almost like we're putting a lot of money in this benefits bucket, which is great to have an awesome health plan, but our employees aren't fully utilizing it. And maybe it's better use of our funds to look somewhere else. So for all these reasons, we thought this is the time for us to have this organizational-wide discussion. Let's talk about the future of the city and what's the best for everybody. And what we did is we formed an employee benefit group. And so this group was made up of employees from all different departments, all different health coverage tiers, so people employee only to family, people from all different income levels. And we really talked to them. We said, give us feedback. What is your priorities? The group was fantastic, and they really gave us some important information that we then used to kind of negotiate with Kaiser through our broker. And we do think that what we'll be proposing to the budget does this rebalancing while also create long-term sustainability. So I'll start with the health care changes. So we're still going to have an HMO option, and it's still going to be through Kaiser. What I did not say earlier is the previous year we went out to market to see, hey, is Kaiser the best for us? And it was clear that Kaiser is the best for us from a cost perspective. It would be considerably increased to go somewhere else. And all of our employees that have 100% disruption mean they have to change their doctors. We're staying with Kaiser for an HMO. And in terms of the coverage that employees get, it's the same. The only difference is we're introducing a modest employee cost sharing. And even with this modest employee cost sharing, this is still going to be the market-leading HMO plan in our region. And so what do I mean when I say that? What I mean is employees are going to pay less towards premiums than other agencies. When they use their health insurance, they're going to pay less than other agencies. And the city is going to pay more for our employees' health care than other agencies. So that's what I mean when I say market-leading HMO. So while there is a modest cost sharing, it's still a great plan. The other thing we're really excited about is an introduction of a new option, a high deductible health plan, or HDHP, with an accompanying health savings account, or HSA. So really quickly, what these plans are is the higher deductible than a traditional HMO, and in turn, lower premiums. What this does is because of the lower premiums, it allows us to provide a health care option that still has a zero employee premium share at all tiers. So even at the family level, if employees find out that the HDHP is the right option for there, they're not going to pay a monthly premium. In addition, the city is going to fund HSA contributions, $1,750 for employees only and $3,500 for other tiers. Essentially because there's higher deductibles, this helps employees pay for this. The great thing about HSA contribution is once we provide it to employees, it's theirs. So if they need it that year, great. If they have, they can save it for a year that maybe they have more healthcare needs. It stays with them. Ultimately, we're really happy that these two plans kind of give our employees flexibility. Just from a city standpoint, the cost from the city is about the same for both of these plans because of the HSA contribution. So from a city standpoint, we're not trying to push employees to one plan or another to achieve savings. It's really, here's options. These are a little bit different, but they're still market leading and great plans that employees can use. Probably the most exciting part about this change is it helped us rebalance our compensation. So the 2027 budget includes a proposed salary increase for general employees of 4%. This aligns with what's in the police and fire collective bargaining agreements. And really, as Heather discussed, we had modest revenue growth. So we were able to utilize these health plan savings from restructuring our plans to kind of put more money in salaries, rebalance these total compensation kind of scales as we wanted. And we think we've kind of achieved this, you know, still providing market-leading benefits while also strengthening our base pay. Ultimately, these changes aren't just about 2027. What we have heard from our broker and we wanted to really go into this mindful of is making sure we have a health care plan that is aligned with best practices, aligned with what our neighbors are doing, and sustainable long-term. So we really hope that, you know, health care costs will always increase. But by making these changes, we're hoping it's much more sustainable in the long term.

So just a final summary on the expenditure side. We've seen rising costs across all categories of expenditures. We did a consistent review of actual versus budgeted expenditures so we could align those and reallocation of budget within funds and focus on maintaining process made on compensation plan and philosophy, as we just discussed, and address and meet rising operating costs and proactively plan and address for future capital needs. So I think after that, we can take questions as well.

Questions before we move on to departments? Councillor Jensen.

I know I should know this, but would you refresh me what audit revenue means?

Sure. It's when we go out and we audit people who pay sales tax, use tax, and determine if they're paying the accurate amount or if they need to pay more or if they're paying appropriately for, you know, I'm not going to say this right, but if they're taxing themselves correctly and we're getting the appropriate revenue. So we had some more focus on that in 2025. And that's why we saw a big increase in audit revenue. And what that does, though, is then it kind of resets the base. So people are paying and complying. So we kind of have a higher base, which is great. But it's harder then to get additional increases in future years, which is why we is why we have suggested we won't have as big increases in audit revenue in the future.

So it's really sales tax, but you went out and found it from people who weren't paying. So it comes in under audit revenue, but it's really sales tax revenue.

Is that correct? It is. It goes into the base long term, but it's like one time, because you go out and you you find someone that hasn't been paying adequately, and then that goes back into your base.

And do they pay us for the cost of us auditing them? Do we get reimbursed for those expenses?

If they haven't been paying appropriately, then there's fines and penalties. And sometimes if they pay right away, they pay less in fines and penalties. in terms of paying for themselves to some extent, the audit revenue that they bring in pays for those auditors.

But the audit revenue is sales tax we were supposed to have that we don't have because they were not doing the right thing. I'm asking because it seems like there might be a way to make, I don't want to say scofflaws, but people who weren't doing it right bear the cost of us having to go find out that they weren't doing it right in some way. I just want to put a pin in that to think about for the future. And I noted on the utility rates, I have three questions, and that's all, just letting you know. On the utility rates, you did a fee study in 25 and you're planning on doing another one in 27. Is that common? Do we always do a fee study every two years? So typically, well, I'll let Jeff answer it.

So I would say typically three to five years is kind of best practice. We've been doing them more frequently just because there were so many things in flux. So I think we did what might have been the city's first professional fee study in 2020. And we've been doing roughly every two years. So we actually, as we look at next year, there's a lot of things that happened even since the last one. But we felt like rather than make bigger adjustments without doing that thoroughly, that we plan to do one in 2027. But we've definitely seen cost escalation different than we projected. And we don't yet know what impact the drought's going to have on revenue. So we'll want to look at how much variability we saw in revenue as a result of people reducing water use.

Thank you. Last question. In the personnel matters, you didn't mention retirement contributions as this compensation story. Would you explain what the city's policy is on retirement contributions for employees?

Sure. So we provide our employees with a defined contribution plan where we make a contribution to a 401 account. Essentially, the city provides 10.2%, and employees contribute 8%. And so we didn't really look at this because we're kind of aligned with market. Everyone does retirement a little bit differently. Some people are in Social Security. Some people are not. We are elected out of it. But overall, we find in terms of what we provide towards retirement is in line with what other agencies do. And our employees, it's not something that we've heard from employees as a major critique or something that they would like changed.

Thank you. So employees don't contribute to social security. They just do this 401 . Thank you. That's all.

Other questions?

I just have one question. Thanks very much for the presentation thus far. Really appreciate what you're driving at in terms of the cost sharing model, but you noted the attempt to keep it modest. How do you do that in the long term to keep that modest contribution for cost sharing given the explosion in costs we're seeing?

Yeah, I think, so for us, this was a big change this year, right? Like, ultimately, as I said, the city's used to paying 100% HMO premiums and having a model that's more copay, but we're changing it. So we're really hopeful that this is going to be more sustainable. I mean, ultimately, the conversation that we've had for employees is that every year this is going to be a conversation, right? That we need to see how we're doing financially, how our revenues are doing. And, you know, when it comes to health care costs, How it works is some of the costs is something that's completely outside of us. It's Kaiser's book of business. And whatever their increase, we have to kind of take. And then others about our experience. And we're really hoping that with this model, it kind of finds that nice balance between something that's sustainable, but also still we can provide a great benefit for our employees. But to your point, if next year something changes, we're going to have to re-engage and re-talk and re-look at it. Gotcha.

Then we go after the scofflaws. Thank you. Council General.

A couple questions for me. On some of these charts, we see personnel costs broken down from operating costs. Does the personnel costs include salary and benefits or benefits operating costs?

Salaries and benefits.

OK. So everything is personnel. OK. I want to talk a little bit about property tax. You mentioned there's a state law that is impacting property tax. But you didn't tell us how or what that is.

I'd like to know more. It affects the assessment rate. I think it is. I'm probably going to get it wrong. And so what we collect, and there's a $70,000 credit that residents get. So we collect less. The legislature does stuff all the time. So this is going forward. So that's why we're assuming that we'll be bringing in slightly negative as compared to year over year moving forward.

And then on one of the charts, there was a large bucket that was special revenue funds. And I'm just curious what that, that probably includes several different things, and I just can't remember.

So special revenue funds includes legacy, post, conservation trust, those kind of have designated funding sources.

Got it. Thank you.

You're welcome.

I think we're ready to move on to the departments.

RACHEL HANSEN- There we go. Can you do it? Is it working when you do it, Rachel?

RACHEL HANSEN- Yes, I can do it. I just had a fat finger on it. So hello, I'm Rachel Hansen with Arts and Cultural Resources, and I'm excited to share with you. Arts and Cultural Resources is funded by the General Fund. We are about 50% of our budget supports, a little more than 50% of our budget supports staff, and the rest supports operations. We have three full-time staff and several part-time staff that help us maintain all the things, all our core functions. We operate, curate, and program the collective community arts center. We manage and maintain the city's art on loan and permanent art collections. We administer three different community art grant programs. We coordinate Art Night Out and various other city programs. And we oversee three different facilities. Currently, our current focus is to complete the Arapahoe Center Rehabilitation and Addition plans, and documents. We are on schedule with that project. This 2026 budget funded that project. And we are on schedule to get some cost estimating later this fall. We're also developing, continuing to develop our relationships with organizations such as Sundance and others. In reference to Sundance, we're hosting two or three engagements with them this fall. The first one was at Night Out last year. in August. We have no budget request for 2027, but we will focus on maintaining our services, keeping up with cost escalation, and expanding our engagement and continuing to build the necessary partnerships we need for good operations. In the beyond, we will look at, our goals are to look at capital funding and grants to fund the Arapahoe Center construction and the expanded programming that will need for that facility. We'll also be assessing our programs and our staffing needs as we continue to respond to the community.

Good evening, mayor and council. I'm Mary Lynn Maxalka, your city attorney. I am looking forward to presenting our budget tonight. So the city attorney's office, as you know, is newly in-house. As of last year, we've been in-house for just over a year now. And our budget is entirely funded by the general fund. We do have primarily personnel costs, but we also have operating costs. That includes our outside counsel needs, our prosecution services, as well as legal research subscriptions, registration, education requirements, but primarily the outside counsel and prosecution services are the main part of our operating budget. In terms of our core functions, There are many, primarily because we provide legal services to you, to management, and to every single city department. But the short list is here. That is the main thing that we do every day. As you know, we also are responsible for drafting and approving all city legal documents, including the city's contracts, ordinances and resolutions. We provide legal review of development applications, and we prepare all development-related agreements for the city. We also represent the city in legal matters and monitor special legal counsel when we have special legal counsel retained. So in terms of the city attorney's office current focus right now, our main focuses are on completing the capital bond projects, design, and construction contracts. Those are major contracts, and I'm pleased to say we've already completed a couple of those, and we have more underway right now. as you move forward to your bond issuance. That was approved last year. We, as you know, are also working hard with your planning department and other departments on the land use code review and implementation, which is currently underway. Our 2027 budget request does include a one-time outside legal counsel increase. For your information, the city attorney's office outside counsel budget has not changed much in the last several years. It has remained relatively static, but private attorney hourly rates across the Denver Metro legal market have significantly increased, particularly since COVID. So in recent years, those rates have gone up. While our outside council needs do fluctuate year to year, sufficient funding is necessary to ensure that we can retain qualified council when we need to at market rates in the area when we need that specialized expertise. And just briefly, a couple of examples where you all have seen that and we will continue to require services are areas like bond council and public finance, special districts, complex litigation that's not covered by our insurer, telecommunications and broadband law, just to name a few.

So those are areas where specialized attorney expertise is needed.

Looking ahead, we do have a very lean attorney's office. As you know, we have two attorneys in our office. I'm very pleased that we've added half of a staff full-time staff person as an assistant to our office But we do have a significant workflow And so we will continue to explore as time moves on with an in-house city attorney's office What we could do to maximize our effectiveness and efficiency and whether those might be tools that would increase our effectiveness and efficiency And so we'll be looking at that for future budgets potentially as we continue to look forward forward to the future, too. We will continue to evaluate future staffing needs for the city attorney's office and potentially use of contract counsel for certain practice areas if needed or to meet certain needs the city has. Thank you.

Good evening, counsel. I am Annette Beck. I'm here to talk to you tonight about the clerk's office and municipal court. So the clerk's office is 100% funded by the general fund, coming in at just under $400,000, where 85% of that is spent on personnel and 15% on operating costs. So some of our larger line items under operating are we have $33,000 for elections every year. We don't often use it, but we hold that space for it. Our other big expenditure is on the exciting things like legal publishing and codification, so keeping your municipal code up to date. We have two full-time positions. Our core functions are council meeting support, election and city council candidate coordination, liquor and marijuana licensing, open records requests, records retention and management, and cemetery administration. So currently, we're focusing on two kind of big software implementations. One of them is the online service portal. And for us, that will manage our marijuana and liquor licensing and our community event permitting. We're also working on software for cemetery administration. So eventually, that will hold our cemetery records and provide headstone mapping for the public eventually. We have no 2027 budget requests. Instead, we'll keep focusing on our software implementation and streamlining and refining our processes around that. Beyond, we'll be exploring automation of an agenda management system. So far, it's been pretty manageable, and the cost benefit piece is not really there, but we keep monitoring that to see if we need to make a change. And then also we'll be looking to leverage some technology to help with our open records requests. We've seen quite an uptick in those. So just helping, being able to help staff respond to those in a timely manner and make that easier for everyone and easier for the public as well will be a focus going forward. So for municipal court, they are 100% funded by the general fund as well, coming in at just over $400,000. 77% of that is for personnel, and operating is 23%. Some of the larger items for the court are the judge's salary. And coming back to Counselor Giannola's question, most of the time that comes under personnel, but the judge is a contract employee, so that's paid out of the operating. And then the other thing that is a cost is court security, court-appointed counsel, and interpreter services. They have three full-time positions in municipal court. That's up last year from two and a half. So we got that extra funding for half of a court clerk. So they have three full-time court functions. We adjudicate local ordinance violations, conduct arraignments, hearings, and trials. manage the docket, cases, and all the court records, collect fines and fees, issue court orders, and overall just ensure access and fairness for the court users. They're also currently working on a lot of software implementation. Big Court Case Management System, which was part of the SIPA grant, So I think that's scheduled to go live maybe second quarter of 2027. They're currently live streaming criminal proceedings. That's new as of HB 261134. So they're doing that. No real significant budget requests for 2027. They'll just continue to upgrade the technology to offer better user experiences. And beyond that, Always that balance of complying with state mandates. They'll be very involved in the civic center design for the new courtroom and the court offices. They're getting more AI-generated filings. So that will be more of a focus in the future, as that tends to increase misinformation and has the capacity to just have a higher volume of filings than they may be able to keep up with. And then always an eye toward enhancing court services.

Again, Katie Dolling, city manager, city manager's office. On the trend of continuing with being 100% funded through the general fund, the city manager's office of three and a half staff is funded by that. And our budget is largely those three and a half people that you see. And that's because we are here, our office is here to support council and your priorities and your implementations. Our office also does a lot of special projects. We manage the mental health and human services grant program. And as you see tonight, we're here before you with the recommended budget. That's one of the main annual tasks that we have every year. And then we also do kind of the citywide work plan coordination and also work with our boards and commissions on recently the revamping of certain programs and then just the ongoing recruitment and acknowledgment of them. So for 2020 or for 2026, what we're currently working on, as you're well aware, is the capital bond implementation. implementing some of the recommendations that have come out of the IDEA strategic plan. We worked very hard and huge thanks to Megan Davis and Melissa for the Lafayette Cemetery transition and kind of closure. And then we are working in partnership with our fire department on a continuity of government and operations plan that we're really excited to probably daylight to council early in 2027. For the budget, it's not necessarily related to the city manager in general, but this is kind of a catch-all for things that didn't go in other departments. But several years ago, we piloted a water bill offset program in coordination with Sister Carmen as we were implementing some of our more significant water increases that we hadn't done for several years. We have used that funding over the last couple of years to be carried over. And what we would like to ask council is to make that an ongoing permanent program, as we don't see water costs going down anytime soon. And that can be funded through the Mental Health and Human Services Fund, because Sister Carmen is the actual person that administers the program for us. We found that those community members that are looking for that support usually already have a connection with Sister Carmen and are more likely to go to a nonprofit versus the government to ask for the funding. We also next year will be looking to budget for the Civic Center design. Again, this will be if approved on the first to issue the debt be funded by the bond proceeds that we start to collect next year. And then looking forward, one of the things we've been wanting to work on as we've developed and coordinated all of our strategic plans over the last year three to five years, is getting a public-facing strategic plan dashboard so we can show the community the progress that we're making on our strategic plans. Again, those plans are really live documents, but we're having a challenging way to show the community as a whole how all of those integrate to each other and the progress that we're making. We did apply for a SIPA grant this year. Internet Portal Association that funded our municipal court system. It was not selected, so we were hoping that we could get it in for 2027, but we're going to continue to explore going into next year how we can start, even if it's a more rudimentary public facing kind of information dashboard.

ERIN FRASER, Good evening, Council. I'm Erin Fraser, Communications Director, and tomorrow marks my three-month anniversary. Grace be granted. For the communications department, we are also 100% generally funded. As you can see, our breakdown is about 3 quarter personnel and 1 quarter operating. Some of our largest line items in that operating space are our tools and technology, like the website, Lafayette Listens, social media tools, and those kinds of things. Also, the printing and distribution of the connection. Our role and responsibility between the three of us is informing, engaging, and inspiring our community. We do that via multiple channels, both digital and in person. We have the role and the responsibility of supporting both the city and council for media relations and issues management. And then we also are responsible for the development, care, and assessment of the city's brand and its communications practice. I came into the budget cycle, again, three months, so feeling very fresh. And so one of the main things I need to be doing in this new role is an audit, really understanding where we put our communications effort, where we put our communications dollars, both in terms of tools and personnel. So I'll be working on that through 2026. I'm supporting with the team the cemetery transition support also doing media relations and the capital bond communications. I have no large line item requests for 2027 because I am again in that 16 month onboarding, figuring out what do we need to do, how do we invest, and reallocating some of my existing funding towards a community-wide survey. We haven't had a community-wide survey since 2023, so we'll be going into RFP and looking for a partner for that survey in early 2027. And I'm also looking to implement a small line item that is a year-round communications internship program. There's an incredible value in bringing interns into communications practice with fresh perspective and energy. And finally, as we look beyond what 2027 brings, we will need to continue to invest in what enhanced digital experiences can look like for our community. The digital interface is really the main way people connect. We will continue to invest and create wonderful in-person opportunities, but also need to step into the next phase of what a digital experience looks like. Thank you.

All right, good evening, everyone. I'm going to talk about some fun stuff. All right, so the Community Services Department is a newer department where we have combined a lot of our public-facing community services together. So our work is really dedicated to enhancing the lives of our residents through the operation of public facilities, the management of public lands, Programs and services that support health, wellness, conservation, and lifelong learning. So we have 61 full-time positions across the divisions of parks, open space, golf, recreation, and the library. Streetscapes and cemetery maintenance are embedded in our parks department or our parks division. And then senior services is within recreation. This team oversees 20 parks, 1,640 acres of protected open space lands, 20 miles of trails, and lots of community facilities. So the rec center, the library, the senior center, the great outdoors water park, the boathouse at Wanaka Lake, the Indian Peaks golf course, both cemeteries and streetscapes. And you can see there that we are not just funded by the general fund, although that is the primary funding source for our work. General Fund supports the library, parks, rec, and open space. Additionally, the library gets a little bit of support from a nonprofit foundation, the Friends of the Library Foundation. And we'll talk a little bit about a project that they're helping support or some donor-funded projects this year. The General Fund also is where the revenues from programs go. So that's where it lands. The Legacy Open Space Fund is a perpetual quarter cent sales tax that supports the purchase and operations and maintenance of open space and trails. The Parks Open Space and Trails or POST Fund is also a perpetual quarter cent sales tax that is currently funding parks, but open space funds are also eligible. And then the golf course fund, so the Indian Peaks Golf Course is operated as an enterprise fund. And so all revenues and expenses of the golf course land there. So the revenues are generated from the user fees. And then all costs associated with operating the golf course come from that fund as well. We also have conservation trust funds. So those are those lottery dollars that support acquisition, maintenance, and operations of different parks, recreation, and open space facilities. So looking at our focus today and into the future for the library, we have a radio frequency identification tags project that was funded this year. This is getting us up to speed and modernizing our library technology. It's allowing some efficiencies for checking materials in and out, and also supports our future possibilities for remote material pickup, so remote pickup lockers, things like that that we may look at in the future. Next year, the budget request that we had for the library is coming from a dedicated donation, so we had an estate gift in 2019 and we're using that for a makerspace refresh so that technology makerspace is a very popular service that we offer at the library and i think the maximum capacity for that space is 12 people so we're looking at how we can rearrange the space to better serve folks looking into the future we are part of a library consortium and we have a integrated library system library database software program that is going to sunset and Collectively, this consortium is gonna have to replace that. As I referenced earlier, possibilities for things like remote pickup technology at other city facilities, perhaps the new Civic Center or the Recreation Center or within neighborhoods. In recreation, our current focus is heavily focused on the Rec Center renovation project, those community engagements and participating in the design planning. As Heather referenced earlier, we're implementing the fee philosophy and making some of those resident, non-resident fee updates, as well as transitioning to the financial assistance program. Our 2027 budget requests we're very excited about. We currently have a strategic plan that was adopted in 2019, and my, how the world has changed since then. Additionally, we have exciting changes coming to our facility with expanded space, and so This is really the right time for us to engage with community and explore how we should be focusing our services into the future. Our recreation software system where folks register for programs is a little bit dated. We got some feedback during our fee study that the user experience could see some improvements. And so we're looking to modernize and update that software system next year and then looking into the future as we move into the new facility, making updates to our programs, how we utilize space, how we provide service based on community needs and our newly available spaces. And then just maintaining those assets into the future and making smart decisions to support safety and functionality and a long lifespan for those facilities. With parks, open space, and golf, We're excited to participate in the service center renovation design planning as we're going to have our open space team join the parks crews over in that facility. Water efficiency is an enormous focus for us in past years, but especially this year and looking into the future. Open space education, we were able to add a position this year and really grow that program, and that's very exciting. Playground replacement, we've got the Yarrow Park playground replacement that was just approved at the last meeting, Zurich landscaping maintenance. As we've transitioned to Zurich landscapes at our public facilities, it is a lot more labor-intensive, and so we've had to shift and focus resources there. And then, of course, the work on the cemeteries this year. All right. Parks, open space and golf will also be participating in the strategic plan update. Uh, the open space strategic plan is pretty solid and we're going to separate open space from parks and recreation for strategic planning purposes. This go round. We're excited to add an open space ranger funded, uh, from the legacy fund. Uh, we are really just seeing high recreational pressure in our open spaces and having, uh, that additional presence. Uh, there is something that we, um, really do need. And then we're looking at some improvements to the Coal Creek Cemetery. And then just moving forward, strategic investment in historic assets. We've got a lot of historic assets like the Wanaka Centennial Farm. We've got the Wanaka Granary. We've got silos. We've got things that we need to be thinking about how we maintain those moving forward. And then potential future open space land acquisition. The Open Space Advisory Board has identified priorities for potential purchase should they become available. And the golf course and water efficiency are tied together, and so we really are going to be looking into the future of how we have the most sustainable operation possible out at the golf course.

Good evening. I'm Bridget Keating. I'm the economic development director. I'm also fully funded by the general fund. Our operating and personnel is roughly equally split, 50-50. We run the small business capital grant that comes out of our operating budget. We have two full-time positions, and our core functions are really grounded in our economic development and housing strategic plan, where we have people, place, and business-based goals. So our core functions include small business retention, expansion, attraction, especially for minority and small women-owned business enterprises, attracting unique and diverse development, and then also increasing primary employment and also the city's tax base. As far as what we're focused on this year, we have a lot of really exciting projects that are coming online. So 200 North Public Road, this is the former Chase Bank building. We're excited that we're in negotiations right now with the Red Queen Bookstore. to sell that, and we'll be coming back to council for a purchase and sales agreement later this fall. 701 Pocket Park is under construction. So it's small, but it's going to go quickly to be completed later this year. And then my team, especially coordinating with Rachel, is working on Sundance both regionally, internally, and then also within our business community. Our downtown development authority has a new marketing consultant for Old Town. And so we're really excited to get started on some printed and digital assets that will help our businesses engage with Sundance visitors and then also just across the region. We just had our DDA retreat last night and so have a really exciting work plan for next year, including wayfinding and doing a whole new comprehensive plan for that. For the city budget for 2027, we don't have any budget requests, but we are busy within our small business community with our core functions. There's also a lot of key vacancies that we're working with property owners to try to fill. And then there's just some really exciting catalytic investment opportunities within our community. As far as beyond goes, you've heard a lot tonight that a lot of these departments are funded by the general fund. And so we're really focused on always trying to strengthen our key commercial districts and our employment centers. We also have a limited amount of commercial properties left in Lafayette, and so making sure that when we are looking at those and unlocking the potential that they have opportunities to have new sales tax or also property tax. So kind of that north star.

With that, I'm going to turn it over to the facilities. Okay, thank you. Megan Davis, City Manager's Office. I'm going to talk about maybe a lesser-known division, the Facilities Division. We thought it was important to talk about facilities because we're doing so much work around the city's facilities with the capital projects. I'm going to click it now. I didn't know if I was in charge of that. So the city facilities budget is about $1.4 million. And it's about 20% capital projects fund and about $1.1 million general fund. The bulk of the expenses are split between personnel and operating. And then about 22% in capital projects. Within that operating budget, a big chunk of that goes to our core functions of maintaining city buildings, fixed assets, and facilities, and that is a janitorial contract that we have. And then we have other contracts that we have to help, you know, whether it's kind of specialty contracts for plumbing or for doing other maintenance improvements in our facilities and buildings. We have a team of four with three technicians who have special expertise in different areas like HVAC and electric. And then we have a facilities manager. We have a new facilities manager that's going to be starting next Monday we're really excited about. And we've got a great team of techs, and so having new leadership on this team is going to be really exciting. Some of the other core functions include overseeing strategic capital maintenance and replacement for the facilities, working with sustainability around the city facility operations, and then managing the leasing of city-owned lease facilities. In terms of what our priorities are, currently we're working on some boiler replacements at police and court and library and building safety system upgrades. This includes fire safety system upgrades across all the city facilities and then capital project planning with the BBRC and service center. The Facilities team has been involved in a lot of different ways with these projects. First, they're really involved, or they will be even more involved in the system and operational system designs as we get more into the design and construction. And Facilities is currently here at City Hall You probably don't know their offices are kind of like a little Harry Potter office right behind that wall. There's a door and it's almost like a little closet. And they don't really have a good workshop. So they're going to be moving to the service center with all of the other shops. So that'll be a great location. And in 2027, we have a couple of budget requests for generator replacement at the library. We kind of have a cyclical replacement of things like generators as well as our HVAC systems. So we'll be getting new chillers, air conditioning replacements at the police and court. And then beyond, we have been working to develop an asset assessment tool for all of our facilities. And that's been in the works, and we've been testing it out at several of our sites. Our new facilities manager will be working to complete that so that we can continue towards our comprehensive capital replacement plan, which has a lot of detail about each and every aspect of all of our assets, from our mechanical systems to our windows to our carpet and everything up and down and in between. And then also to continue to integrate sustainability into our capital planning and replacement. and also working on the relocation of the new facilities team to the shops. With that, we'll turn it over to Finance.

Mayor and City Council, good evening again.

Heather Bolser, CFO.

So, Finance is fully funded out of the general fund as well, a majority of personnel and then the operating, that's largely for our ACFER and our audit services. We have 10 full-time employees, our core functions, sales tax management and audit, budget preparation and management, just like this evening, and then financial planning, reporting and analysis, contracts and purchasing, and cash and investment management. Our current focus for 2026 were development and implementation of various internal and external financial policies, like the investment policy that you saw previously, upcoming purchasing policies, onboard fully staffed sales tax team, internal technology upgrades, which this includes AP automation, purchasing cards, cash processing. And then capital bond financing as well, which will come before you on September 1st. And then 2027 budget requests. We are requesting with IT, financial enterprise resource planning, and utility billing software implementation. So funding to do that. And then focusing as well on core services and continuation of the capital bond financing. And then in the future, we continue to look at long-term capital planning and financial modeling.

All right. Good evening, council. Pete Bradshaw, fire chief. I think I pay attention. The fire department is largely funded through the general fund. We received some funding from the public safety sales tax, which funds three full-time positions and some capital funds, and then fleet funding from time to time, which we'll talk about a little bit later. Forty-one full-time positions at the fire department. We're fully staffed today, and of those 41, 36 are assigned to 48-hour operations online, so just five of us hanging out in administration. In terms of our focus, kind of three areas to talk about emergency response, which includes EMS quality assurance and all our training. It's a large portion of what we do. We spend some time in community outreach trying to find ways to connect with the community outside of 911. And then our fire marshal's office is incredibly busy doing both ongoing inspections and work on new developments and plan review. So currently, we've invested a lot into our health and wellness program. It's a dangerous job. And taking care of our staff to get them to a happy, healthy retirement is the primary goal of ours. So we instituted, at the end of last year, a new annual physical program, which is highly successful. And this year, we've been focusing on shift change start times. For as long as the fire service has been around, we've come to work at 7 or 7.30 in the morning. And when you're staffed 24-7, you It doesn't really matter what time you get to work. Somebody's always there. So for the last few months, we've been coming in at 10 a.m. The staff has been coming in at 10 a.m., working 48 hours. And later this week, we'll switch to a 7 p.m. shift change. So we're evaluating those through all kinds of metrics in terms of quantity and quality of sleep. And then some more subjective things in terms of work-life balance and family relationships and all that sort of stuff. So pretty excited about that. We funded a training officer position last year. So that position is about one year old. And our training chief, Jason Oliver, is doing a good job. We're building that plane as we fly it. But there's been some good exchange and solid improvement in our overall training program. And then we've been working for the last several months with DTC Architecture on a Station 1 modernization plan. We really didn't know what we didn't know. We just knew the facility was not up to current standards. So we've done some good work with them. That plan is about 80%. So hopefully late this year, early next year, we'll bring that forward to show you kind of the overall plan. And then we'll look for budget opportunities in the out years, probably in a phased approach to make some of those changes over time. In terms of 2027, we're excited to replace our cardiac monitor fleet. Our current fleet ranges from about 6 to 12 years old. So imagine having a computer in your house that's responsible for saving people's lives that's 12 years old. But in fairness, the technology really didn't evolve for quite a while. So the last couple of years, some significant improvements have come up. Most of those are based on crew feedback, lifetime feedback in terms of performance metrics. with CPR and following the new science in terms of cardiac arrest survival rates. So we felt like it was finally enough of an improvement to move forward with those, so we're excited about that. We partnered with Louisville Fire Protection District and Boulder Rural Fire Protection District to bring in a half-time physical therapist starting next year. That kind of has two goals. One of those is to maintain the physical fitness of our firefighters. and also help them get back to work quicker should they be injured either on duty or off duty. So that will be available to them 20 hours a week. And lots of other departments have had success with that. I will say it's not something we could have done individually. So it was nice to have some collaboration with our partners.

What's next?

Fire truck replacement. We budgeted that out of the fleet fund. That was the $1.3 million you saw on the previous slide. That truck will be ordered in 27. It might be here in 29, but it could be as late as 31. It's about a two to four year delivery window. So it's a really complicated factor that my friends in finance have helped me with. So it's a little strange to make an order and not see it for years. Little luck can happen in that amount of time. So we're excited to get that order, at least. Looking into the future, we applied for a direct congressional funding grant through our senator's office to fund and build a training facility on the city-owned property west of the fire station. We're waiting on an award notification for that. Just waiting for the federal government, so I don't know what could go wrong. So as soon as we get that, if it's successful, we'll move that into the 27 budget as a supplemental. That project could be, it's pretty much designed currently with a modular training facility and some confined space rescue props. So we're excited about that. That will not be a live fire facility, so no need to worry about smoke from that facility or runoff from that operation. So it should be a pretty low impact to the neighborhood, but we'll get there if we get that awarded. Union negotiations, the Lafayette Professional Firefighters Agreement, this was a two-year agreement for 26 and 27. So that expires at the end of next year. So we anticipate those negotiations starting in April of next year. And I think one of the things we realized is some of the challenges negotiating as a small municipal fire department in a region that is heavily, is mostly larger fire departments or special district fire departments, presented a bit of a challenge when we tried to get comparables and things like that. So that kind of segues into the last bullet there. We've been looking at regional collaboration and consolidations throughout the metro area. Arvada and Fairmount did a consolidation a couple years ago that turned out to be pretty successful. If you've been watching the news, Mountain View to our north and North Metro to our south. See if I get that right. They've been working toward a consolidation which, if that moves forward, that would be a pretty significant sized fire department, probably one of the top five sized fire departments in the state. So we would be smack dab in the middle of that. So we've had a good relationship with Louisville Fire over the years. Chief Milan came in December of last year. Kevin and I go way back. We were both in the training world back in the day. So we've had some good conversations about, I guess, back at a napkin, what if-ing, talking about what would that look like or is that possible to come together. And then earlier this year, both of our labor groups approached their respective fire chiefs with support, looking for some movement toward consolidation or collaboration. So that made the what if conversations a little more serious. So I guess Chief Milon and I have been asking ourselves, what could we do better together, right? I'm not one for air quotes, but that might be a good usage for them. So we're pretty confident that our cultures and our operations are pretty close. We work together. We train together regularly. We work together every day, sometimes multiple times in a day we respond to calls together. So what we're doing now is we're trying to look at the finances, the current finances, forecasting, At the same time, just kind of keep talking about some items that we would want to talk about if that was a way to go. So I guess we're asking ourselves right now is could it be done? Can we do it? And once we get through that phase, then the next question is should we? Just because we can doesn't mean we should. And so that would be the conversation that would be a lot more people and certainly interested parties from both sides of that and how that would work. There's lots of different ways to do it. But I will say it's an exciting opportunity. It's an exciting discussion both for me as the fire chief and for staff to be maybe part of a slightly bigger organization without losing all of the community character that both organizations have now. So it's an interesting discussion we're having. So yeah, that's it. Thanks for your time tonight. And on behalf of all of us at the fire department, thanks for your support of us and everything we do.

Hello again. Sarah Picolsa, HR Director. So HR, like a lot of departments you've heard from tonight, is fully funded through the general fund. Most of our expenses are personnel, our operating expenses. Some of that is to operate the HR department. A lot of it is actually kind of like we're caretaker funds for the whole city, things like our wellness, career development, rewards recognition. We currently have eight full-time positions in HR. I kind of think of our core service, our core function is to support our employees and our managers so that they can provide the great services that we do to our residents. And what that entails is the typical HR functions like recruitment, benefits, leave, pay, training, class and comp, employee and labor relations. We also have risk management and payroll in our department. Looking right now, we are lucky enough to have a few new staff members in the HR team who have great experience from outside agencies, and we're kind of like leveraging that to just re-look at all of our policies, procedures, and service delivery models. We've been really proud of the updates we've made to payroll this year. Ultimately, we're always looking to strengthening our partnerships with departments and making sure that we're managing the city's risks. As you already heard tonight, a lot of work this year was done on the benefits restructuring. We don't have any significant 2027 budget requests. Ultimately, we're going to be busy with our core functions and always looking to improve. One area that we'll be specifically looking at is making sure we have a great training program for our employees. Looking beyond, we do have, as Chief Bradshaw went over, labor negotiations, not only with fire, but also with our police union as well in 2027. So we're looking forward to supporting the city manager's office in those negotiations. Ultimately, HR is always looking to make sure we have a safe, positive, and inclusive workspace. An organization is always going to grow and change, and we just want to make sure that we are helping our employees and managers adapt. And finally, there's always going to be ongoing changes in federal and state employment laws, and it's our job to make sure that we're in compliance and following those. Thank you.

Good evening, mayor and council members. I'm Ernesto Chavez. I'm your chief information officer. And for our budget, it is all provided by the general fund. About a third of our expenditures are personnel for seven people. The vast majority of the remaining is licensing, maintenance, and contract services to keep everything going. The core functions we provide are technical services for all the technologies that are used across the organization, and you've heard about lots of them that are planned to be improved in the near future. Making sure that all of that is secure and available still, but keeping all of the bad things that could potentially happen from happening is a secondary priority for all of my team members. Project management, as you can imagine, working with all the other departments to make sure that the technology and the projects happen in an organized fashion is a big piece. But as we're doing that, we also look at business process improvement. We work with the departments to evaluate the processes, see how technology either that we have now or that we're looking to implement can be improved to help efficiencies. And as we should be, we're also looking at emerging technology and seeing how does that plan into the future of our city services. Thank you. Right now, we're getting close to going live with our permitting licensing system implementation. We're calling it the online services portal. That will be presented to council next week, so we can talk about that in more greater detail and how that is going to benefit the city and our community. We are also getting close to finishing construction on bringing fiber optics to all of our city facilities, which is going to significantly improve our availability, especially when it rains, because we have issues. And as mentioned before, we have a core case management system that we got funding from the Statewide Internet Portal Authority, and that is moving along quite well. As we start looking into next year, we have the finance and utility billing system upgrade. That's listed as one item right now, because right now it's under a single solution. However, those two, the financial system and the utility billing system, are likely to progress as separate projects that we'll make sure that are integrated appropriately. And along with that, the recreation management system that we've heard about. We also leverage interns with our geospatial information system program. And so each year, we bring in a couple of interns, usually trying to finish a degree program. And they do a lot of great work for us to catch up on projects in that space. So that's been very successful, and we look forward to continuing that effort. And of course, all the technology that we see in front of us. requires maintenance and renewal periodically. So we have a strategy to keep that current. As we keep looking forward, of course, artificial intelligence is a hot topic. And every conference you go to, I guarantee 90% of the conversation about how AI is going to change the world. And it very well could. And we're looking at how we can leverage that technology and adaptations to city services. And it's not in our primary, like, 27, like, viewpoint, but we're evaluating it primarily because we don't do software development. So if we're doing software development, definitely be a much higher priority. But right now we're looking at that environment and waiting for that to mature and to look at how we can best adopt that in a meaningful way for our community. We also are looking at our police records management system to upgrade that eventually. and transition from, to cloud services. So we have about 60 servers that we maintain on site. And as things are transitioning and the costs for equipment are continuing to increase dramatically, we are looking at cloud services, transition those services too.

All right, next slide.

Good evening. Steven Williams, Planning and Building. Planning and Building Department is 100% funded by the general fund. Most of our budget goes to personnel with just under 20% going to operating expenses. When we're fully staffed, we're at 14 staff members. That includes development review, long range planning, affordable housing management, state legislation tracking, code compliance, our building division, which is building permit review and building inspections, as well as historic preservation so our current projects as you know the big one is the land use code update and adoption we're also working with it and other departments on that online permit software implementation we kicked off the south boulder area planning effort earlier this year And we still have a comprehensive plan update to accomplish before the end of the year. The 2027 budget request for next year is fairly nominal. It is in order for us to manage the two single-family homes that we were able to retain as affordable units, and we have that kind of progressing in the next handful of years. That's around $20,000. I think it was $22,000 for next year to manage that program, and we intend to continue to acquire housing to keep that in our housing stock. And so that's what's related to that request. And then beyond, as you know, we'll have additional code amendments and refinements to process, and I'm assuming and projecting inclusionary housing program to implement. So those are future budget requests that we have on the radar. Thank you.

Good evening. Sorry about the voice, but I'm your police chief. So the police department is funded by two funds, general fund and the public safety fund. Mainly the expenses come out of the personnel fund, which is 81% of the budget, and the operating fund, which is 19% of the budget. Police department has 61 full-time employees. Our core functions are patrol division, investigations, animal protection, records management, community outreach, regional participation in SWAT and drug task force, and community policing. Community policing is the most important thing for our agency. That's what we want to do is get out in the community as much as possible. Our current focus is upfitting and replacing department-issued rifles. These are the rifles that were budgeted for this year. They just recently came in, so we are actually upfitting those, getting our officers trained in collecting back the rifles from the 1033 program. We're doing a lot of training at the police department. We've brought in several new employees throughout this last year, trying to get us up to full staff. One of the big things we're doing is revamping our community engagement. We're trying to get our officers out into the community as much as possible. That's why we did the cop talks. That's why we're trying to get into the schools as much as possible to do different programs like e-bikes and anything we can to educate the students. 2027 budget requests. So our main request this year was for animal protection officer supervisor. We have two animal protection officers at the police department, and they are currently supervised by a patrol supervisor. And animal protection is nothing like police work. That is a very important role that it would benefit the department, the city, that unit, in order to have somebody overlooking the animal protection officers so they know exactly what they're doing, so it's not a patrol sergeant or patrol corporal that's overseeing them. The other budget request we have is for Boulder County Victim Advocates. We have used Boulder County Victim Advocates, which has run through the Sheriff's Department ever since I've been here for 27 years. We have used them. And there's never been a fee. But this year, they are adding a large fee for us to use their services. That is for everybody within the county. We did research and looked out to see would it be cost-effective to bring that in-house, and it wasn't even close. It would be cost-effective for us to actually use the Sheriff's Department and just pay their fee, but that is something that we're going to still continue to look at in the future. So beyond, as Ernesto said earlier, we need to look at the replacement of the records management system. We've used the Tyler records management system for about the last 13 years, and it's becoming outdated in time to look for a new system. And beyond that, like I said earlier, we need to evaluate our county services. Each year, the county services seem to be going up. They continue to add different fines or fees for different services that we've never paid for. So we're going to keep evaluating the different services that we currently use. Thank you.

Good evening, Mayor, members of council, Jeff Arthur, Public Works. So Public Works includes five core functions, transportation and mobility, water, which is an enterprise fund. Sorry, transportation and mobility is through the general fund, water, which is an enterprise fund, the water reclamation or wastewater utility, which is an enterprise fund, the stormwater or drainage utility, which is an enterprise fund, and finally, fleet services, which is funded by a variety of funding sources depending on the department. Let's start with transportation. We went into quite a bit of detail at the workshop a few weeks ago, so I'm just going to touch on a few highlights. But our current focus is on the near-term priorities identified in the multimodal transportation plan, and generally that includes completing some foundational plans and studies like the Vision Zero Action Plan, maintenance of our existing transportation access, and integrating safety of multimodal improvements into those asset management projects. For 2027, our primary budget focuses on taking care of those existing assets. As we mentioned in the workshop, earlier this year we completed an updated pavement condition index. The recommended budget for next year is close to what was recommended in that. We hope to secure additional funding opportunities over time, but I think we're able to be in the ballpark of what was recommended and keep those assets on a sustainable trajectory. As we mentioned in the workshop, we have been focusing on what we're calling a one-build approach, which is we integrate safety and multimodal improvements into projects as we rehabilitate those assets to use resources more economically. I'm just going to highlight just one project that falls in that category, which is West Baseline Road. Some of you probably recall that about two years ago, two children were struck by vehicles in crosswalks on West Baseline Road within a 24-hour period. The VSAP was actually already underway at that point, so those data points weren't considered in the VSAP analysis, so we subsequently hired an engineering consultant to initially look at some short-term options, and we implemented some measures last year but then we subsequently commissioned a more comprehensive safety analysis which we wrapped up earlier this year and with that analysis we were able to get agreement from CDOT to allow us to eliminate a vehicle lane beginning at the Colorado 42 intersection which opens up some what we feel are some good opportunities so for those of you who are not familiar with it there's a It's a very wide stretch of road, so it's a long way to cross, and the lane drops at the railroad tracks near the edge of town. So there's a little bit of some interesting things that happen in that area. And by taking that additional lane out, we can shorten crossing distance. It should reduce speeds. potentially allows the opportunity for a buffered bike lane through there as well. And it's a road that needs to be repaved. So by integrating the two together, we think for about an additional $300,000 beyond what it would cost to just go in and repave it, we can actually put it back better and address some of those issues. other highlights of 2027 multimodal maintenance so as we've begun to implement multimodal improvements it does increase our maintenance burden so one of the things we are looking at for next year is funding to hire a contractor to maintain multi-use paths and some of the new sidewalk ramp islands so our current Winter maintenance is essentially dump trucks. And so to get a contractor with a smaller piece of equipment to be able to handle those areas, and then over time as we build out multimodal improvements, that might be something that shifts in-house. But the thought is to initially supplement our resources with contractors for that purposes. The other kind of major thing as we go more multimodal is we now have pavement markings that are different than what we've historically had, and some of them are hitting the end of their useful life, so we've got some funding requested to either contract out rehabilitation of those or to buy equipment. to do more of that in-house. And then finally, you heard a little bit about this when we talked about right-of-way permit fees. But we currently have two engineering field technicians that provide inspection and oversight of city infrastructure projects, land development projects, and private utility projects. So they're pulled in a lot of different directions. So we updated the permit fee schedule this summer to better recover permitting inspection costs from private development and utility projects. And we are recommending adding an additional technician. The benefit of that, help us reduce public impacts associated with construction, more efficient execution of city projects, higher quality infrastructure improvements, and hopefully better restoration by the other parties that damage right away in the process of doing that. The multimodal transportation plan was adopted in 2023. So our intent is long-term. It includes midterm, long-term, and future plans. $40 million or so of projects that are outside of a 25-year horizon. So the intent would be about five years out, and won't necessarily be exact, but to actually go and refresh that, see how we're doing on our progress. I think you heard last month, I think we've made pretty good progress on that near-term plan, but in about that horizon, see where we're at and reevaluate based on our funding and how we're progressing. So that's... The transportation side, I will shift to utilities. Our current focus and really ongoing focus in utilities is regulatory compliance, asset management, taking care of our aging infrastructure. And a biggie, particularly in the waterfront, is climate adaptation. So in our region, we are looking at warmer temperatures and more variable precipitation, both of which create some complications as far as water supply. So for 2027, our plan is to continue to invest in water supply and storage projects. Basically, that improves our ability to store water in wet years to better manage dry years. We are continuing to advance plans for a second water treatment plant. Treatment plants are generally built with multiple trains. It's almost like four treatment plants inside one with the intent that you always want to have a backup. So you should always be able to have one fraction of the plant offline and still meet your demands. We are beyond that point to be able to do that consistently. So we have a lot of days where we have to have the entire plant. running, which is a concern. So we're going to continue to move forward this year with plans to identify a site and move forward with design of an additional treatment facility. Recognizing that those capital investments have huge price tags, we have two budget requests. And to help make sure we're investing as wisely as we can, one of those is to do a updated water rights model. We have a fairly antiquated computer model of our water rights. And it's based on historic record, which is typical of water rights, but the climate is not really a good indication of the future. So to get something that is modern that lets us evaluate a broader variety of scenarios is a pretty critical piece. We're also proposing a water resource analyst. So we have had a lot of emphasis on optimizing our water supply. In 2019 through 2020, we implemented smart meters. So we now have this huge amount of data to really better understand how our customers use water. And with some of the work we've done this summer around drought, I think we have a better understanding of, or opportunity to better understand what tools encourage water efficiency in which things may be able to have long-term impacts. So we think it's a worthwhile investment to really dig into that data and ideally it helps us make better decisions about how much additional storage capacity we need for the future. And then the Water Reclamation Fund, there's a request for additional funding to make sure we stay in compliance related to industrial discharges. There's some state regulations that we need to keep up with. And beyond that, it is more of the same. Climate is going to continue to be a challenge in the the water world, aging infrastructure. Particularly, we've done a lot of work over the last few years related to our water system. Our wastewater and stormwater pipe networks have some similar challenges that we intend to pursue. And finally, we have a lot of major regional water projects that are nearing completion, but that will be a lift to get over the finish line.

Thank you.

Good evening, council. Last but not least, we have the sustainability department. I am Elizabeth Bocon, and I'm the sustainability director. The sustainability department is 100% funded by the general fund. You can see the expense budget split between personnel and operating. It's almost a 50-50. We have two full-time positions. We're a small but very mighty team completing the core functions. The core functions are divided up between external, so community-facing, as well as internal. Some of those external functions include implementing the climate action plan, building community resilience, and providing community programming, outreach, education, and partnerships. Some of those internal functions include supporting city projects, departments, and operations, as well as grant management. The sustainability department has many projects we are working on at once, but I wanted to focus on three for this presentation. The first is the tree canopy inventory. I'm very excited about this. It will be a comprehensive look at the health of our tree canopy, and it will allow us to have a proactive approach to maintaining our urban forest. Next we have the electric vehicle infrastructure expansion. You may recall earlier this year we hosted a electric vehicle ribbon cutting for our public facing chargers. We still have some chargers that will be installed later this year at the service center to support our fleet electrification. And lastly, we are working closely with Power Ahead Colorado on seeing if there are opportunities to enhance the existing incentives for electrification in existing buildings. While the department does not have any 2027 budget requests, we are committed to maintaining the services and programs for our community, as well as enhancing the partnerships internally, specifically with the capital bond projects and the new addition of the facilities superintendent which I'm very excited about. And we are continually searching for grants that align with our department's scope as well as other city projects. We do have some anticipated revenue already in 2027, including the statewide bag fee revenue. as well as continued financial support from Boulder County to support our Growing Shade program. The Growing Shade program, as you may recall, was a pilot earlier this year that helps with enhancing our community's tree canopy program, specifically in disproportionately advantaged census blocks. Looking beyond, we are continually working on extended producer responsibility. We are anticipating some reimbursement from that program. So we, more to come, more information to come, but we are anticipating that revenue later in 2027. We also have identified more opportunities to support the regional charging network for electric vehicle infrastructure, as well as fleet electrification. We have three potential sites that we are going to be installing EV chargers in 2027 and 2028. With that, I will turn it back over to CFO Balzer.

Thanks. That's everyone. So all those 2027 requests that were discussed are in attachment A in your packet that was sent out today. So you have that complete list in there. So next steps, September 18th, you'll get the recommended budget. The budget book will come to you all. And then September 22nd is the CIP tour. And then October 6th, we'll have our first reading on the budget appropriation and first reading for fees. And then October 20th, we'll have budget hearing number two with the second reading for the budget appropriation, adoption of the pay plan, adoption of general improvement districts, and adoption of the DDA 2027 budget. So that's next steps. And I'm going to turn it over to questions.

Great. I know there's questions. Who wants to start? Councilor Jensen.

Do you want me to ask just a couple and then go on to somebody else?

Honestly, no. I would prefer you just go through all of them and we hit one councilor at a time.

And we're not going to have staff come back down here so they'll just get kids from the dais. Otherwise it'll get real messy. And

Some of my questions are just trying to understand, because I haven't been through this before, just so I know what's going on. And I don't have a goal. I'm not trying to accomplish anything. I just want to get it. So you mentioned interpreters in the court. This is for Lynette. I had the experience of being in a civil court at one point where there were no interpreters on civil matters. Do we have interpreters for civil matters or only criminal?

I don't think we handle civil matters in municipal court, so just for criminals.

Okay. So if someone was evicting someone, they wouldn't go through the city court?

No.

Okay. All right. Well, then that's a good one. Community-wide survey. This is Erin. Don't play musicals. Oh, sorry. We have heard some feedback from the public about our surveys that we're missing, that we're getting mostly homeowners, that we're missing Spanish speakers, we're missing maybe the single parent who's working long hours. And I just want Maybe as we do a community-wide survey, one idea I was thinking of is if we maybe have an advisory group of some of those marginalized groups who are left out of our surveys so that the data isn't, we get kind of accused of not being very representative. And I'd like to make sure we do whatever we can to make that be representative. So that's more of a comment than a question. Okay, Melissa, on the open space funding, we have some tension between parcels that open space has identified that would be a good parcel for open space, but that are also people want to develop on them, and it would be You didn't mention this in your presentation, and you may not have it at your fingertips, but knowing where we are and how much, like, we're getting a lot of comments about 8600 baseline, which is on the open spaces list. How close is OpenSpace to having the money to purchase this would be a really good thing for us to know, or how high a priority it is. I don't have that access to that. Just a little more information about where OpenSpace is with these individual parcels and how... how they prioritize them and how they might fund them in the future so that as we are getting feedback, don't develop this, it should be open space, we know whether there's a realistic chance of that ever happening in the near future. So at some point, especially as that particular property gets developed, it'd be really useful to know more about that process. Bridget, my question is, we have had some comments from people in the community about the land use code and its impact on different small businesses. Is there a vehicle of the businesses that you work with where They are connected. Maybe people who are not members of the chamber, who are just so small that they don't do that kind of thing. Is there a way that we talk to our small businesses about upcoming things like that so that they have an opportunity to say, this will impact me positively or negatively? How does that work?

So for projects in general, we work closely with the communications team just to try to get the word out through different formats. We also have partnerships with the Boulder Small Business Development Center and the Latino Chamber of Commerce, and we and our Chamber of Commerce to try to get the word out about different initiatives. Within the OWN Economic Development Department, we have a small business newsletter that goes out quarterly. We also have a small business list, where if we want to get the word out about something specifically, we can email them. We have our business licensing list. With the Land Use Code in general, they did a comprehensive outreach approach. They also had their land use working group that had members of different boards and commissions, including a member of the Urban Renewal Authority. So we have different tools for different sorts of outreach.

OK. Thank you. Ernesto. Given the community's concern about data centers, moving 60 servers to the cloud in light of that, knowing that that will be hosted at a data center, I just wonder what your thoughts are about that and whether we are part of the problem, given that the community seems to not want to have a data center.

Sure. So the way that I look at that is a couple of reasons. One is I guarantee that the consumption of resources is higher in my small closet of servers than it will be in a big data center. And also, every time we purchase software that's SaaS-based, it's using data center resources. None of our products are utilizing data centers in our region for the most part. In the United States or the northwest or the north central or central part of the United States, yes, we all establish data centers. So generally not. I think our consumption is really small as well. relative to major corporations. So I would say that if we're looking at a sustainability standpoint, we're probably going to be using less resources by consolidating into these data centers and also making the availability of the services we provide a lot more survivable in case there's ever an event.

Thank you. steve uh williams um so you mentioned the regional housing uh compliance contract and i think you said 22 000 for that and is that with the city of boulder is that through their program where we've been working with them to do that yes it is with the city of boulder and it is for management is what i needed to clarify so we the acquisition we had a different pool of money and we used close to

close to our budget, which is $750,000 to acquire those two properties. But it's the rehabilitation and then the future management of those properties that is that $22,000. Right. I get that.

But I understand that that program that the city of Boulder has that helps multiple communities throughout the region had some ARPA dollars that are going away. And so we're tapping into a service that already exists, and we're just paying a little piece of it. Does it have long-term funding source? Has it been given any money to continue so that we can purchase our little $22,000 piece of it?

We're expecting it to continue. I don't know whether or not there's a funding shortage on their side. So nothing's been communicated to me on that front.

Okay, well, I'm communicating to you right now that that's ARPA dollars, and I don't think the county has renewed it.

The shortfall for this year for that $22,000 was because we were projecting the county to be fulfilling that and us not having to pay for a couple years. That's the extent that I understand at this point. This is something Phil's been managing, but I'm happy to follow up on it.

I think it needs a little bit. Thank you. The tree canopy inventory. I'm familiar with the one we just did, which was more in the... disadvantaged communities area. But when we say we're inventorying, are we inventorying the whole town?

So we're not inventorying every single tree in Lafayette. We are prioritizing alleyways as well as public trees in public-facing facilities, including parks and our golf course.

And so could you explain if what the purpose of the tree canopy is to try to help us keep our land cool with trees? Could you just explain to me what this inventory is trying to accomplish?

Yeah, so this inventory will assess the health of trees. We do have an issue of emerald ash borer in our community. So if there is a tree that's dying off or there is a tree that has too low of an overhang or has another issue that's impacting the sidewalk or other infrastructure, we will be notified of that with every single tree that the consultants have visited and assessed.

And is it to our benefit, climate-wise, to help people, just an average person in our community whose tree might be suffering from drought or other issues, to help them maintain their trees? Does it help the whole city if people's trees in their yard are healthy?

Yes, so that is part of what Growing Shade, the program that we piloted this year, not only do we provide trees to those individuals that receive them, but they also get emails about maintenance and they also receive tools to properly take care of their trees. We just met earlier today and there is 100% survivability of the 80 trees that were planted in that census block.

So would it be our intention then in the future to do this with the whole city, to help everybody who has trees who might need some help or whose trees are old or just struggling because of water?

Yes, so we are exploring other opportunities. We are hosting a building community resilience workshop specifically on tree tundering later this year to help those residents be informed of how to properly take care of their trees. And we are looking at expanding the growing shade program to a different section of the city as well.

Okay, that's all my questions.

Thank you.

Great, thank you. Councilor Gallegos.

I have a question for Director Williams about the automation of permitting and licensing. And I'm curious about the costs associated with bringing that online and when that can be expected.

So I've been working on that project, and we've been doing all the contracting for that. I don't have the numbers handy. However, I'll make sure that's included in next week's presentation. But we're planning right now to do a soft launch September 14th and a complete launch on September 25th.

Great. Thank you.

Councillor Juneau.

Thank you, Mayor. I have a handful of questions. I'd like to start with Deputy City Manager Davis and talk about facilities quickly. You mentioned there's a maintenance plan for the buildings and capital assets. I'd love to get a view of that and maybe talk a little bit about deferred maintenance, what maintenance has been kind of kicked down the road, and what are we trying to catch up on? I don't know that I need an answer right now, but I'd love to have some insights into that kind of going forward. And then I also wanted to ask about the library generator. I didn't know the library had a generator. Can you just talk a little bit more or...

Yeah. I mean, the library doesn't have a generator, but the library will. So about three years ago, the city started to look at where we have generators and where we don't. And so we have had generators clearly at our most critical facilities. So at our water infrastructure facilities, water treatment facilities. As a part of our emergency preparedness and our resiliency planning, we wanted to look at what other facilities might be necessary to be prepared to respond. We've been looking at resilience hubs and where we might need staff access. potentially community access. And so we did look at improving our generator kind of infrastructure and our ongoing ability to have the resources that we need both for our staff to facilitate ongoing staffing during those types of events and also potential community access during those events. And so we did upgrades and new generators at Service Center, some at Goose Haven, and Fire Station 1, I think, is getting a replacement this year. We were planning to get one at the Senior Center. We decided to wait on that until, and the Rec Center as well, until we complete those, the projects that are happening. And then we're getting one at the library this year.

Excellent. Thank you so much. Director Heisel, I'll move to you next. Tell me a little bit more about the Open Space Ranger. What will they do? How will they be utilized? Very excited about this.

Yeah, we're excited about it, too. They'll be non-commissioned. So they will not be post-certified. They won't be full law enforcement officers. They will have a background in natural resource management. And so there's a little bit of an education component. But it's the enforcement of those rules on open space, engaging with folks,

things like that the program is still to be developed okay great um director keating's or maybe cfo balser i'm not sure i wanted to talk a little bit about the sunset of laura and its tiff and how that is impacting the city's budget

So I can start, and then Heather can jump in. RTIF expired in October 2024. It had a 25-year lifespan. It was established in October 1999. And with that, the base, or the entire base and the increment was put back into the general fund. With the DDA, we now have a new base that was set, which is roughly $1.6 million. And so the city will now be getting that base of 1.6 every single year. Before they were only getting 300,000, so it was a big leap. And now moving forward, any increment above that base will be going towards the DDA.

Okay. So the base was accounted for in a couple years ago budget at this point, so we're not seeing any increase because of that? Correct. Okay. Thank you. Just a couple more. Director Arthur, can you talk to me about the water reuse pipeline? I see it's a recurring. Big line item budget. Tell me a little bit more about that.

So a number of our water rights are decreed for reuse. Not all of them, but a portion of what we've put back in Coal Creek. we can reuse. So the way that works is if we actually don't physically reuse it, we exchange it. So basically, when we put water into the creek, we can take a like amount upstream at our diversion, which is all the way up at 75th Street. And so when we can't do that is if somebody in between is in priority. So what is proposed, and we've been working at it in pieces because it's a long pipeline and there's property acquisition easement stuff. Basically, we would be able to take treated effluent from the water reclamation plant pump it to Goose Haven. One of the reservoir cells that's under construction there is designated for that purpose. We would then release that strategically into the creek, which would then allow us to divert at 75th Street, even when there were water rights in priority in between. And so that will basically improve, meaningfully improve the yield. our existing water rights. It's an expensive project. And we have a lot of things in the works. So it's sort of going piecemeal. But we're not done woodwork. We're close to wrapping up things up at Coos Haven. So we agree.

And that's an expense we'll continue to see every year for that project?

So it wasn't until it's done. Yeah, so we've been doing it in pieces. So like a piece got built through Parkdale. So we just still have some missing pieces along the way to complete the rest of the way down.

Thank you so much. Continuing on water. Can you help me understand the fee increase for water? I thought we had gone through these really big fee increases over the past couple of years to kind of catch up. And now I see we're looking at another 17, I think, percent increase.

So yeah, what? What was identified last year when we did this study? So we've been looking at these. When we do a study, we look at multiple years to try not to bunch it all up at once. So what was projected last year was 16% in the water fund, 9% in water reclamation, 8% in storm. What we're actually seeing in terms of numbers, in terms of construction cost escalation and revenue probably points to something upwards of that as being prudent to avoid bigger increases in future years, but just reluctant to do that without having a comprehensive study and without having good data on how the rate structure performed in a drought. So, yeah, the intent would be to stick with that. It may mean that we're talking about bigger increases next year. But until we get some of these major water projects kind of settled and financed and ideally as we get projects completed, we will be able to shift water dedication to cash in lieu or actually rolling those costs into tap fees. So some of those, so when we debt finance projects, if they have a growth benefit as new users come in over the life of the debt service, ideally the revenues from those tap fees pays the debt service, assuming that the growth and the financing remain relatively compatible. We're probably in for a few more years to keep things stabilized. But again, as we get clear costs, the hope is that it moves to more of a water CPI-type index, where it's just keeping up with the cost of goods and services. Thank you.

Last question for Director Chavez. I want to ask about the municipal network. kudos for rolling out fiber to the city facilities. Has there been any discussion about expanding this community wide? I know maybe it was probably 10 years ago when the voters authorized the city to do municipal broadband. And I don't know that we've had a whole lot of discussion about that. Any thoughts or comments you could share?

Sure. So a couple of things. One is as we're building out this network, we're adding extra conduit that may not necessarily provide service to residents. However, it could be pathways for other commercial vendors to provide that service to others in a less expensive way. And we would lease that access at that point. I have watched and observed and researched and analyzed potential options for providing municipal-based internet services. And so far, the communities that are successful with that own their electric company. And so that's kind of a significant piece to being able to successfully transition to that kind of service. that is lacking in our community. And so although I continue to encourage vendors to consider our community and we're clearly adding infrastructure that might be able to be leveraged in the future, it's not something that we're pursuing right now.

Okay. Kind of on that same topic, you know, we are having some broadband rollout. I think Intrepid has been doing fiber project. I don't know if you know the answer, but there's a whole chunk of like South Lafayette that's not even on the horizon as far as I'm aware. Anything that you know that we don't know?

I know that it's not on their work plan. And so I can confirm that. And that's one of the challenges of working with commercial companies, that they're economically driven. And they're primarily looking at density and availability of other infrastructure. I do believe that as time goes on, availability will increase because that becomes opportunity for another company and for them to expand. But right now, I have not seen that in their plans.

Yeah, I'm disappointed. I think the community that's over by the fire station is really underserved. And it's high density over there, too.

Correct. There is a website that I'll provide to you all. And you can look up your address and look at what kind of internet services are available. It's not always fantastic, but it does list satellite services and other options that are available as well. So I think that can be considered for some residents. Thank you.

I'll also add, because the city has limited influence over where they can do it, we're encouraging residents, as we're getting questions, to contact Intrepid or their providers to advocate for them as well, because it is a challenging position that the city doesn't have much influence.

That's it for me. Thanks. Any other questions from other counselors?

Thank you. First off, thank you all so much. This was really fun, particularly for a few of our first municipal budget meeting. You mentioned, Katie, that it's been done differently before. I love doing it this way. So I don't know what was done in the past, but this was really enjoyable. And I know that we, of course, post the video online, but I really hope a lot of the community looks at this and sees where their tax dollars go and the really cool programs underway. So with that, a few of the questions I wanted to raise have already been brought up, so I'll just borrow in. So first, Clerk Beck, the point you made on AI filings of the open records requests, I imagine that's probably something that a lot of other communities and clerks are grappling with. Is there any kind of additional resource or regional strategy to dealing with a substantial increase in AI-generated requests? Or are we all kind of figuring it out as we go?

No, so I'm talking about AI-generated court filings, so motions. Oh, OK. I misunderstood.

OK, good. Well, I'm going to please delete what I just said. OK, great, wonderful. Following up on the Open Space Ranger concept, can you expand a little bit more in terms of the relationship with our police department, with Boulder County Open Space? And I take your point that they're non-commissioned. But we'd just love to see how that meshes together.

Yeah, we anticipate collaboration between all of our partners in open space. Again, it hasn't been determined quite how that will work yet. The chief and I have had some preliminary conversations, but we're looking forward to digging in a little bit deeper.

Super cool. Very excited about that. Let's see. I wrote build on Councilor Giannullo's dot, dot, dot. Following Councilor Gallegos' question on the time frame for permitting and streamlining, heard from a number of small businesses and other local developers that Lafayette is a bit slower than some of our comparable municipalities. I take the point, as you raised, Steven, last week, that sometimes we don't always get 100% application, so some kind of squish in between. But I guess I'm wondering, are there additional resources that your team needs or authorities or whatnot in order to respond to that concern? Because it has been sort of a perennial thing raised with us that, gosh, life gets just a bit slower than our neighbors.

I think it's kind of comprehensive, right? We're taking an approach where we're trying to make process improvements. We're trying to, well, the software system's going to help, but the actual code, and there's been a question that was raised by the Planning Commission at the end for us to come back and kind of summarize where we're moving the needle in terms of efficiencies. So I think relative to some communities, we have a lot more applications that have to go through a public hearing process. And that's one of the main things that slows things down. But it depends on who's bringing up the issue, because sometimes the response is that's been in their court longer than they've actually divulged. Or there's been some other issue that's actually kind of hung up the application. So sometimes it's design, getting into design details, and then other times it's a bigger issue where they're trying to have a zoning change and we feel differently about it than they do.

So that's probably not the exact answer you're looking for, but we are, I think, getting more efficient. When I started, we were in

probably like a 18th month kind of backlog of applications, and we're kind of happy to say that it sounds awesome, but we are working on applications that came in this year, which is not something we've been doing in the last handful of years. So we are catching up, but until we're operating at what your normal level would be, which is we're taking in applications as we've received them and not trying We've been working on fixing applications that have been entitled for a certain amount of time, too. It's hard to assess how quickly we can function until we're back at a normal stasis, and I think we're getting close to there. The code update and the software update

Thank you, Director Williams. Chief Bradshaw, you noted that the ordering process for a new engine, you push go and it might arrive in two to four years. I completely believe you. Can you help me understand a little bit more how that works?

Why or how? Both. Yeah, OK. So we experienced a backlog in COVID, and we have never recovered from that. The orders kept coming, and the building kind of stopped for a while. So that's what the manufacturers will tell you. There have been congressional hearings on it, It's a pretty big issue. The way it works for us is, and maybe Heather might need to jump in here, is once we purchase, we allocate the funds, and then we roll those over year to year to year. So we purchased a tower ladder in 23. It's scheduled to be here at the end of this year. So it's shown up in every budget since that time. And so it's a little complex, and it's a lot of moving parts. That's kind of how it works, is we just keep carrying that financial commitment for multiple years. So lots of discussion recently about the fleet fund and how that complicates the issue. And I won't steal any of Director Arthur's thunder, but it's not too far different from snowplows and backhoes and boom trucks. There's a lot of backlog in the whole specific vehicle ordering system. Does that answer your question?

It does, yeah. Thank you. It's a tough problem. And just for what it's worth, I love the idea of the collaboration with Louisville. So just incredible. I love all that. I think, Mayor, my final question will be, we've been Director Heisel, we've been looking at kind of the Lamont-Dowes water park and then referring to the ballot, the tax notion. I'm wondering how kind of corporately we incorporate maintenance into each of our individual departments' budgets, recognizing some departments are very large and some are a bit smaller, but just trying to think about sort of philosophically how do we think of maintenance and carving out resources for that maintenance, both in the immediate term and then the emergency, but then also kind of the more long-term strategic, as Director Arthur noted.

Yeah, I think the deputy city manager can also assist with this question. The more specialized facility components have been part of the planning of those departments that operate those facilities, and then we've just started having larger conversations about how we manage those capital assets.

I think we have... Before talking about the facilities, the facilities division manages about 40 facilities. So it's everything from the large kind of public-facing facilities to the smaller facilities like the museum and Sister Carmen that we actually lease out. so those those facilities are we have on regular maintenance cycles and so that's everything from just you know sort of managing the day-to-day maintenance and also looking at what the replacement would be and what any you know deferred maintenance might be and so right now the way that we manage that and the way it's been managed over time is we do have an asset management system and so but it's fairly new I mean it's been within the last probably three years that they've been using an asset management system to put in, you know, kind of all the requests and tickets and to sort of track all of that. And so what we're really looking to do is get a more kind of sophisticated way to do an annual kind of conditions assessment, facility conditions assessment for all of our facilities. And this is, the facilities team is really looking at everything within those walls. including the BBRC and including the library. BBRC is a little unique because they have the aquatic systems and the aquatic systems are managed by the aquatics team, but is to really look at every one of those pieces and to kind of see what the condition is and is it, you know, 75% to replacement and then to be able to plug in and then have a plan for you know This is your one. This is your three. This is your five. This is your nine or whatever so that's kind of where we're working towards and You know we're hoping our new facilities Manager is going to be able to help us get that a little further along so we kind of have the tool We just have to get it put into place

Wonderful. Thank you. And you mentioned BBRC. Huge kudos for the event. I went to the event for the Bob Berger Rec Center on Saturday at the Senior Center, and it was outstanding. Really, really well done. That's all for me, Mayor. Great. Thank you. Mayor Protel?

Sure, yeah. My turn?

Your turn.

Three questions. Number one, do I understand correctly that, I think I'm going to answer this, that we are... for the people who are maintaining the grass along 287, cutting the grass. And I know we need funding to support maintenance of our xeriscaped land. Is it possible to stop cutting the grass on the highway and redirect those resources to taking care of our xeriscaped surfaces?

We are looking kind of holistically at how we manage those things. You may have noticed we have been significantly reducing the amount of water that we are providing to the areas along 287. So we are exploring different ways to balance.

I'd love to see the grass get longer on the highway and zero scape manage. Second question. In the community-wide survey for communications, did I hear that it's not going to impact the budget that you have?

Yes. I reallocated existing funding from my continuing budget towards that.

Love it. Last question. Doctor? You're awesome, Director. As we upgrade all of these management tools and the software, do they handshake with each other? Or is that another tranche of now we have to get software to get these new management systems to talk to each other? Should we expect additional software needed just to get them with each other?

I will say that given our current inventory of software solutions, we should not need an intermediate software solution to do data transfers. When we're selecting products, we're putting a priority on their ability to interconnect automatically, and to be honest, it's a mixed bag of results, because sometimes it's okay, sometimes it's pretty good, but I don't anticipate that we'll need a separate system just to manage that. One of the things with the financial system that we do now is the bare minimum is being able to do a download and an upload. And so even though there's some manual pieces to that, it's still a lot more automated than trying to copy from one system to another. And then we have other systems that integrate with, for example, our GIS system pretty well. And we'll see that with our online support portal where we're actually pulling data from our GIS system into that system and being able to utilize that.

That is so cool. That's all I got. That's why I said doctor. Yeah, doctor.

Great.

Any other questions, thoughts from council?

Thoughts, but not questions.

Please. Councillor Jensen.

Two things I'd like to think about changing the way they're currently done. One is that we fund the homeless shelter through a competitive grants program. and we according to uh information i've gotten from them about 4.1 percent of their population is from mafia i don't have data i had asked for but they didn't get it to me yet about what that costs them to deliver the services and i that's why i don't have that yet they told me it's more than the grant that we currently give them which is 25 000 or at least i i don't want to presuppose that they will get that grant again this year because it's a competitive grant program but I would like to figure out a way to budget for that since we have and also it's self-reported information right so the people in the shelter give their address as Lafayette and Nobody checks on that to make sure. But that's 4.1% of that self-reported information is that they are using that shelter. So I feel like it's incumbent upon us to do our share and help the shelter regularly. And if that changes over time and there's only 1%, then it might be less that we would fund the shelter. But I would like to switch over the way we fund the shelter to a regular grants line. And I don't know. how to do that or to suggest that or recommend that. And I'd just love to talk about how we could do that.

I have thoughts, but I'd love to turn to staff and just see initial thoughts on this.

Yeah, sure. If Council's interested in turning into just an ongoing non-competitive grant, we do have that in the Mental Health and Human Services Fund already for our Sister Carmen annual. So they have both an ongoing $25,000 that we've given for as long as I've been around. And so when we got that grant, that dedicated tax, we moved it into there. And then they also do apply for specific program competitiveness. So it's just a policy choice for Council if they want to make that of, how they want to approach it. But we do have funding in that fund. It's been a really healthy fund since it was established. So it's a policy choice rather than a financial choice.

Great. Thank you. OK. I have a couple of thoughts here. First is I love the idea, first and foremost. I think it's something we should be doing. However, I have concerns. And I'll open it up to council here in a second. But my main concern from removing them from the competitive process is that we're just going out of our way to remove one single entity from the competitive process instead of looking at this holistically, right? If I have a relationship with a different nonprofit, can I then pull them and say, well, they should also be removed from this competitive process? What I would love to see is just kind of a more equitable way of doing this. And maybe as we look forward, maybe a 2027 project or further, something where we could start looking at the relationships we do have in the organizations that our city already does a lot with and maybe start looking at a better way to implement this across the board rather than just kind of picking one out of the blue right now and saying, well, let's move this one over to this side and everyone else stays on the competitive side. But I'd love to hear if any other councilor has ideas on this.

You know, we have the Mental Health and Human Services Committee, and typically they only meet for the grant term length, whatever, window. And so it could be something if you want to task them, they're going to be back in November with the recommendations, task them with exploring between the next grant cycle. I know that they've brought up the city of Boulder does like multi-year grants. That way it's less administrative burden to do this every year. So I know that they do have some ideas both on the process, but they could maybe also advise you on the efficiency of whether we just establish a core group, whether we have a little bit of both. That could be an option if you want to, if council wants to have them look at that and what others do.

Is that something council would be on board with? I do

appreciate the competitive, that there are people that they compete for the funding because the landscape keeps changing. I don't want anyone to not, any of those services to not be funded. And I do think the board that looks at who is requesting what is very thoughtful about that process. So I would be careful before we take anyone and have any of the people being funded and have a specific ongoing item.

I guess I'll ask, is there any council that's against the idea of this board looking at this for a potential future? I think we'll go forward with that. And you had a second thing.

My second thing is that Councilor Barnes and I were at a meeting where there was some conversation about increased coyote activity on open space. And it could be that drought and climate change is changing the patterns of the way coyotes get their food. But I was told last week that seven dogs were recently killed by coyotes, and that people who live along open space are very reluctant to have their dogs in their yards because they will hop the fence and go after the dogs. And so we've got the new ranger coming in, and it seems to me this could be a function for that new ranger to work on. And I really don't even know if you know carl around parks and wildlife has to get involved or who actually has authority over coyotes i mean the best we can do is note for our public where there's aggressive coyotes where there's increased activity make sure we inform them i'm not sure we actually can do anything about the coyotes but i would love to have this park ranger person look into this

yeah so that is we have seen some unusual behavior this year we do you know trail closures which is what we had done this year the the incidents i think you're referring to were happening kind of on the eastern most trail at rothman open space so lots of public engagement trail closures colorado parks and wildlife does have that authority over that and right now what they're telling us is that they are not They are not terribly concerned, and they think some of that behavior has died down. It was a mother with pups, and they have moved on a bit. But yeah, the ranger would certainly be involved in things like that.

Can I add on that? This is not just happening in open space. This is happening in private, I don't know what to call it, civic space, trying to stick with the land use. It's an undeveloped HOA outlot. I live near one of those, and I see coyotes there. You know, is it an informational? I don't know how the Open Space Ranger might get involved with those kinds of things, but maybe it's an education component.

Great. Any other thoughts from the council on this one? Great. I have one, and it's a very direct question. I think it's for Director Arthur, so I apologize. We talked about Wanaka Landing at the last workshop. It came up through the transportation update. We looked at a specific project through that. So going back a little bit, last November, I believe it was, We looked at this project. It was brought up through the past council, through the past mayor, as something that we should prioritize for the multilateral transportation plan and the Vision Zero action plan. And at the time, the council approved, let's move forward with this and let's look at this in the view of the holistic plans. We saw it then at the last month's transportation update. However, I just want to hear from you. When we look at the one-build philosophy and when we talk about near-term, mid-term, and long-term projects, where does that kind of fall for us? So that plan specifically, where does it fall for us? What is the feasibility of something like that happening, either within this budget or a budget in the near term?

So it is... relatively low in the Division Zero plan. Again, that focuses on areas where we've had people get hurt or killed. In a lot of cases, those are pedestrians and bicycles, just because when there are crashes, that tends to be where the injuries are. So there are a lot of things that are in line ahead of it. probably what we recommend is the most likely scenario is when we get to the point and it's a few years out but when it's time to repave that street you know we're not going to go in and put it back the way it is if it needs to be updated but the cost to go in and do a specific project there when the existing infrastructure is generally and has more life in it. It's costly. It's that $400,000 that we talked about as a rough estimate. And it definitely is a concern, but to move it up and do it sooner than that, it would be jumping ahead of a lot of projects. And again, those projects also have residents and have stories and have crashes that cause them to have the higher ratings. So we just want to be sensitive to if we did move it up, it's taking funding away from other things that are also areas of concern.

Okay, I'm going to dig in just a little bit further on what you just said, which is the funding part and kind of prioritizing but rather reprioritizing and using the funds for this. But those funds come from somewhere else because we have a limited budget. So let's talk about what's at the top. Let's say that for whatever reason this council today decided this was a project that we wanted to spearhead. We wanted this right now, nothing else. What would go away in the real terms?

I might have to look to the the city manager for that. I mean, if it was going to come from existing transportation funds, it would essentially be we would have to take a street that is due to be repaved and put that off, which then risks that that street goes from needing a chip seal or a mill and overlay to needing a full reconstruction, which, and I don't mean to be totally gloom and doom, but there's potentially a series of events that happens that then that project that was going to be $400,000 that we take the $400,000 away and that project now becomes an $800,000 or $12,000 project when we do get to it and it sort of cascades from there. But I mean really the only place where I think there's those kind of dollars would be taken away from the asset management resources. We don't really have, I mean we could, We could shift the funds that we identified for West Baseline. But again, that was also a council priority and was an area where we had two kids get really severely injured in a crosswalk. So I would be reluctant to move it away from that. And again, as we're in that first phase of Vision Zero, all the projects that are in those upper tiers are ones where really bad things have happened.

I know he gave city manager an opportunity to add on. Did you have anything there?

No, I would say the most discreet project that we have in the 2027 budget is that West Baseline project, where it is much more than just like a paving project. So it would be a full thing that would translate more towards what we're looking at for the Wanaka Landing. So again, council's prerogative. I mean, we're really proud that this budget doesn't utilize the fund balance. So I would be reluctant to recommend that. But again, you guys drive the budget. And so it's up to you. up to council on how they want to prioritize.

Okay. I appreciate the answer. Councillor Giannullo.

Yeah, just on that same topic, you know, are there, you know, besides, you know, kind of a repaving type project, are there low-cost things that we could try, like a striping, alternative striping kind of thing to address some of the community's concerns? And could those things be prioritized? differently than a full kind of infrastructure of the road?

We did look at that early on. We generally start with what's the quick, simple, easy thing. The problem is there's three or four different things going on there, and they all play off each other in tricky ways. So there's some concerns about speeding, and on-street parking actually reduces speeding. there is a lot of pedestrian activity the way the social trails and the paths have evolved over time they're not where the crosswalks are they're at the curve so that's something that needs to so if we take out so for example if we took out the parking it would address the concerns about the parking but it would likely decrease pedestrian safety and increase speeds which so mean what we landed on with the consultant was kind of our best guess is something that would fix the list of concerns without just causing a different one you know there are things potentially you can, rather than putting in permanent concrete curve, you can put temporary curve in. Doesn't really have the same benefit at a crossing, because you don't necessarily feel safe behind it the way you do when you're outside of the road. It doesn't necessarily slow people down the same. But that would be a piece of it. A big chunk of the cost is to move the social trails in particular where they ought to be. It's going to require some grading, so some costs associated with that. There's costs associated with putting a streetlight across and should have a streetlight. You could not do that, but it's, again, not not ideal, not best practice, and potentially makes things worse. So yeah, I wish there was a quick, easy, simple thing. And if there was, we would have done it several years ago. What we came up with was after several years working with two different consultants, and it was in our professional judgment the best solution for this suite of issues.

Great. Any other thoughts on this, or Councilor Jensen?

I just have a question. Director Williams, you mentioned that your department is completely general fund. So when an entity applies for a permit, they don't pay anything for that? There's no dollars exchanged in that process? No.

It depends on the application. planning fees are generally fairly low and that's a bulk of our lift but they pay a development review fee that goes into the general fund and then they pay a building permit fee once they get to the building permit stage so there are fees they just aren't separated out into funds for planning purposes and when you get a project that

needs a lot of work and is kind of rough and you have to spend more staff time on it. Does there anything in the fee structure that incentivizes somebody not to give you those kind of plans? How do we help so that the staff work that you have to do can be reflected in the fee structure?

I think the best practice on that is to have a resubmittal fee after your standard number of reviews. We have been not reluctant to do that, but we've been trying to catch up with getting our house in order, and then I feel like we fold that in, but we also have had the general fee structure update. So it was 9% last year, it's 9% this year, and that was really mostly due to the fact that we hadn't done an update in a number of years, so we were roughly 20% behind our peers, and so that's where that update came from. if that continues and once we're more efficient and not getting the criticism that you guys are hearing about, I think we'll be in a better place to then add, like, hey, our standard review time or our standard number of reviews is two or three. And once you come back for, like, a resubmittal after not hearing, not addressing the comments through those first two or three submittals, then you pay half the original fee or something like that in order to disincentivize that.

Thank you.

Councillor Butler.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Counselor. One question and two quick thoughts. First question, city attorney Max Alka, I neglected to ask this earlier. When you were talking about yourself and Aaron Poe as the two attorneys, because I'm wondering, is two folks a typical number of attorneys in a city attorney's office for a community of our size? Because I know the two of you all work tremendously hard.

We don't have a lot of data because communities of our size, there's only a few that have an in-house city attorney's office. I would say the most comparable are now Erie, which brought their attorney in-house recently. They have two, and they're actually looking at hiring a third. And they're fairly new, like we are. Golden went in a couple of years ago, and I... I know they have at least two. I believe they have three. So we're kind of learning along with the other communities and assessing workflow. But there aren't a lot of examples because smaller communities have typically had outside contract counsel, which was what Lafayette had until last year. So that's why we need to continue to assess. And we are, at least it's a little bit of validation when we look at our workflow to see that other communities of our size are adding attorneys So it's something that we'll continue to look at. And we would certainly be ready to justify to counsel if we feel like the time comes to add an attorney.

So it sounds great. I would almost certainly be supportive, which brings me to one of my two thoughts. And that's the thought on trade-offs and prioritization. And so we hear lots of really excellent things. And I'm like, that's a priority. That's a priority. But I struggle with, well, all of the shiny objects are important, but then how we necessarily rack and stack. And so one point of maybe feedback or thought, because I thought this was outstanding. I really, really appreciated this. And we've teased out some of the questions, but getting a bit more of a sense of some of the trade-offs and priorities and hard choices that the departments are facing in addition to the budget overhaul would be really helpful, particularly as a new counselor. But truly, this was spectacular. Then my last thought is in recognizing three months in the job, communications director, you've been outstanding. We've got to spend a lot of time together on the cemetery, so I've enjoyed that. I know you have. I know that something I've heard of from some members of our community is that Lafayette communications are a little uneven. And so sometimes here, it's super polished and professional and very clear. And sometimes here, it's like maybe these are technical experts who are doing the widgets, producing the widgets, but not necessarily comms professionals. So maybe a thought could be for a future workshop or a future discussion is, does it make sense to streamline? Does it make sense to align some of the comms across? uh departments uh simply because i've heard this um a few times the past week um particularly related to the board's uh in committee's recruitment that's happening thursday um and anyway i've made my point thank you so much uh thank you mayor great thank you as we wrap up project any final thoughts from counselors just thank you this was so helpful um as a new counselor to be able to see the elements of each department's budget and to have also human faces

with that department presenting it to us. And it really helped me to understand better. So thank you very much.

I agree. Thank you all so much. Good. Great.

Thanks.

That concludes our one agenda item tonight. Now we move on to new ideas. I didn't hear of any new ideas. However, I have one. Do you want to go first, Mayor Pro Tem?

I'd love to go first, Mayor. Thank you so much. I just quickly. I have had the opportunity to be with the Northwest Mayors and Commissioners Council and the CC4CA retreat. And there was a discussion, because these are both organizations that we pay V on and guide us with legislative questions. And both of them have highlighted three items Two initiatives, two constitutional and one statutory. I had to, what do you call it? I could not vote because I hadn't gotten input from you all yet, but I can tell you that the three that I will send you are two of them both CC4CA and Northwest Mayors and Commissioners are really concerned about. And if we as a council decide to write a letter and state that, that is something we can do. So I'm going to send you the information that I have that's available for those. And I'd love for each of you individually, not as one group, uh to let me know how you feel about that and if there's something that i'll bring it to the mayor and if that's something we should uh address as maybe sending a council-wide letter of support or opposition for those um that would be great

And just to be clear, are these ballot initiatives you're talking about?

They are potentially, yeah. They're trying to get them onto the ballot. So there's still a bit of a deadline. I can say which one they are, but I won't.

I believe ballot initiatives are coming to us at a later date on the agenda.

They're coming on the 1st. Yes. And getting our opinion out as a group sooner might be great.

Perfect. Great. Thank you, Mayor Pro Tempe. My one idea, so I've been talking to a lot of our neighbors. And as we talked Sundance, which we did earlier, there's a lot of things that are going on. The one thing that I'm noticing more and more as I talk to more and more cities, more and more people, is that lodging is very limited within our county, and they have to expand outside of Boulder. The one thing that I've seen is – and we actually talked about short-term rental licenses and the expansion of it potentially through a sort of land use code update. But a thing I'd really love to see is a – very short-term rental license, something that's a festival license. It's something that's passed in Boulder and something that's passed recently in Superior. And I just wanted to kind of see if council would be supportive of looking at this at a future date. It's something that we could implement, I think, relatively quickly, knowing that some municipalities around us have already done so. And just looking towards January, which is right around the corner, I'd love to have that and allow our residents to also be part of Sundance.

Mayor, I strongly support that. I love that. And I think it dovetails nicely with two things. One, Councilor Jensen had brought up last Tuesday the notion of a subcommittee on ADUs. So I completely agree with that. It makes me think of a way to sort of more midterm, long term. streamlining processes around ADUs. And so that is something I would really agree with. And you've also made me think there of something that's kind of come up in a recurring fashion in the past seven months for me since I've been on council, is the notion of how can we encourage more lodging writ large in Lafayette? And so I wonder if in addition to speaking of prioritization, in addition to this immediately, what do we need to do to try to encourage and incentivize a proper hotel to come to Lafayette or another proper hotel to come to Lafayette? We'd love to explore that. Any other thoughts?

Yeah, I just have a question about this. We talked about, I think, short-term rentals when we were talking about revenue. And if we are to create a special festival license, is there revenue to be had from that? Or would that require a vote of the people to add a new revenue source? Or it would just be a... an expansion of our existing, how does that work?

Yeah, so we can bring back information about how our current short-term rental program works now and what these other municipalities are doing to kind of free up, which includes if you rent, if you have permission from your renter, you can rent it instead. So there's some hoops that loosen up with them. We've been tracking all of it, too. So as the mayor said, this could be relatively easy lift to implement it um and it would just fall under the same process where they apply for a short-term rental license fee um i know city of boulder structured it a little bit differently than the current one so we'll bring forward all that information but it wouldn't need to go to the voters it's a fee not a tax and we could make some actual money out of this like a per day fee for everybody who It's not a per day fee. Fees, legally, what we have to do is set them at the rate that it costs us to do the license. And it's very, the festival license in particular is a lot less work than the general license, depending on how you structure it. Some have done it where right now we wouldn't do necessarily a life safety inspection, but folks would have to certify that they, you know, self-certify. And so let's bring back information, but it's not going to be, the revenue generator that we think it will be compared to all of the people just coming into the communities and spending their dollars. And Director Keating's been working on, and I know we've gotten a lot of questions, kind of a holistic guide of all the things that we're doing, because we are doing a lot. I think we just need to share it. We're going to be standing up a web page here shortly, so we'll give it up to council on that as well.

Great. Thank you. That was my only idea tonight. Not seeing anything else, I'll adjourn us. Good night, everyone.