City Council - Regular Meeting

Members of the public are invited to attend in-person meetings in council chambers at City Hall. Public access to tonight's meeting is also available on the local government access channel 8 for Comcast subscribers, on the city's YouTube channel online, and by telephone using the call-in numbers posted on the meeting agenda. Will the clerk please call the roll?

Mayor Leidy? Here. Mayor Pro Tem Luke Minharamasa? Here. Council Member Burns? Here. Council Member Sievers?

Here.

Council Member Kondo.

Here.

Council Member Roper. Here. Council Member Goff. Here. Council Member Nowicki.

Here.

Council Member Lighty. Here.

Thank you. All right. Tonight we will be discussing the proposed 2027 budget department and capital improvement program presentations. Acting City Manager Jason Loveland will introduce this item. Good evening.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. We are indeed going to about the proposed budget and where we're at today. You'll get the pleasure to hear from all of the department directors at some point tonight. And we really do just want to touch on kind of where we are as far as each individual department. We've been talking about kind of just our position that we're in at the moment and looking at more of the reductions and cost saving measures. So you'll hear that for the first time in my 17 years being here from department directors of, hey, this is more of where we're saving, more so than kind of what's new and coming forward. There is some of that as well, just things cost more. And there's some essential things that we need to address in the budget. And then we'll go over the capital improvement program. We're kind of mushing a couple of meetings together versus what we've done in the past couple of years. So this one may take a little bit longer than typical. And then the proposed budget will come forward September 21st. So any modifications or discussion that we have tonight or additional information that comes to us as far as revenue forecasting or just errors or omissions in what we're presenting tonight. We'll make those corrections and get those cleaned up by September 21st. One of the larger ones from a revenue standpoint would be receiving the preliminary assessed valuations from Adams and Weld counties. Those are due to come out August 25th. We often have those sooner. But at that point, we'll definitely have an opportunity to revise those revenue numbers. On July 20th, I presented a slide similar to this. We've made some adjustments and modifications to the numbers. You can see this is general fund specific with a balanced budget at $39.9 million. I won't go over the pie chart or whatnot. But here, for numbers purposes, you'll see a reduction in 2027's budget on the personnel side of 3.1%. That's due to the positions that are vacant and have been frozen over the past 18 months or so. Some increases throughout, but overall, the budget from 26 to 27 is going to be the same. Compensation, did want to point that out as well. Here's the plan for compensation for folks that are on a non-step pay plan. So civilians, others in the police department that are sworn but not on a step plan, a 3% market, 2% merit in 2027. And then the step pay plan for those sworn officers and sergeants, a 3% market at the start of the year. at their anniversary date, 7% or 6%, which is included in the SEP plan. This is just a repeat of a slide that was provided in July of here are the vacancies that are going to remain frozen for 2027. I won't read you the list, but that is the list of vacancies. that will be frozen. So that total is about 16, just under 17 FTE. And this is general fund specific. We're not making any reductions or freezes in any of their funds. So now to get into things that you didn't see July 20th. We have summary pages for all of the different departments. where we'll discuss kind of what's going on with increases, reductions, and whatnot. On each of the slides, there's an FTE slide that shows kind of the history. We'll see that since 2024 through 2027, what's being proposed is flat as far as FTE count. And you may ask, well, hey, you have frozen positions. Why aren't you going to reduce the FTE count? For now, my thought is we're going to leave the FTE account and just not budget for those positions so that if and when opportunity comes forward, we can fill those positions through a budget amendment, but not necessarily seek council direction or approval to add that position back in. to the budget. There may be some positions that we do by September 21st determine that it's okay to remove that position, but we're leaving that to have some flexibility as we navigate through the rest of this year and then 2027 if we determine that a position that's currently frozen needs to be elevated and filled. So that is why you'll see kind of a status quo across and not see any dips in the FTE count that's going to come forward. The package requests, there's a paper copy on the dais for you, just because toggling between slides and kind of that detail will be a bit of a challenge, so we provided that to you. And on the package request, there's a number that precedes what the name of the request is or what the overall big picture is. That refers to the detail sheet that's on the dais. So if you need a reference point, we obviously couldn't fill in all of that information on slides, or we would have 100 slides show for you, and we didn't want to do that. And then also on the right-hand side of the slides, there'll be the proposed amount. in each spending category. So does all that make sense? Big picture. This is rolling back to a couple years ago presentations that we used to do. We kind of mashed 24, 25, 26 into 27. And so hopefully most of you are familiar with the concept and the idea of what we had presented previously. So I will start off and go through a few of the department budgets. AND THEN I'LL TURN IT OVER TO THE TEAM TO TALK ABOUT THEIRS. I'LL START OFF WITH THE LEGISLATIVE BUDGET. SO THIS IS GENERALLY CITY COUNCIL'S BUDGET. AND I'LL FOCUS ON THAT BOTTOM LEFT. THERE'S PACKAGE REQUESTS, ITEMS 1 AND 2. THE LOBBYIST COST INCREASE DURING THIS PAST YEAR THERE WAS AN INCREASE IN FEES PROPOSED BY THE LOBBYIST. which I know that we're in a transition at the moment, but there is a need to increase those fees by about $10,000 based off of the proposal that was coming forth last year. And then United States Conference of Mayors, that had never been budgeted, actually. There had been space being absorbed through the budget for those types of things. And now that inflation has taken over over a couple of years it's to the point where we needed to really recognize that as a separate do and add that to the budget just because the space the availability of funds has shrunk over time as costs have escalated And then over on the right hand side cost reductions and So this is something on board and commission funding overall. Reductions on dice, CCPP, and then the youth commission travel total about $23,000. So these aren't complete cuts of those boards budgets. They're reduced by half. So that is being brought forward as a cost saving measure from their budgeted for under the legislative budget. So that is what that is referring to over on that right hand side. Any questions on the legislative budget?

I was wondering if you wanted to stop each time just to double check for questions.

I don't see any hands up. Does council have any questions?

Moving ahead to the city manager budget. THE REQUESTS ON THE BOTTOM LEFT, THOSE ARE ACTUALLY FROM MUNICIPAL COURT, WHICH MUNICIPAL COURT FALLS UNDER THE CITY MANAGER DEPARTMENT. SO WE HAVE AN INCREASE IN KIND OF SOME INFLATIONARY ITEMS, SO CREDIT CARD PROCESSING FEES, THAT WILL BE A THEME THROUGHOUT THE ORGANIZATION. CREDIT CARD FEES ARE ESCALATING MIBLY. A COUPLE REASONS WHY. ONE, MORE IS BEING PROCESSED ON A REVENUE STANDPOINT. And then the credit card companies, the fees are just increasing as well. So municipal court right now is spending about $15,000 annually and has a $6,000 budget. So an increase to cover those costs is important for 2027. And then court interpreter increase, we spend about $25,000 annually. over the past couple of years specifically, and that's just the agreement to provide those services. Interpreter costs have increased fairly significantly. Right now they have a budget of about $13,000, so again, basically a doubling in those costs. Part of why these are coming forward now is, much like the Conference of Mayors on the previous slide, there was some room within the budget to handle those increases that has expired and has since changed with other inflationary pieces and so we're needing to to increase those budgets and then on the right hand side these are just general reductions in for the city manager communications training travel and supplies nothing exciting to share about those just overall reductions in in those trainings and travel, so.

We have a couple questions. Council Member Nowicki.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. Thank you for being here, Jason. With regard to the transaction fees, the $9,000, should we, I mean, is it worth, like, encouraging folks to pay in cash? I mean, is that a possible? I mean, I use my credit card. It's all Apple Pay. But I know. Would that be a way to kind of mitigate some of that cost?

That's a possibility. I think more likely is that we start to pass that on to the user of paying the fees. And that's something that we're exploring on the utility billing side as well as how we can there's a request coming up that is six figures to help offset those costs. And so we're actually somewhat in the middle of that process now and just trying to identify the right timing to implement changes. And so this would be really across all of our platforms really to identify percentage or flat dollar or some sort of shared transaction costs. Right. Or provide some preferential treatment for not a credit card but other electronic transaction types that don't have as big of impact on the city covering those costs so what would be an example of another transaction type the debit card okay so if folks use their debit cards for things as opposed to a credit card then yeah okay so um so we're in the middle of kind of navigating what that might look like. So hopefully that is something that we can implement in 2027. And obviously, we have a lot of various payments and reasons for the payments. Court processing is one of them. There's the recreation center. you know, theater sales, utility billing, and so on. So we're trying to look at a holistic approach to navigating those. And they may all be different.

Yeah.

There's probably not a one-size-fits-all situation, but we are looking at that as that starting to eat up our expenses.

That is helpful, though, because it does make me rethink, you know, how I'm, rather than just swiping everything credit card, maybe, you know, messaging around some of that stuff would make me rethink my own behavior. Thank you.

So I know every department looked at their budget and made very intentional cuts. I'm looking at the supplies for $250. On this sheet, it talks about CML and NLC conferences. Are there supplies for the conferences?

That one should be tied to the training and travel piece.

Oh, okay. So it's just a typo.

Yeah.

No big deal. Just now I got the clarification. Okay. Gotcha. Thank you. That's all for now.

All right. I shall put my communications hat on now and speak to the communication side of things. This one, cost reduction to special events. This includes stopping, in 2027, Pirate Fest, Food Truck Carnival, and then reducing Noel North Glen. And that is what makes up that $150,000. We're really looking at, again, the essential versus non-essential, trying to continue to provide the events for the community. that we're able to under tight budget times. And so this is a tighten your belt type of situation where we're really looking at the bigger framework of who the audience is and how we can best achieve providing these opportunities with the limited resources that we have. So that is all that I have on the communication side.

Any questions on this section, council?

Okay.

Just looking at our online friends. I see you. Okay. Thanks. We're good.

Okay. And then because I'm up here, I'm going to skip ahead to the other two that I'll do, and then we'll go back to economic development and the city clerk. HR hat now. Okay. A handful of things on the reduction side. Supplies, that doesn't really tell a good tale of what those supplies are. This is really some of our employee engagement activities that the city has done for a while. So this is things to the Joy Committee and North Glen Next and the Wellness Committee. Not completely eliminating the budgets for those, but reducing them a fair amount to keep engagement opportunities for employees, but also recognizing that there's other priorities for the city that doesn't entail fully funding those for 2027. The SparkHire software, that's an online interactive interview system. So we're going to fully eliminate that process as far as screening applicants and just focus on in-person or some other method and eliminate that tool. And then training, that's just a department-wide initiative in human resources just to reduce the amount of training available to the HR staff for 2027. Any questions on the HR reductions?

Council Member Nowicki.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. Just a question. The way it's worded, reduce joy, wellness. Maybe, I get, yeah, okay. Just from a comms perspective. Gotcha. Maybe it's a Freudian slip.

It could be.

It could be. Thank you.

Joy committee.

Yeah.

Council Member Kondo.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. Thank you, City Manager Wellman. I'm just curious. So the SparkHire software, does that preclude us from using SparkHire in total? How does that have a bearing, say, for example, on our chief executive search? Are we intending on using Spark Hire's services for that?

We are not intending to use that for future recruiting purposes.

Okay. Thank you.

All right, this is my last one, so I skipped ahead again. Talk about finance. So on the package request increase, so this is not general fund related. This is our water and wastewater functions. Here's that six-figure addition, that $110,000 to tackle those credit card processing fees. And this is just on that side of things. it's a quarter million dollars. So this is an increase to reach that level of coverage, which again is why we're looking at different ways to change our billing system and processes to be able to address those high costs. The reduction, albeit small, proposing to stop using the return envelope for people that are still receiving a paper mailing a couple parts one it costs money and it's maybe not as productive as we want it to be and two that may possibly encourage uh using electronic methods uh to pay rather than sending out that return envelope so we'll see how that works and see how well that goes over. But the plan is to give that a whirl and see if we have any success getting people to transition to receiving their, hopefully they'll receive their statements electronically versus us mailing them with a return envelope inside. So this will be a test case opportunity for us that we'll need to communicate quite a bit. But we'll see if that $3,000 in savings can turn into some larger savings with people transitioning to receiving their bills electronically.

Any questions on finance?

Yes, Council Member Nowicki.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. So with that, do we know... Do we know how that will impact maybe some of our older residents in the community that maybe rely on paper and kind of do things a little bit old school?

Definitely exploring that and realize that this won't cover everything for everybody. But if we can get a large segment of the population to transition, that will be considered a win. But it will not be kind of an all or nothing, at least at this point. because we do have to connect with people the way that they need to be connected with us. So the goal will be here's what we're moving to and see where that takes us.

And the thing being, if they need to pay, like if I needed to pay and I didn't have access to the internet for the moment or I didn't have information, could I literally call the city and just pay by phone? Yes. Okay. Is it automated or does somebody answer? Somebody answers. That's North Glen Service right there. Thank you. Yep.

Council Member Burns.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. Thank you for this. I just wanted to like triple clarify for everyone listening and paying attention that the credit card fee increases are controlled by banks and processing fees and not us. Just to make sure that that's like an increase from third parties and we have no control over that kind of stuff.

Yeah, thank you for clarifying that.

You're welcome. That's a large number for, but I mean, I guess it's nice that everyone's paying online with their cards. AutoPay.

All right.

That's it.

All right. Time to hear from somebody else. I will turn this over. Thank you for the questions.

Thank you, James.

Good evening, Mayor. Good evening, City Council. Economic development's budget for next year includes one item. We have an increase for our subscription to the PLACER online database. As you know, we often report attendance through the PLACER tool, and it's used by multiple departments. That particular contract has an annual 5% fee increase, so that's reflected actually the last two years are reflected in that amount for this year. Last year's increase we just absorbed into the economic development budget, but chose this year to articulate that amount. Beyond that, we are recommending four cost reductions, primarily in advertising, travel, professional services and training. Relatively minor amounts, but we're hoping this is a short-term situation. We want to make sure that we can continue to train and learn more as we move forward. I will say that we were specific to not impact our business retention work. So our events that we put on for the business community, we specifically wanted to make sure that we continue doing those as fully as we possibly can. So with that, I will answer any questions.

I don't see any questions.

No questions for me. All right. Well, then I will pass it on to the planning and development team.

I think it might be city clerk.

Okay.

good evening mayor and council so you have the excuse me proposed 2027 budget displayed for the city clerk's department the total proposed is just under 800 000 and it maintains the current staffing level of five full-time employees we do not have any budget additions this year due to the city's budget constraints but we have proposed five reductions those are listed as items 14 through 18 in the package request list the first one is a little over 8 500 that is for the agenda and meeting management system and that is just due to the contract being less than anticipated we are also reducing funding for the coordinated election nothing to fear there it just aligns better with the actual costs from the county instead of their anticipated costs in the IGAs. The third item is a non-capital equipment reduction. That is just because we don't have any equipment planned for 2027. Same with technology supplies. That would have been to replace a laptop. That's not essential for us. And then a $1,000 reduction in training. It still leaves plenty of funding for the five full-time employees. So I am happy to answer any questions.

No questions. Thank you.

Thank you.

Good evening. For your convenience, I will point out that all of the package requests for technology are in your packet on page 43. So if you want to flip there, that's where all the information is. So starting with package requests, line item 24 is to continue the existing warranty we have on the audio-visual equipment that is installed in three rooms at City Hall. The first room is this room, Council Chambers, and the other two is across the hall for the community rooms. So again, that's just a continuation of the existing warranty to keep those in working order. Items 26, 27, and 28 are all part of an ongoing schedule to replace our technology infrastructure at end of life. The goal there is to make sure that we maintain operational continuity and resilience. So to dig into a little bit for these, 26 is to replace the servers that power our demilitarized zone, which is an important component of our cybersecurity for our network. Lines 27 and 28 actually go together. It is to replace the server cluster at our Emergency Operations Center up at the Justice Center. Moving over to our proposed reductions, we are proposing a reduction of $4,000 in our training and registration budget. That's not a complete elimination. That is just a reduction to align with our expected usage next year.

And I'm happy to answer questions.

Council Member Nowicki.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. Thank you for being here. Real quick, just for kind of residents who might be paying attention, what is kind of a server lifespan?

About three or four years.

Three or four years. Okay. And due to kind of the increases or the enhanced spending in AI and things like that, does that make servers and all that stuff way more expensive?

That is definitely impacting server costs. We have seen increases this year for sure. And the costs that are put into this package are based on current costs that we're seeing with our vendors. We anticipate that those costs are either going to remain the same or they will go up next year.

Any idea, like, percentage-wise, how much that might go? Okay. Cool. Thank you.

Council Member Kondo.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. I would like to just build off of what Council Member Nowicki was asking regarding server lifespans and lifecycle costs. I'm just curious. When you talk about the server only lasting three years, you're just talking about the blade component that fits into the rack. I'm assuming the racks don't need to be replaced. Is that correct?

Correct.

And do we budget for life cycle costs so that once a blade is nearing its end of life that we do have monies in reserve to be able to pay for its replacement?

So how we are managing that currently is every year technology is coming to the table with a package request for that particular year's scheduled replacements.

Okay. So it's really just a budget request, but there's no pool of money that anticipates that sort of expenditure coming down.

Correct.

Am I?

Sorry.

Okay. No, that's okay. All right. Thank you.

Sure. And that is all. Thank you. Thank you.

Good evening, Mayor, Council. I'm here to present on our budget package reduction request, I guess tonight. And we are proposing a $24,300 reduction to our operation and supplies budget. Mostly this is we're looking to scale back on some of our community facing interactions. So where we're scaling back is on our Earth Day event. We're scaling back on the electrified the Speedway event, as well as tabling at neighborhood nights. We do have funding budgeted for our live well and sustainability programming, which has been pretty flexible in working with the committee, and also to implement our sustainability goals. It's in the past funded things like the bike rodeos with the schools, the breast cancer awareness walk, bike to work day, and cleanup days. And we are looking to reduce that budget as well. So we won't be eliminating everything. but looking how to really use those resources wisely. And then we are putting a pause on a couple things that we haven't launched yet. That includes the community and business grant program that we were going to encourage sustainability actions with our community. That was supposed to launch this year and we put it on hold and we want to wait until we can keep that program going continuously. And also we are pausing on our beneficial electrification plan implementation. We are working with Excel Partners in Energy through q1. So again, we're not funding implementation with city budget, but we are still working with partners and energy and we'll have them as partners through q1. And then we will be able to utilize some Dr. Cog funding through the decarbonize Dr. Cog to keep those initiatives moving forward. Happy to answer any questions.

I think we're good. Thank you. Thank you.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. Amanda Peterson, Director of Parks, Recreation and Culture. I'll start with our package requests for 2027. As you've seen in several other slides, we also have an increase to our credit card fees and the amount of $10,000 as we can, and those are just a portion of the percentage of the charges that are made. So as we see an increase in fees or an increase in the use of those services, we have a correlating increase in the credit card fees. That is an ongoing request. The parks tool cat replacement is a one-time request in the amount of $75,000. This is a piece of equipment that has reached the end of its useful life. We're seeing increased down times right now and borrowing equipment from another department in order to be able to continue regular parks maintenance activities. We have cardio. I'm going to skip to the next slide because they continue here. We also have one Our cardio equipment replacement, that is an ongoing expense. We're approaching this as a program similar to how we do our pedal boat replacement. So rather than replacing all of our equipment every 12 to 15 years and having that downtime near end of useful life, this rotates through that equipment, replacing two or three pieces each year on an ongoing schedule. Our selectorized or the weight equipment also has a similar approach. So we're seeking $18,000 in an ongoing expense to replace that on a regular schedule. For both of those pieces, or both of those series of equipment, some of those pieces came from the old rec center, senior center and theater. We moved that over so that wasn't equipment that was purchased new with the opening of the facility. And then the last item on the additions is the park's Ventrac attachments. These are attachments for an existing Ventrac mower that allow us to use that piece of equipment year round. So they're able to put a snowplow on it and able to put a cab on it and utilize that equipment even in the winter months. We have outfitted one of our Ventracs with that and would like to be able to do that to a second. It allows us to plow and access some of our smaller trails a little easier than we can with our large truck-mounted plows. On the cost reduction side, we have identified training in the amount of $2,500 in arts and culture. This is a reduction of a single conference, so there is still training available for our staff. And they will focus on virtual resources and other ways to fill that gap. We also have the goat grazing in the amount of $27,000. This is done at Oscar Arnold Nature Area. We would replace that with staff maintenance activities still aligning with our open space management plan and utilizing as a natural practice in that space. We have fertilizer in the amount of $3,000. This would be a reduction of one time a year fertilizing. So from twice a year to once a year in some of our lower priority areas. So we would not reduce fertilizer in sports field, high use park spaces. But some of those lower priority turf areas, reducing that to a single time per year. This is something we would hope to gain back at some point in the future. And then recreation operating supplies, that's $2,000 that we've identified that were under-expended dollars in past budgets. So this is not a specific reduction, but just looking at what we're spending on average year over year and noting that we can reduce that amount by $2,000. We have recreation subscriptions for When to Work and our Pedal Boat waitlist. We can transition the When to Work, which is our scheduling software, to our new NeoGov software. So we're training staff to be able to use that system, which is great to be able to integrate and use a single system and not have to divide our scheduling over multiple systems. And then Pedal Boat, we really are only using that waitlist a few times a year. So we'll transition that back to a paper form, which is very manageable. Daytime films, this is our silent film series. The most expensive part of that film series is really the live music that accompanies. This is a reduction in that daytime film series from four to six events a year down to two. So we'll still be able to continue that, but at a lesser interval. our senior center training is a 900 reduction again this is a partial reduction in staff training we would still allow for some attendance at in-person training and conference but looking to fill that gap with other virtual training or more local training options and then the last one is our park ranger programs with a reduction of one of our park ranger positions and that being a vacant position that's currently frozen we'll see a correlated reduction in programming, still continuing to do programming just at a lesser level and with fewer supplies. And with that, I'd be happy to answer any questions that you may have.

I'm going to let you add something. Oh, sure.

Yeah. So I wanted to take a second. One thing that's not listed on this slide as far as cost reductions, we did determine, council determined to not continue funding the fusion swim team. So that should be a cost reduction of about $100,000 when you net the expense to the revenue so that will be something that we identify and get added to the future presentation in september but i did want to wanted to mention that since that had been a discussion topic previously so would that then reduce the fte as well that would yes okay thank you uh mayor pro temp

Thank you, Madam Mayor. Thank you, Director Peterson. I just have a question about the parks goat grazing program elimination. That's $27,000, but I'm just looking at the analysis portion of it and where it says it would increase workload demands on existing staff, reduce the use of alternative vegetation management practices. and so on and so on negatively affect vegetation and increase the accumulation overall that doesn't seem like great news so I'm just wondering if you could speak a little bit more about how that's going to be mitigated because it seems like it has a substantial impact.

So it is the way we manage our other open spaces. So it is not an unusual practice for us to have those be staffed managed. And we do that with the Fox Run open space as well as the Crook Reservoir open space. We would love to be able to continue with the goats, but it is a fairly significant expense. So when we look at staff time in a space that has relatively low mowing practices. There's going to be an increase in the time staff is spending at Oscar Arnold Nature Area in order to do those seasonal mowings. But we feel like we can balance that through the course of the year with the remainder of the mowing schedule. But it does transition it back to how we were managing that prior to the implementation of the goats. mowing on a limited basis, limited use of chemical controls in that space, and would align still with our open space management plan.

Right, and I remember part of that too was fire mitigation as well, because it does say some of that mitigation would likely go unaddressed. So I just wanted you to speak a little bit more to it, because I know folks will probably be asking about it, besides the whole, you know, cool factor of the goats. They were doing a very...

important job but i understand so i was just curious i know we we got by before but it was also part of fire mitigation so and we'll absolutely continue the fire mitigation practices that we have in place so we do mow on an extended space really what's beyond our fire mitigation plan boundary. And we do that currently even in addition to the goats. So between those residential properties on the east side of Oscar Arnold and the trail, we actually mow that entire area. The recommendation is 30 feet and we're at nearly 100 feet in that gap. So we are mowing an extended space. We'll continue to do that and staff will continue to monitor any overgrowth that's in the open space itself and they'll manually remove that. We do hope we'll see continued benefits and had anticipated continued benefits from the goat grazing that shouldn't be undone a year in we should see a a ongoing impact from the work that the goats have done.

That's great. Thank you. Just so I have some talking points because I can think of a handful of residents that will be asking about it. So thank you.

All right, thank you.

Thank you. Pass it on to the police department. Okay.

Mayor, council, good evening. The police budget is funded out of the general fund. This year's proposed budget is $16,389,886. Some of our package requests that you can see, As you guys, psychological services for our officers, so that's $35,000. I do want to let you know that we really want to enhance that as much as we can, so we have put in for more grants, which we're excited to hear that they did open that back up for us. Celebrate what this system is. It gives us where we can download phones, helps us tremendously in our investigations. So that's another thing that is super beneficial. Matter of fact, over this last weekend, some of the evidence and everything else that we're getting at homicide cases, we'll use that technology. The records terminal guard, this is one of the areas where, and you'll talk about being more efficient, being more effective. With the reductions in our records unit, we'd like to increase our terminal guard, which is with the county, which they will cover us 24-7 on the weekends. So that's why we see that increase. Our Brazos ticketing system, this is another thing that currently this is the only thing that we can use. That price has gone up, so that's where we're using that. Then on the Adams County Animal Shelter IGA, which you guys saw that presentation earlier, and this is that increase that they had come through. before i go to the second page i'll just go over to the cost reduction um training software bulletproof vest and uh reduction of 1700 which is about one vest right but we ended up having able to replace um and also got you know the bulletproof vest um grant as well um this year so we're thinking we don't need that extra vest uh External training, that reduction, this is a lot of, again, trying to get a lot of research done with our officers and trainers. So we're going to, you know, really limit that external training. The cool thing is, you know, with the new building up there, we can host training where we get some of those trainings free. So we're going to try to, you know, do more internal training and bring out instructors to that. Police Academy registration, as you've, you know, we're cutting $50,000 out of that. For one, we're not doing overhires, but because of the overhires, we're in a really good position, you know, with our staffing currently, right? So we're hoping that trend continues, as you guys saw in some of the stuff where, you know, some of the... We're going down in how many officers we lose. So hopefully that continues where we don't need that many academy spots. Tri-Tech RMS. So we are bringing our records management system, which you guys know, which is Axon. We're going to bring that in-house instead of paying for that service at adcom. So that's that savings. On the second page, am I supposed to do that? Yeah, there we go. All right. On the second page, on some of those package requests, this is our policy and procedure, our Lexapol. That's where that increase is seen, our Motorola radios, just purchasing that equipment. The North Metro Task Force IGA, that's all our undercover investigation stuff, so that's that price increase. A lot of these things, these external ones, are proprio translation. This is really important for the officers out in the street when they come in contact, and that's any language. It's kind of like our language line. I call it lifeline, so we're able to communicate with our residents. That's an increase as well. We do share our victim services with Thornton, and that's our percentage of the increase for next year. And then we go over some of the cost reductions. And I'll really talk about some of the efficiencies that we're going to do on this because some of this software was very important to us. However, we have a solution for it. So the ammunition, we felt that this year we could do a $25,000 reduction for next year. And I think the reason why we can do that is back when we had wars and you know, I mean, currently, right? Ammunition was hard to get. So back early on in my career, I said, we're going to have to build up a three-year reserve of ammunition for training the academy, our SWAT team. So we did that. So we could push a year of not buying ammunition. So that's why we did that. Our MakeNote software, Axon drone software. So I know drones are very important to this group. So we are using, Axon's kind of expensive on that side. So we're going to use, we have two drones. We have an inside drone and an outside drone. And that's going to be covered by that drone company, DJI. So we're going to be able to save that $3,600. OUR BENCHMARK SOFTWARE, THIS IS KIND OF OUR WINDOW TO THE COLORADO POST BOARD FOR POLICE TRAINING. SO THAT TRACKS ALL OF THAT. IT ALSO TRACKS, YOU'LL SEE A LOT OF THOSE ARE ATTACHED TO A BLUE TEAM IA PRO. THAT'S ALL VERY IMPORTANT SOFTWARE. FORTUNATELY FOR US, WHEN WE DECIDED ON AXON, THEY HAVE THIS SOFTWARE WHERE IT ALL BE UNDER ONE UMBRELLA NOW. SO I THINK THAT, AGAIN, THAT EFFICIENCY MAKES SURE that works well for us. So yeah, I think and then speak right, we're going with axon. So that covers that price as well.

Do you guys have any questions? Councilmember Condo?

Thank you, Madam Mayor. Thank you, Chief question going. I have two questions in regards to the bulletproof vest. How many vests are we looking at there? That we're deferring on.

I'm sorry. I couldn't hear what he's asking about.

How many, how many vests? How many vests? How many vests do we, that are we reducing in the 1720? Just one. Yeah.

Okay. And is it that, uh, what is the service life of a vest?

I know. How long does a vest last? What's its lifespan? Five years. Yeah.

And then in regards to your munitions, not that I'm trying to get in your knickers, but I'm assuming you're managing the first in first out.

Yes.

Okay. Thank you.

Mayor Pro Temp. Thank you, Madam Mayor. Thank you, Chief. I have a question about the translation propio. Moving towards Axon and getting rid of the tri-tech, I know Axon also has a translation, like a real-time translation. Is that something that would be, is that an additional cost for Axon, or will it eventually be covered under the new software?

There are several things that we're looking down for the artificial intelligence report writing. And I think that's another one, making sure Propio is, you know, that's one that we trust and know right now. So when we get to that point, it's a lot of the on-camera where it does the translation automatically. That's what I'm thinking. You know, yes. And it sounds like incredible technology. I want to make sure that's tested and vetted before we jump into it. I mean, let the bigger departments do that because I can tell you Perpio is tested and proven. So once they get to a point where they say, hey, I'll come back in another budget cycle and say, hey, this is something we need to add. Okay.

All right. Yeah, that answers my question. I was just curious because I know Axon has been announcing that as, like, their next big thing, right, the translation. But obviously you guys know what you know and what you trust. So that's great. And then in the external training, what type of training does that encompass? And you said you're trying to bring it more internally to get some of those.

training. So we've done a lot of external training with our school resource officers, our digital technicians, our crime analysis individuals, our crime scene investigators. So we'll send them and some of them are out of state training because it's excellent training. We're just pulling that back this next year and see what we can do, find some in-state. Like the national SRO conference, right? It's a great conference, but we're going to do the in-state CASRO conference, a Colorado conference for our SRO. So there's things that we're going to, you know, do locally rather than send people out because not only we're saving money on that training, but also the travel, the airline tickets, everything else, and that adds up pretty quick.

Okay. All right. That makes sense. Thank you.

Before we move on, I just want to thank you for explaining it because if only, if people only look at, you know, $25,000 in ammunition, that seems like a serious public safety concern. But knowing that you had, that you're in an okay place to do that is super important. So every department made cuts and you made cuts that were okay to make. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Mayor and Council. So I have a bit of a list here. So if it's okay with you, I might break it up into a couple of chunks if that's okay. So I'll go through our reductions first, and then I'll do our general fund requests. And then I'll do our enterprise requests if that works. So we're going to start on the right hand side of the screen with our cost reductions. That first line item there is $27,000 for urban SDK. That was the software. If you remember a while back when we were talking about traffic calming, it brought up a really cool map and it gave us the ability to see generally how fast traffic was going all across the city. Super cool software. We were really only using it occasionally and we can't use it for things like doing a traffic calming study. So if we get someone who comes in and asks questions about as they're speeding on our street, we put equipment out and get a real reading on it. So we felt this was a pretty safe and not insubstantial amount of money to reduce here. The next couple are professional engineering services. We're doing a lot more stuff in-house. There's still some things that we can't do in-house, but to the extent we're able, we're bringing that stuff inside. And then engineering supplies and engineering technology supplies. We buy things like new and updated regulatory materials. If you see like our city attorney has books and stuff back here, we have very similar things that we use for our work. It's an annoyance to not have those things, but it's not the end of the world to not have those things. And so we reduced our budget there for the line 70 and 71. Line 72 is traffic signal supplies. What we have found in that specific account is that more often than not, if we are replacing traffic control equipment, it's because someone has run into it and it ends up being insurance claim or is paid for by that individual. We do have some desire and need to upgrade some of our signal cabinets to allow for generators inside of them. So when we have power outages, it's not so much staff effort to go out and hook up a separate generator. Staff time is hard to get that done too, and so we're going to postpone that out. Street overtime, this is really just bringing that account down into more of a five-year average of where we are typically seeing our overtime for our streets crews. Streets on-call repair, Line 77, that is making a reduction. We are going to move our repairs for when we have a water main break. It ends up causing damage to the street, and it ends up causing damage to the sidewalk. We have on-call services come in and do repairs on those. We're moving that to where it really probably should be, which is in the water fund where the cause is being from our water infrastructure. So that's a deduct from here over into our water fund. A street supplies number 78. Where this is a big chunk of this is our ice slice that we use in the winter season. For better or worse, it didn't snow last year. So we have a lot already in storage. And so we're going to kind of just carry that over, it allows us to reduce that line item just a little bit. The last line item on the reduction side is actually in the water fund. It's for $18,000. There have been some rules over the last few years with EPA and CDPHE requiring us to let residents know if they have a lead service line. That software was allowing us to do that. But we are grateful that we don't we have confirmed we don't have any lead service lines. And so the function of that software becomes a much easier internal function, we just need to put a essentially a comment on our website. All right, I'll stop there if that works.

All right, I think you can keep going.

All right. So now we'll do package requests for the general fund. By and large, these requests are related to things just cop costing more. So you'll see facilities maintenance increase of 27,000. Pumps and HVAC systems and those sorts of things cost more in general. And so this is really just a cost escalation. Line item 74 and on the next page 75, same with our fleet vehicles. Tires are a lot more expensive. Batteries, fuel gets paid elsewhere. But the oils that we use within our vehicles are just costing more. Line 79 is a capital equipment request. So that is a tandem truck that our streets crew uses. That truck is a 2007 and it is the bed of it has rusted through. We pour stuff in and it slowly trickles out the side. It's not good to look at and maybe not ideal there. So we're hoping to replace that vehicle with another tandem. that is the end of the general fund requests if anyone has questions there i do not see any okay so the next three items are from our sanitation fund um the first one is sanitary sanitation property services uh that's the landfill it's cost more to bring stuff to the landfill um 81 and 82 are both capital equipment requests. So we're in need of some new roll offs. Those these are the roll offs that we customers can get for a few days from us, we go deliver the roll off and then carry it away. Those are showing their age. So we're hoping to replace five of those. And then 82 is our annual sanitation truck purchase and replacement. So unit 164-21, we're hoping to get replaced next year. The next item is our only stormwater request. It's $47,000, and that's to purchase camera equipment. So we recently have been talking about our stormwater system and that there's some of the infrastructure there that we struggle to get to. Um, for most of our stormwater system, we have to hire someone out to go do that work because of the size of pipe that, um, we can't use any of like, like our wastewater cameras because those are just too small and they don't have, um, they can't track down the, down the pipe. Um, so that would be a camera specifically to get to some of our larger stormwater infrastructure. And then the last few here are water and wastewater funds. So 84 is a capital equipment request for a water valve exerciser. That's a real thing. This is an attachment that goes on a truck. When you see tiny little circles that are about yay big and they've got little lids on top, Those are the valves that allow us to, in the middle of the street, those are the valves that allow us to turn the distribution system on and off. And we have to exercise those annually. And that's a lot of hard work, a lot of repeated injury and whatnot for staff if they have to do that by hand. And so this just assists them doing that. Line 86 is another capital equipment request. This one is an excavator that's past its useful life. So we're hoping to replace that excavator. 87, line 87 is the theme of the night. Everything costs more. Our water chemicals at the plant, things like permanganate and chlorine and those sorts of things are costing us more. So we're including some additional budget there. I'm almost done. Waste water plant. So both the water plant and the wastewater plant will have these accounts that allow things break in the system. Usually it's pumps or parts or electrical equipment. That stuff's expensive and it ends up being capital equipment. And so we make this annual request to have a, little bucket of money that we can make purchases from to replace some of this larger equipment. So that is what eight line 88, 89 and 90 are, are all kind of those bucket accounts for the, I shouldn't call them bucket accounts, but their accounts for us to have available to us. Line item 91 is IP, which is the backflow replacement program. I don't know if you saw in the news, we've had some thefts of backflow devices. We're hoping to do, and you'll see later on in our capital equipment request, we're hoping to do some upgrades to protect those, to keep them from getting stolen. But we have seen that increase. We also have a very large backflow at our water treatment plant that needs to get replaced. And so this would cover the cost of those. Then on to wastewater side of the world, our SCADA upgrades. So SCADA is the computer system that runs our plant. Also, you may have seen on the news that there's been some increased activity and people targeting water and wastewater treatment plants. We want to make sure that we are doing our part to make sure that we are as safe as possible. So that is related to that. Line 93 is an interesting one. So You have seen this request before. It was in our budget for this year. This is for the camera van for our wastewater system. There were some math errors in that quote, and so rather than bringing a change order to you and doing a bunch of complicated things, we are not purchasing it this year and asking for you to approve that in this line item. So it is about... 90,000 more than what we anticipated, which is super a bummer. So line 93 for 420,000, that's the camera van with all the pieces and parts and doodads on it. Nothing extravagant, just what we need to make the thing work. And line 94 is up at the wastewater plant. They have a little Kubota. that it's a large campus, it's hard to get around quickly if you've got to get from one place to another. They've been driving this Kubota around. It's seen better days now. It's got a lot of use on it. And come to find out when we started pricing things out that those little Kubotas have gotten really expensive. So this is actually not a replacement for that. It is going to be a small pickup of some sort. All right. And then line 95 and 96 looks very similar to what you just saw at the water plant. Those are where we pull capital equipment from. And the non cap equipment on 90, line 97. Oh, right. Our UV bulbs. So at the wastewater plant, before we discharge to the river, the water goes through and gets hit with UV bulbs and UV bulbs kill kind of the last little bits of what might be remaining there. All right. Happy to take questions.

I don't believe we have any.

But thank you. I appreciate it. Oh, sorry.

Mayor Pro Tem has one. I had my hand raised.

Sorry, I did it quickly. Just going back real quick to number 79, the vehicle replacement, the dump plow truck for $350,000. Did you say 2007? Did I hear that right?

Yeah.

Is that, that's longevity seems pretty high and, you know, they don't make them like they used to. Is that kind of the anticipated longevity for a replacement vehicle or is that kind of unusual?

Coming up on 20 years. I think it's a testament to our fleet crew on like keeping that thing going and on the road. Yep. Okay. So I would guess 10 years, 15 years. Yeah. Yeah. We try to get, cause they are so expensive. We try to get every last bit of life out of them as we can.

Okay. I just wasn't sure if I actually wrote that cause that's almost 20 years old. I thought that was incredible.

Okay.

All right. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Before we move to the second thing, I have a question for you. So you can come on up. You said at the start, I want to go back to the slide that has, here we go. It's like slide eight that has the 16.76 positions. what i liked about the slides that you're scrolling back through um is the bar graph that shows how fte has stayed fairly consistent for the last four years right um so can you run that by me again how those 16.76 were not pulled out of those bar graphs and why oh sure so right now we're considering them

frozen positions, not eliminated positions. And therefore, we're keeping them in the overall FTE count. So while FTE count may be 346, we're really just budgeting for 330. The plan at the moment is to keep those available. If we do pull those out, It's just one more administrative step to come to council to say, hey, can we add back the sales tax manager, for instance? So that's the process there.

But they are removed from the budget.

They are removed from the budget, yes. They are not budgeted for in 2027.

OK. Because they weren't pulled out of the department budgets, though? is a true story that yes and they so they are but they did not show on those on the slides okay i just wanted to make sure i was following yeah okay uh before we move to the next thing do council have any comments or questions for our city manager okay thanks awesome

We actually will just skip ahead. No more questions. That is wonderful. So next up is to go over the capital improvement budget summaries. I will turn this over to Amanda and Sarah to tackle most of these. These again, heavy on the numbers, all of the detail as far as what the projects are attached but really we're just gonna go over at a high level you know where we're at for the proposed budget in 2027 not necessarily talk about every project over the next five years but this provides a snapshot of kind of what's on the horizon what's in the works currently that will be carrying over and whatnot so I will turn conservation trust over to Amanda okay

thank you good evening again mayor and council um as uh acting city manager loveland said i'm going to focus on our 2027 projects if there's questions about any other projects please let me know that as we go through this 20 27 list we'll start with our conservation trust fund you'll see one item that is new this year is a transfer to the general fund and that's taking two of our positions in parks maintenance and moving those out of the general fund essentially into the conservation trust fund so that allows us to pay for those positions out of our conservation trust fund dollars moving forward that is an eligible use of those dollars they're limited just Just as a general overview, those dollars come from our lottery proceeds. And we're limited to use of those dollars for acquisition of conservation sites, acquisition of other public properties that are used for recreation purposes, and then the maintenance of those sites. So this would fall under that maintenance category. The next item on that list is our Greenway Trail. This is an ongoing program that replaces individual slabs, pieces of concrete that have cracked, heaved or otherwise creating a challenge in either maintenance or the way our community is able to use those trails. We also have a theater lighting project on this under the Conservation Trust Fund this year for $110,000. We have some lighting equipment that was moved from the old facility to the new facility and equipment that has just reached the end of its useful life. And we're starting to see failures in those pieces of equipment, high-cost equipment. to repair those individual lighting components. So this $110,000 replaces that series of lighting fixtures that allows for staff to operate all 100 shows that happen in the theater throughout the year. Next is our playground replacement. This is also an ongoing program. We have $200,000 budgeted for 2027. We generally are using these as match dollars for additional grant funds that are customized depending on what that individual program playground scheduled for replacement is this year. Tentatively, we have that identified as either Huron Crossing or Sperry Park under consideration for 2027. Our staff do conduct regular safety inspections. And so we'll continue to do those inspections and identify which is most appropriate for replacement in 2027 as we get a little closer. Are there any questions that I can answer for you on the Conservation Trust Fund?

I don't see any questions.

All right. Moving to CDBG. We had some conversation earlier this year around use of CDBG funds and have identified Odell Berry Park as a use of those funds for 2027. I do anticipate that sub grantee agreement coming forward to you at the council meeting next Monday. I'm going to kind of go through these first couple slides on capital projects and move to the one that has our projects listed. For the capital projects fund, we have a combination of dollars being used in this fund. The majority of our projects are funded through Adams County Open Space dollars, with the exception being our citywide fence maintenance, which is a general fund project. so citywide fence maintenance continuing to replace individual segments of citywide funds as they reach the end of their useful life we have 400 000 budgeted for 2027. we also have emergency park repairs this is another ongoing expense previously we've identified 25 000 we recommended we're recommending increasing that to $35,000. As others have mentioned, we're continuing to see escalation in costs. So we're using those dollars earlier in the year than we had been previously. These are dollars that are spent when we have an unanticipated expense come up. So it's something that can't be covered under insurance due to vandalism or an accident, but that we need to replace and helps us avoid doing a complete playground replacement or leaving a piece of playground equipment out of use for an extended period of time. We also have Northwest Open Space Phases 2 and 3 identified at $500,000. We understand this is not enough to do that project. Again, anticipate seeking grant funds and utilizing that as matching dollars. We did Phase 1 in I believe 2019. That was the central portion of the property where we did some work on the ‑‑ we added the concession stand. did some work on the ball fields, as well as some of the concrete trails. This looks at the east and west ends of that property, replacing the remaining asphalt trails with concrete, renovating and replacing irrigation systems, removing the berms, and some other improvements in accordance with the plan that was completed prior to that 2019 Phase 1 improvement. And then the last one I have on this list for you is Odell Berry Park. Again, this is that continuation of funding. Our total for that project, including CDBG, as well as all of the other grant funds, is $6 million. We anticipate putting that project out to bid when we have work starting on the property next door to us, where the old rec center, senior center, and theater sat. Once that remediation work begins, then we feel confident in that timeline and be able to move forward with the Odell Berry Park project. I'd be happy to answer any questions that you may have on capital improvements. I think we're good. Thank you. All right. I will turn it over to Director Borges then. Okay.

Hello again. All right. So starting with capital projects fund and continuation of what director Peterson was discussing was the stuff that is the stuff that public works will be working on. So starting at the top for the 2027, we have a series of kind of annual projects that we do. So this includes residential street, improvements, traffic signal replacement. Council, you recently saw the engineering contract for work for 117th and Washington and 100th and Huron to get that work done. So this is going to kind of cumulatively help us get to the point where we can start construction on that next year. We also have the concrete program where we go and we fix little pieces of concrete across the city and The concrete program also tends to include things. We partner with parks and all of the grant funding that they bring in to help with greenway trails and that stuff will tend to get all packaged together as one project. School zone safety, that's one where we've been coordinating and will continue to coordinate with the school district to make sure that the work that we're doing is supporting their long-term goals for various schools and make sure that we're providing appropriate safety for our local schools. parking lot repairs, sort of a never ending task. We have a lot of asphalt that we have to maintain. And so this is just a regular annual part of money to to do asphalt repairs and parking lots. And then we have our temporary traffic calming. We've accumulated a little bit of money here. We haven't spent a ton out of this account, so we're going to lower. We have been sitting at $200,000 a year. We're going to drop that to $100,000. We do also have a number of projects that we're evaluating to move forward with, including a couple of PED crossings. I know most recently, there's been discussion about a ped crossing at marketplace between the senior housing and marketplace to make that a safer crossing there. And so we've got a few ideas of good projects that we can do that we would bring forward to you when those are identified. Moving a few down, we've got 100,000 over the next two years for bridge rail replacement. So these are really along the farmer's highline where pedestrian railing is not in good condition. We were able to do two of those. The third has some complications in engineering design with it and also is going to cost us a bit more than anticipated. So these just help us accumulate dollars in order to be able to get that project completed. Uh, going down to the very bottom, uh, M and O campus repairs, you'll see the same line item mirrored in our water fund budget. We're going to split that between general fund and water fund since M and O campus does support both operations. Um, it's in need of some love. Uh, we have had also some, um, security concerns with some break-ins and that sort of thing. So a lot of what we're working on this year is perhaps a little bit different than what we anticipated programming. We've diverted a lot of those funds for security upgrades to get us started with these improvements All right So moving on to the water fund So the first few things there because they're enterprise funds the lines include a lot more stuff with operating budget and some other things so we'll get down into I apologize. I meant to bring my ruler. It gets a little hard to read. All right. So we're gonna move down to our water line rehabilitation. So we have annually $100,000 going into this account in order to allow us to do various improvements to the water distribution lines under the ground. We have accumulated a little bit of money there and that's in hopes of doing a larger capital project. So this 100,000 for 2027 will help us in that way. The next line item is the Stanley Lake pipeline. So we share the pipeline with the city of Thornton. And this is our proportionate share of the operation and maintenance of that pipeline. So then we've got the chemical building. So the chemical building is one that we just finished construction on. We did some upgrades. I know there were a couple of council members that got the opportunity to see that. And As a part of that project, we identified with the fire department that there's some fire suppression needs that that facility has. And so we want to make sure that we're circling back around and completing those fire suppression projects. So that's what those dollars are. And then we'll go down to the $3.5 million or so. of automated filter backwash. This is to do improvements in our filter system. The filters are essentially kind of a version of coal and sand, and we put water in, they filter out the stuff, and then once every so often, we backwash, and that is where we run the water backwards and clean out all the stuff that it's cut. We've got a fairly antiquated version of that, and so this would do some upgrades to that system. Then we've got $250,000 for water treatment facility rehabilitation. This is kind of miscellaneous projects that need to happen at the water treatment facility. And if I'm not mistaken, there's a similar one that we'll see with the wastewater treatment plant. Going down to $475,000 is the next one down. That's the mirror of the M&O campus improvements. And then we have a line item for cathodic protection for our low zone tanks. These are the tanks that sit next to the Justice Center. There is equipment that prevents them from getting corroded by the soils and whatnot. And that system needs some work. Then we have $180,000 that is for the security project to protect our backflow devices across the city. That's a project that we've been working closely on with our parks crews. They've been super awesome partners in kind of developing this. So that's what that money is for. And then the last one in the water fund 250,000, there is a pipeline that goes underneath for the big circular basin on the site that tends to get stuff into it and it is not sized correctly. And so we want to go in and appropriately size that pipe so that we don't get quite so much backups in there. All right, I will stop there if that works for everyone. I've got a few more.

Does anybody have any question? No. Okay.

Cool. We're good. All right. I took out my page and now I've lost my place here. All right, moving on to the wastewater fund. All right. So similar to the water fund, there's a few extra line items here for operating debt service. And then we get into the actual capital projects. So we've got 200,000 for collection system rehab, this is to the pipelines underground, and can include to some extent the lift stations as well. And then exciting stuff. We will start on the wastewater treatment plant upgrades that is associated with decreasing the smell concerns out there along with increasing capacity. And that Oh, no, I am off one. I am off one. Sorry. That is lift stations. My apologies. Let me get back on track here. I'm not giving bad information. Alright, so lift station replacement. So this is to do construction for this one will probably be lift station F, which is right down the street here. To do some major upgrades to that this was related to the engineering contract that you recently saw to do a better evaluation of that lift station. All right, this is making more sense. And then wastewater treatment plant rehab 250,000. This is similar to the one in the waterfront for the water plant where there's need to fix some kind of miscellaneous capital projects there. And then the big one, the primary clarifiers and digesters. This is the big one that we've been talking about for the last few years. There will be some level of working with finance to determine funding for that, because that may be a little bit different funding than normal. And so that's going to be the start of that project. We are hoping to bring you here, it will probably be early 2027, an RFP for engineering services. And so we're excited to get that one rolling. But that one's going to be a big lift. And then last one, collection system analysis. This is to look at our collection system. These are the pipes in the ground. We are probably going to be pairing that one with our big project and doing one project to make sure everything is sized correctly. kind of a big picture, everything works together. All right. I messed that up a little bit. I hope I didn't cause any confusion. If you have questions, please let me know.

Mayor Pro Tem. Thank you, Madam Mayor. Thank you, Director Borges, for all this information on increasing capacity for the, is it the wastewater treatment facility? Okay. And I saw somewhere like Carl's Farm, but does that extend beyond increasing capacity beyond just Carl's Farms. That was the only thing I saw mentioned. Because we're looking at development here, for example, potentially. There's been talk of other development, and we've talked about capacity ad nauseum. So I'm just curious.

So that's going to be a big part of what we ultimately decide to build and part of what the engineering project's going to help us determine is there's cost to building things bigger. And so a little bit of a cost balance there of what can we Support from a financial perspective, but also I mean certainly growth and development is critical for the city as well And so balancing those two things What I will also say is It it's as much about risk as it is about Capacity so we have limits on how much the state allows us to treat and We see that can fluctuate with time. And so our amount of buffer that we've got changes with time as well. It also, during certain times of the year, interestingly, so in the wintertime, the bugs that are doing their thing and eating all the nutrients out of the water, those, they get cold and they are less effective. And so we have a harder time meeting our requirements in the wintertime than in the summertime. And so this will be partly what can we support from a development perspective, but also limiting our risk exposure to variations that we see with both temperature and also how much waste the city as a whole is producing.

I think that it was vague, I know. I've taken the tour twice, so I've learned about the bugs, and it's very interesting and gross all at the same time. And the capacity piece is important, too, because I happened to be there during a summer where we were, and it was summer, where we were pushing that limit, I know. And so this was like five years ago. Anyway, that makes sense. That answered my question. It wasn't vague to me. Thank you. Okay, good.

All right. Thank you. Next, we've got our stormwater fund. I won't go into that in extreme detail since we've been talking about it a couple of times now. But by and large, this is mirroring what you saw when we approved the $7 rate. You will see there's a Kiwanis Park detention area. That's the area that's kind of behind the pool. kind of problematic from a variety of perspectives. We recently had a meeting with Mile High Flood District about what does that look like. This will likely be a Mile High Flood District project. But we have not fully worked out all the details here. So we will be coming back to you to talk about that line item more specifically. And then the other line items below that are just the starting to pick away at our high uh high priority projects cool i think that's all happy to answer questions if there's any remaining ones otherwise oh whoops cool okay thank you thank you

Well, thank you, Mayor and Council, for letting us brief you on where we're at at this stage in the budget development for 2027. On the slide now, you can see the future budget meetings will include the proposed budget coming more officially on September 21st, and then public hearing on October 12th, and seeking budget adoption on the 26th. I know that we provided a ton of information and it's not a one and done conversation. So as you're going through these things or questions pop up, please reach out. We're happy to answer those and get back to you. It feels like this is a one time, hey, we took two hours and if you didn't ask, don't talk to us that's not the case please please reach out as you uh dig in a little deeper um or you have thoughts that uh that come up so um with that I think that is that is the end of what we had planned for tonight and I just want to make space uh council member condo did you have a question I did see your hand and then it went down

Yeah, I did, and it was for Director Borgers in regards to the Kiwanis detention.

She'll come back up for you. What is your question?

Yeah, I guess I'm just trying to understand that a little bit better because, I mean, when I look at it, it's basically a swamp area. I'm assuming it's just water areas. I guess if you will, it accumulates water that might come through Croke Reservoir and then underneath the marketplace, the highway, and then the water just kind of settles there. Is that kind of, am I understanding the functionality of that correctly? And what is it exactly that we're trying to do to it to make it better or function better?

Can you remind, I didn't quite hear which project you were talking about.

the Kiwanis, the detention, uh, area behind just South of Kiwanis pool, Kiwanis park.

Yes. So that is to help with, um, urban runoff. That is an area that's identified that has floodplain that actually does come up and impact, um, some of the buildings in there. It has, um, it does make its way, um, all the way from there, all the way down to, um, to where Grange Hall Creek meets up with a different branch. So it's to improve capacity there largely. It's also pretty overgrown back there, and it needs some additional work. And so one of the things that Mile High is very good at is taking stormwater projects, making them work as detention areas, but they are also very supportive in helping find grants and other things to make them multi-use areas. And so there may be some opportunity there to, one, improve the floodplain within that area, but also have some opportunity to engage in some other ways as well, particularly with the school there.

Yeah, I was just trying to understand that. I mean, a swamp area, I'm not sure what you can do to make a swamp area even a better swamp. But if you're talking about an opportunity for... creating a space or activating it for other use, I guess I can get that. I suppose the other thing that I struggle with, obviously, is, you know, the overlay of what may be happening with District 12 and who knows what happens to Studio School. I know that's going to be announced here in a couple months, but, I mean, it may be a moot point if the school doesn't continue to operate. anyway this is i i feel like it's a game of tetris and trying to get all the pieces to fit together but thank you for helping me understand that this is not just making a swamp a better swamp certainly sir it's it's to improve the floodplain is probably the best way of looking at it okay thank you thank you thank you councilmember nowicki

Thank you, Madam Mayor. Real quick, I just want to say thank you to Acting City Manager Loveland and the department directors for, you know, and your staff as well for taking a look at this. I know, again, this isn't easy. You know, in reviewing all this stuff, I try and think it's a real bummer, you know, but I think kind of being an optimist at heart kind of looking at, you know, what does it allow us to do, you know, and maybe in some ways kind of be more creative, kind of be more, and I hate saying that because I feel like that's such like a platitude for like when there's cuts. It's like, oh, think more creatively. But I do think it, you know, it allows us to kind of refocus some clarity and kind of creativity with things. I, you know, I think it's opportunity to lean on junior staff members who may have ideas about efficiencies. You know, as I was thinking, you know, with the goat thing going away, maybe we could do like a sickle rental or something for kids. I don't know, something along those lines. All right, tough crowd, tough crowd. All right. But really, I just want to say thank you for this. You know, I see you. I know the mayor's mentioned that a few times, but I appreciate the work that went into this and the diligence.

Thank you. Does anybody else have any questions or comments for staff? Okay. So the next steps are up on the screen. We know what to expect going forward. Thank you very much. Have a great night. This meeting is adjourned.