Town Council - Regular Meeting

That's good.

All right, you're on my to-do list, my ski coat questions. Incredible. It just takes me a minute to think about those.

That's fair. I haven't touched it.

Yeah, I haven't touched any of that. My glass. She stole it.

It really speaks to your point, Gloria, about upgrades. It's a little...

We need Space Force TV instead of grassroots.

Thursday night.

I guess we could not record these.

I think we should probably roll. part of my campaign to get to the department.

That's not working out.

I know. We could start if you'd like. Should we not? No, I'll figure out another way. Angela, can you hear us? She won't be able to hear us until grassroots.

Oh, until we go live here.

Oh, it's happening.

I can hear you. Good evening. Welcome to our council meeting. It's Tuesday, May 26 and we were starting with a work session. It's a department introductions with the engineering events, the police department and finance. be master of ceremonies.

Absolutely. So I can introduce this for you all. This work session is a speed dating with department heads since they will not be at your retreat. So this is one way you get to know all of your department heads and the departments and what their priorities are and what they've been working on. And keep this in mind, you do have the slides that you can use in the retreat as well. So this hopefully is your FaceTime with the departments. Please ask questions and basically this is your FaceTime with each department. So we'll start off with engineering here and yeah. Go right ahead.

Thanks, everyone, for having me this evening. I'm happy to review some of what I do for the town. But ultimately, I'm here to support all the town's various departments by delivering safe, reliable infrastructure and help technically guide responsible growth. The pictures here are a few of the projects we've worked on together over the last five years, just to remind you where we've been a little bit. On these next two slides, I've distilled my duties into six categories. Yeah, engineering department, it's me and the mouse in my pocket. I've distilled it into six categories, and I'm happy to field any questions you have around these various things. Development review, I provide technical assistance to planning and building, giving comments on building and planning applications to be sure development meets the town engineering standards. I also sit on the town's technical review committee and weigh in on various developments through that and help oversee development funded public improvements like Recently at Stott's Mill when they did all those public improvements, walking through that with a developer and staff to make sure everything is as we wish it would be. Public works support, I work closely with the public works team and provide technical support to their work. and projects as needed. I often help coordinate with public utility providers to try to make sure we minimize conflict. I'm pretty consistently working with Holy Cross Energy, Black Hills, and the Sand District as needed through various projects. emergency services support. I act as a town's floodplain administrator. I've been a certified floodplain manager since 2008, and I also frequently support the needs of our fire and police department, largely their concerns around access and other aspects of development. Next slide, please, Jane. And then capital improvement planning. I support the town council's priorities through financial and strategic planning of town assets. A lot of this is around budgeting, staff capacity and planning, and grant funding. And project management itself, I manage a diverse range of projects, both planning projects, with kind of a long-term vision and also construction projects with each phase from scoping and design to budgeting and bidding, contracting, construction, and through the warranty period. And then also trying to make sure we have enough public outreach throughout all of those projects. And finally, I manage the post committee. I manage those citizen meetings and try to make sure that the goals of that citizen committee align with council's goals and act as a liaison between that group and town council to be sure the park and trails projects align with budgets and design decisions. And then on the last slide, that's just a list of the major projects we're working on this year. And a lot of those will continue into 2027. And I'm sure you'll hear more at your retreat. So I won't go over all of them now, unless you have specific questions that you'd like to address. But that's my speed dating summary. And I can't remember if I'm the left rain or right rain, but next you'll get the other side of you. Thanks, Catherine.

Does anybody have any questions?

Are you the only one in the town in the engineering department, or are there other?

I mean, Justin, our public works director, is a PE as well, so he and I really work together a lot on various things. We also do have, I was going to mention, We have a contract with Roaring Fork Engineering as our on-call engineer, and they help us. We don't do design in-house, so they help us with design and other engineering needs come up throughout the year.

And I'll just say, that's changed over the years, the on-call engineer, just for one reason or another. But yeah, they do all help with surveying issues or whatever, things that kind of go beyond what you have time for. Yeah, what does that mean, like on-call?

So if something comes up and it's a relatively small scope, we don't have to go through a bidding process on every single project. We have them available to us to help with projects, mostly public works projects. And a significant amount of work comes up through the year. If it gets beyond a certain dollar amount, which I think is $50,000. I can't remember what their contract is.

I think it's higher now.

Yeah, but beyond a certain dollar amount, we have to go out through a bidding process. But for smaller stuff, we're like, oh, shoot, we've got a flooding issue. You need to install a quick dry well. It allows us to expedite our processes and not get bogged down by some processes.

Or to prepare an exhibit for an easement agreement that will then come to council for approval. They'll help with things like that.

Yeah, that's a nice arrangement that you guys have. It's kind of managed that capacity that's not always steady.

Yeah, exactly.

That's with the Roaring Fork Engineering?

Yeah. And that contract gets renewed every few years. I think right now we have three years written in. Yeah. And we're probably two years or a year and a half in right now.

Cool. Thank you, Catherine.

Yeah, no problem. Thanks, Catherine. All right, next we have Brad.

Definitely the right brain. I'm Brent Compton, and I've been doing the concerts for a few years as a contractor and was hired last year full-time in January. So I run the public arts and community events, also currently a partner of one. And I have some part-time staff who will go over here as well in the next few slides. Sarah, who is one of the senior planners, helps out with BPAC, Basalt Public Art Commission. And then part-time seasonal staff, mainly just during the day of concerts, Sunday market, and a few other events that we do. These guys are on call and come in. They're contractors that come in and help me out. And there's a few photos of them. And then we'll start with public art. Public art is something that we've been working really hard on getting more pieces of art around town. And as you can see in the middle photo, we finally have plaques for all the pieces of art around town. And that was a project we really took a little initiative on because it's respectful to the artist and to the piece to have identification of the sculpture. And same thing for murals. And on those plaques, you can actually scan them with your phone for QR code. I'm working with Mitzi on that, but it spits it back to our website, basalt.net, and there's a section in there for BPAC. And that's what that QR code goes to. And the photo on the left, we did an art consignment call recently and those are gonna, there's four sculptures gonna go in Willits this summer is the goal. And we're working through the process there and I gotta send some of those to Jeff pretty soon to get contract agreements with the artist. But this is one that was identified on the left. And those are voted on by BPAC members, a citizen board that I help manage. So we have four of those coming this summer which is exciting. And then on the right is one of our older sculptures that I'm sure you guys all know about. And I put this photo on there because we've identified maintenance as an issue for a lot of the sculptures and murals too in town. So this fall, our goal is to touch up that sculpture that everybody sees.

And the next slide, please.

Future projects, this photo was more of my humor because we are doing a call to artists for the roundabout in Willits. This will not be the sculpture. But we will go through a selection process and a call to artists on that. And that's coming up. The call will be this year. And we're going to see if we have the funding and timing to get it done this year. But more likely, it's going to be in 2027 for the roundabout. Other projects we're working on is a mural project. I'm identifying five locations around Willits and downtown to do murals in the future. So that's coming up soon. Our parks and trails and we'll see this on a few slides later. There's a capital improvement and part of that is a 10 year plan and looking at eventually doing sculptures or murals of some sort in the parks and along the trails. And then the new police and public works building, we're looking to talk about, at least have a conversation about doing public art at the new building if that gets done and when that gets done in 2027 or 8. Next slide, please. And this is the capital improvement plan. This is something that was put together before my time. It's kind of like a schedule of things for me to focus on and for BPAC to focus on as far as the timing of when we rotate sculptures or when we want to add new sculptures in certain locations. So they've kind of identified capital improvement plan and this was approved by Town Council a couple years ago and part of this long-term plan is we were looking at call yourself creative designation with with the town and so we're working through that process currently of identifying downtown as a creative district and The call yourself creative is kind of the first step of that process. And that's what I have for that slide.

What does that mean? Call yourself creative designation?

If you can go back to that previous slide, there's a little more detail on there. So the call yourself creative is kind of like a stepping stone to becoming a creative arts district. And Colorado Creative Industries has They have guidelines that you go through to becoming a creative district, becoming a certified district. And so the Call Yourself Creative is more of, there's like the vision, there's like 10 steps to go through. I don't have them all in front of me, but it's basically kind of a guide to get your, to certify your district as a creative arts district.

Certified by the who, Colorado? Colorado Creative Industry. Okay.

it is it has that yeah there's I don't know the exact number I think it's 37 creative arts districts in the state and there's another 60 that are call yourself creative okay so the goal is to get to the first step and then if it's something where you're able to do we'll go for the full certification

besides all the steps leading up to that that are probably good in and of themselves, what are some of the benefits of becoming a creative district?

The benefits, for the most part, is that it kind of attracts people to come to your town. So it's a lot of the wayfinding, a lot of the public art that we put out. Even the concert series is part of that. The streetscape that happened in Midland, that's all a process of that becoming certified.

Yeah, and those are all intrinsically good in and of themselves.

Yeah, and there's other things that we haven't approached and done yet and one of them is a like a creative space like a public creative space downtown so that the art base kind of qualifies at that but there's a there's some different you have to be able to make it open to the public for so many hours a day so there's like different parts that we haven't done and we're going to look at that and see if we can get identified follow through with it cool Community events, I'm sure you guys have made it to the concerts, and if not, hopefully you will this year. And, you know, the community concerts, the summer concert series is like the biggest thing that we do in my department. So part of what I do is booking the music, talking to all the vendors, the nonprofits that come to the concerts. We run the concessions and part in the concessions go to help fund. It's a fundraiser for 10 nonprofits each year. Last year we did $4,800 for each nonprofit. We divided evenly over the 10 weeks. It's a really cool community give back, which I like about the community events. There's a lot of other things we do in the concerts. We do a green team that also helps non-profits sign up to volunteer for the green team. That's really a good thing we started this year, which I'm excited about, which is part of these cups because their goal is to have less waste at the concerts. These are gifts for staff, but also you can buy these at the concerts. And the goal is for a dollar off each drink, we're going to try to get people to use the reusable cups and bring them back each week after they hopefully wash them.

Have we considered working it so that people would use the cups like they have to buy the cup? There are no disposable cups per se.

I have compostable cups to give out for free, but I just feel like it'd be kind of tricky to force them to buy it. So I give them the option for the compostable one, but the benefit is you get that dollar off all summer, which I think will... How much are the cups selling for? 15.

15. So you would get paid back with 15 beers.

Correct. Or wine. Whatever you want to put in there.

That's a lot of wine. Only get $0.50 if you don't wash it, though.

I mean, something interesting to look into is I know there are, like I said, I went to a tennis tournament recently where you had to buy it. But the cup was essentially a souvenir cup. Probably not as nice as this. Probably cheaper. And that might, you know, kind of drive it so people have to do it. There is a precedent out there. I don't want to talk about this per se, but just following on this.

No, it's a great thing. I mean, I would love if we didn't use the compostable cups because it's another cost involved and it is another waste that we have to deal with. I just, I don't know. It'd be tricky. We could discuss it later. See how this goes.

Yeah.

And then I think another thing that's part of my job is I meet with town manager and Chris from the chamber pretty often and also Mitzi with communications These posters that get designed, like that's a big part of my job is editing and I have to get them approved by the bands and make sure the font's okay. Like there's a lot of steps behind those posters. So we're really excited to have Mitzi and Alice to do those because she does a really good job. I mean, we did a poster competition and it wasn't quite what we were looking for. So these are, I don't know, these are great. I love having Mitzi on staff, so it's great.

Yeah, they're really good. You guys should do, like, maybe a limited print run or something. What's that? A little limited print run. I don't know, like, you know, give them out to people and stuff. It would be kind of cool.

Yeah, we tried my first year at the concerts, and it could have just been the design. We tried with shirts and posters to sell them, and just nobody was buying them. So we ended up giving them away from the stage at the last couple concerts. So I haven't looked at it. making enough to sell because I mean these would probably sell but they're also they have sponsor logos on some of them that's kind of probably why people don't want to purchase them but the sponsors is another thing that we started a few years ago and really helps out with the concerts because it's not a it's not a huge chunk of the change that it costs to run these concerts but it's so helpful it helps fulfill the book certain bands which is nice

What is the budget, typically?

The concert budget itself, well, the events itself is $250,000 for the actual events. I think around $200,000 probably goes into the actual concerts. And that includes River Jam, so all three of those. And it does, I mean, there's a whole list coming up, but there's Earth Day, Bike to Work, there's the holiday events, the tree lighting, like all that goes into the same fund. So the summer series definitely is the majority of that. And there's the list. So one that I would add would be the Basalt 125 on October 10th to put on your calendars, because we're starting to build that out, because this is Basalt's 125th anniversary. And that is going to be in Albany Park. We're kind of in the planning phase of that, looking at what we're actually going to do. So I can't release too many details today, but that one's exciting because we're moving out of the park, going over to the barn. I'll be right in front of the barn. I'm working with the Heritage Society on that one as well to have the barn open for the event, which will be kind of fun. Future events, I'm working with the library to do movies in the park. That's been suggested by quite a few people. We were holding off on it in the past because we didn't want to compete with the movie theater, but as you know, that's not there anymore. So we're looking at maybe even a fall couple of movies in the park just to kind of test it out. I think that's going to be pretty well received, and we'll see how it goes.

Really cool.

Yeah, I think people will like that. What's that? I think people will like it for sure. Yeah, I do too. I just got to see how it's going to be, what the cost and how it's going to go. So that's why we talked about doing just a couple of those. And then just researching what other towns do and trying to look at our down times in town, the spring and fall and winter to add more events, plug them in there because It is an economic driver for anything that we do event-wise. We've noticed town is busy during and after those events, so we're trying to look at other times to do different types of little pop-up events to get more people in town. These are the posters, and then I can probably move on to, I believe, the last slide.

And this is a view of one of the concerts last year.

And hope to see you guys there. And if you have any questions, I'd love the answer. That's all I got for public art.

No, I like it. The only thing I had written down was just as an idea on your future events. It looks like I like everything that you've been doing. Um, just like something like, like I know soup school and asthma has been great things for like restaurants to kind of get involved and get people out on the street and just kind of like walking around sampling food.

yeah i think that's great you know we even talked to like a chili cook-off or something exactly any of those things would be yeah something like that that um and that's that comes from chris of the chamber too she really thinks like a fall harvest type anything in that period because she sees that's a i mean she sees she sees the businesses and say that's the downtime a good time to do something so it would be good i like it cool Anything else? Thanks, Brent. Yeah, thank you guys.

What does PACE stand for? What is that? What does PACE stand for? Public Arts.

Public Arts and Community Events. OK. Manager. So it's a lot of work.

Thank you, Brent.

Are you familiar with the Bear Tracks walk? A little bit. Robert E. Yes. I think it's special. It's cool. You know, it reflects the history of us all. People enjoy taking that walk. And it leads to the pool, which is a nice destination. The caboose, I think, should be activated at some level, especially in the summer. The QR code at the front door, that would be great. I think maybe coordinating with Crown Mountain and some of the events they have. and potentially offering, when they're bringing in, not necessarily a concert, but a tournament, there was a couple tournaments there, and people don't really, they think Basalt is Willits. And they go, oh, I love the new town. Well, there's an old town called Basalt, too, so maybe look at that. There's a lot of opportunity out there for those things. And you know, Battle of the Bands, some of those tried and true movies in the park. The 100th anniversary was in the Albany Park with the potluck attached to it, which was cool. It might be too big a community to do that now.

No, we're thinking about it.

Yeah, that's on the... At least a pie baking contest. Yeah. There was other things going on in the community, too, at the same time, like River Days. And posters, I don't know if I can show you one that Judy Haas did, who now has a gallery in Telluride.

it was amazing the river days i'd love to see all the old posters because that's stuff that gives triggers my brain for ideas too yeah that'd be great so i'll bring it by sweet thank you these will age well too

Well, thank you. The Bailey Film Festival, too, was a big deal where the high schools all produced their own films. It was headed up by three seniors from Basalt High School. And they're all in movie production today, so they made a career out of it. Anything we can do to get the... local feeling out there. I know being part of a community creative district. Creative arts district, right? There's 60 of them, so there's a lot of people tagging on to that. We've always relied on our confluence of the rivers for us to be branded. There's bicycle, there's creative stuff, there's all kinds of interesting specifications we only were 14 miles from the largest resort in north america so it's definitely a two-edged sword like all those all right who who's up next thank you thanks brian thank you now we have our police department

Hello, all. Good evening. Aaron Munch for the Police Department. My first slide, I wanted to start with this. I thought it was probably the most important, just because everything we do is driven by our mission, values, and vision. In front of you, I did put a patch and a coin for each of you as a little gift. You'll see on our patch that we wear on our shoulders every day. is our core values, and on the back of our challenge coin is our mission statement of do the right things for the right reasons all the time. I think it's a great mission statement. It's nice and simple, and you can apply it to everything that we do on and off duty, really. We've kind of just taken that on. Next slide, please. In regards to our employees, when we are fully staffed, we have 14 employees. You'll see there of the 12 sworn, myself, one lieutenant, two sergeants, one detective, one school resource officer, and six patrol. And then we transitioned one of our, a short time ago, we transitioned one of our sworn staff to a non-sworn community resource officer. Much of you might have met probably Rachel Fenton. She does a great job. So she's doing everything from kind of code enforcement from dogs to birds to... parking, you name it. But she's in a non-sworn capacity. And then we have one administrative assistant, Dina Prieto, who does a ton. Our current status, we just sent Officer Brian O'Reilly out on his own. He just got out of our field training program, so you'll see him out and about. Behind me is one of our newest officers, Laura Gutierrez. I brought her along tonight just to say hey and put a face to the name. She is in field training and she'll be in that for a while. But I'm sure she'll get through it just fine. And then we have another officer that we just well, I should say employee that we just are trying to bring on board hopefully June 15th to fill another slot. He is looking for housing. He has made it through the police academy but he is shortly on with us, and then we still have one opening. So that's kind of where we're at as a capacity right now.

What housing type?

I'm sorry?

What housing type? Or we can talk about that later.

The housing for him?

Yeah, we can chat later.

Okay, no problem. Thanks. Shifts. So our patrol officers work at Panama 12, if you're familiar with it. This just means every other weekend off. It has been nice, especially for those with families and activities and what have you tournaments every weekend that they can actually get to. It is a 12-hour shift. We rotate every two months from when we're fully staffed to a day shift, mid shift to night shift. So thankfully, throughout an entire year, you're really only working four months of nights during the year. So a little better on the system. Try to be a little healthier. Our community resource officer, Rachel, she does work a 10-hour shift Monday through Thursday. And then admin and our school resource officer is during the week, same as all of us. Some calls for service. This is a graph from our mailer that was just sent out as well. It just shows kind of our calls as they've gone over the years. I put this proactive versus reactive. This really depends on the number of calls for service. It all depends on number of staff to how busy we are. There's all kinds of issues that can go into this. It definitely varies. There's so many variables, I guess, is the main thing here. I put a lot of different types of calls on here. This is not the full extent of what we do, just kind of some more common things that we unfortunately deal with. So just for information where you're at. 2026, we are on pace to be pretty close to 2025 numbers as of right now. But again, the summer could change all of that. And as we get more staff, we may see more numbers, higher numbers as well.

Excellent.

Some of the different things that we do for events and outreach. The Community Police Academy, that starts June 18th. This will be our eighth year that we've been doing it. National Night Out is a good event, second Tuesday, sorry, first Tuesday in August. Every year it's a good, fun community party that we hold. Shop of the Cop is a Christmastime event. that the school district usually identifies some needy families that we will take their children and go shop with them for a night, which is fun. Coffee with a cop, we just did that event. Our school resource officer holds some bike rodeos, mainly towards the end of the year. Active harbor training, we hold this as more of an educational thing of for businesses if they reach out to us and hold that training in regards to what it might look like if an unfortunate event happens at those spots. Same thing for bank security procedures, just something that we will one-on-one with their employees on alarms and bad calls we might have to deal with. And then at the PD, we have a medication drop box take back, so if you don't have to flush or throw away your old medications, they can just drop them in anonymously, and then we'll take care of them, send them off to the DEA for proper disposal. Last slide. Just some future hopeful requests that we kind of think about. I put the two or more plus patrol officers on here. We seem to be always short on shifts, whether it's someone on vacation or training, someone hurt. We run short shifts, unfortunately. And that can be interesting with one person on shift in the middle of the night when you get an interesting call. So that would be a good request. An additional administrative assistant, if you want to see someone do the job of five people, come watch Dina work. She is a hustler and gets it done, but it would be helpful for the amount of requests that we get and all the things that she's doing, try to spread that work out for her. the SRO so we have two main campuses but only one SRO so our SRO is about always bouncing back and forth and it's just To be honest, it scares me. I don't like having a school campus unattended. And having an additional SRO would have both campuses covered at all times, really. I put on there the license plate reader. Well, we've used the technology with other agencies around us to actually solve cases. And I think it would be very helpful for us to continue being successful in solving cases. And then the last one on here is a drone as first responder. I don't know if some of you are familiar with it, but it's just a capability where a drone is located in a certain location. It could be, if I had a computer in front of me, I could launch it from, let's say it's on top of Whole Foods, and you could get eyes on a crash scene or something. where we're stuck in traffic on 82 as we all as all of us are most of the time but you could get eyes on certain crimes and crash scenes and get better responses of more of a size up so again uh bigger requests but just wanted to throw it out there so hopefully i went fast sorry not very fast that was great any questions

The only question I had, and actually it was in the monthly staff report, talking about drones caught my attention. There was like a drone symposium in Carbondale that you sent some folks to. I don't know, does Reefer have any drones?

They have one. Yeah, we have one as well, but the same size. It's like a mid-sized drone. And then we have two that are used for indoor, any actions indoor. They can be used. They're very tiny. Very small, yeah. We have three right now. But those were just like, you have to take those out and move those. The whole DFR thing is... Pitkin County is actually going to that for canyon responses here shortly. You guys will probably see that come about.

And then also just keep in mind Mountain Rescue has drones. It's pretty powerful drones. We've definitely worked with Aspen PD or Pitkin County Sheriff on searches and stuff like that.

We've helped with that. I'm familiar with their capabilities. They're very good drones. Yeah.

What's the difference or purpose between the non-sworn officer and then the rest of the folks?

So sworn has the capability to arrest powers. It's usually carrying a gun, handcuffs, all that stuff. Non-sworn is more of a, I wouldn't say civil, but it's no arrest powers is really what it comes down to. No academy. Non-sworn does not go to the academy. can be brought on at any time and be plugged into any position, just not arrest powers, really.

And is the idea that they move in that direction, or is that there to stay?

That's up to them. I'd love to see Rachel at some point move into a sworn position, but I want to make sure she would be ready for it too. I would never want to force that on anyone. So it would have to be with her own comfortable levels or comfort levels.

Any other questions?

I have a comment. Just thank you so much for all the hard work and effort you've put into this new facility. We're trying to pull out of the hat. That meeting with last week was really good, and I really enjoyed listening to you and hearing what you had to say about this and how much homework you've done already to get it off the ground. along with engineering and Justin and Doug, you know, it was really a very powerful thing to be at, seeing how strongly you guys are collaborating and it just feels like a different environment to me, you know, from the last conversation we had a year or so ago about this same thing. So thank you for that.

Yeah, thank you. Appreciate it.

Thanks, Aaron. All right, thank you.

Thank you. Next we have finance.

So we're a team of three and I gave my little nicknames to everyone.

Doug really likes to click way too much, though he's Mr. Clicker. And I call myself the professional paper pusher. And Vanessa is my little Padawan that's so excited to always be learning and wanting to constantly do more. So couldn't ask for better for a team of three.

Exactly.

So we're going to call this our domains. I call it hats as well. So these are kind of our main areas that we do within the town.

And we have. Townwide across all our funds by 22 or so. Made in budgeted revenue say much of that is 70% of it or so is property tax sales tax franchise taxes and we have grants and. Intergovernmental revenue. And our readers from transfers of real estate tax and we have I didn't mention Our lodging tax and tobacco tax when we are also rounding out our tax domain, if you will. And then really I think the next part is just charges for services, which is led by Matt K. He has his pool in our recreation department. generates quite a bit of revenue. It's not really marginable, but still revenue. And then we have our interest income that we're continuing to accrue. So that's really, every month we go through the revenue and see what's there, what's not there. More importantly, what's not there that should be there. So, and then take the next several here.

And then we do all HR and payroll in-house. So we're about 45 full-time employees with you guys. And then in the summer, it picks up a lot with all the part-time pool seasonal kids, so we're about ready to get all new paperwork here. We do do all the benefits and the retention and work closely with Gloria in the HR role as well to constantly... keep updating our stuff you saw that with our handbook last time and then accounts payable as well all AP checks that you see at the end of the packet every two weeks runs about 120 invoices every check run so there's a lot of paper pushing that's why I call myself a professional paper pusher and then we also manage the procurement policies within that realm as well And then we also manage the IT. We do contract that out to Iron Edge, which once was Provelocity. But we do monitor that contract and meet with them regularly, try to make sure our security is up to date and where we should be. I also try to do internal security monitoring with our employees so that we are not clicking things that we're not supposed to.

And then just rounding out just going around the circle here, you know that we don't have much debt right now, which is a good thing, but as we. You enter into the budget season and into council retreat. We'll be talking about how various initiatives are going to be funded and it will likely involve, most probably involve, issues of some sort of debt or multiple levels of debt as we assemble the stacks. These next two areas, audit and financial, budget and capital, This really is bread and butter of the finance area. It's a tag team with Jenny and myself putting together the audit. You'll be hearing about that second council meeting in June, wrapping that up, oversight of all our funds. We did receive our GFOA designation for recording, so hooray, right? So we got that going for us. And pretty much uneventful audit, I think, is what we're going to find. And then on the budgeting capital side, we, you know, that's the second biggest thing we do, begins in July and wraps up like in November. And it was really assembling the budget for the next fiscal year. And that was the other thing that we applied for and received the GFOA designation for. So I think on the budgeting side, I think Gloria will be her first spin, not for a budget, but for the town's budget. And so she'll likely have some unique ways and value-added ways of assembling our budget. So I think between, again, Jenny's been real granular with me on the ClearGov program. and getting that data assembled. And I believe it's been a pretty collaborative process, generally, with the department heads assembling what, separating the wheat from the chaff, these from the wants, and kind of how we can afford to go forward with certain things. That's what we pretty much do. I didn't mention in the water fund, it was 950 bills that go out every quarter. And this is really Vanessa's own point on that. So she's also processing 950 payments four times a year. So it's a little bit of a lift, you know, doing that. So it's sort of like the, you know, unsung hero taking care of a lot of that.

But we've gone a lot more paperwork. Less paper checks and a lot more electronic payments. So now just shifting that on importing payments and getting them to the right bucket versus manually depositing in a check, which takes a lot less time.

And we do it four times a year. If we do it monthly, that would be 12 times a year. Three times as much work.

We need another Vanessa.

There you go.

How much time do you spend on IT? That's like pushed into your bucket.

Yeah, it's probably the smaller one of them. I mean, that's why we outsource it too and rely on good relationships with them. But that's always the push and pull with ProVelocity going into a bigger corporation. I mean, some good stuff because they can monitor our system better. But that local... What would you call it? Yeah, when you expect something, you want it now. It kind of has to go through the pipeline a little bit, which can be frustrating.

And so like managing the website, is that done by this?

Pretty much every department kind of has their hands in the website. We, again, wear a lot of different hats, but a lot of like our pages, we manage our own pages.

Individual pages.

Yeah. And Lonnie at the front desk, she does a lot of the website as well.

Any other questions? All right. Thank you both. Thank you.

Good job.

All right, so you will have another round of these in the next meeting as well. But hopefully this gives you an idea of who you're prioritizing and what projects they have and what needs they have. So, yeah, that's our spiel.

You were running a little behind here. We're going to take a quick break and then start a regular meeting in about 10 minutes or so. Thanks, everybody. Good evening, and welcome back to our regular Basalt Town Council meeting. Today's Tuesday, May 26. We had a work session earlier on department introductions for several of our departments. Before we get started, I just want to remind everybody about how to join the meeting if you'd like to join via zoom you just need to go to basalt.net click on the agendas and minutes tab and then find the may 26th meeting packet and then the instructions are there to join so you are able to make comments and participate in the meeting so with that i will call the meeting to order and pam will you please call the roll i will do so sir

Okay, let us begin with Elise Hoddle.

Present.

Angela Anderson.

Here.

Rick Stevens. Here. Hannah Berman. Here. Angel Dupre-Bouchard. Here. Greg Schaffran. Here. And David Knight. Here. Motion carries. Thank you. Motion carries.

Everybody's here.

Sorry.

One of those days.

Yes, it is.

All right. Well, next up we have our consent agenda, item two, which is item 2A, approved tobacco tax grant recommendations from the Vail Board. Resolution number, or 2B, resolution number 25, series of 2026, adopting a revocable license agreement with Mountain Rescue for use of town property. 2C is continued to June 9, 2026, the public hearing. for 555 Basalt Avenue development application for special review, PDD amendments, and associated development review actions for 54 commercial storage units and 47 residential units. Item 2D, resolution number 26, series of 2026, approving an application for annexation and zoning certain municipally owned real property annex to the town located at 10526 Highway 82, I think that should say. So I would entertain a motion to approve the consent agenda items as presented unless anyone has anything to take off.

Is it 10-526? I was just going to mention that I would need to recuse myself from 2B because I'm on the board for Mountain Rescue. OK.

It's 2-0-526 on the license agreement.

So as a mayor, let's amend that on 2D, 20526 Highway 82. Are you good with that, Hannah?

Yeah.

Mayor? Real quick, sorry. On the license agreement for Mountain Rescue, the resolution does give me some authority to make some edits to that agreement. There were some edits from Mountain Rescue, which is to allow for some additional equipment and to extend the term through the end of October. So I... Those were handed out and circulated earlier today, so if we could have Resolution 2 to be approved to get those amendments, that would be great.

Mayor, I move that the Town Council approve the consent agenda items as amended. Second.

It's been moved and seconded. We can do voice vote and we just. And he's just kind of, yeah, Greg's just kind of a line item recusal on TB. Perfect. All those in favor, please signify by saying aye.

Aye.

All right. Thank you very much. Next up, we have our item three, which is call to the public. So just some ground rules. Please limit your comments to three minutes and address your comments directly to me. Identify yourself by name and address when making comments. And please sign it in the back of the room. Comments should be courteous, civil, and constructive. And town council will make no decision or take action except to direct the town manager.

So the floor is open. I'm going to grab a clock.

And fire this thing off if somebody wants to talk. Is anyone interested in making public comments? All right.

April's got her hand up, too.

And April will come to you next. Please.

Hello, can you hear me? Yes. My name's Monica Muniz and I live at Cavern Springs Mobile Home Park, 5387 County Road 154, number 79 Glenwood Springs. We are aware of and supportive of your efforts to build and acquire workforce housing. And just want to point out the value of a contribution like this, where you're helping 100 families with as little as $100,000 to $200,000, whereas that would only be helping one family in other affordable housing projects. Thank you for your attention to this matter. Thank you for your comments.

April, would you like to go next?

April, if you'd unmute, you can speak to the council.

OK. Can you all hear me but just not see me? Correct.

And I don't have an option to turn my video on? Either way, we can hear you great, though. Okay.

Okay. I'll just carry forward. Hi, everyone. I'm April Long. I'm the executive director of the West Mountain Regional Housing Coalition. You just heard from Monica. She was intending to go after me, and so I'll put her comments into context. But we're speaking with you tonight about the Cavern Springs Mobile Home Park. which is located between Glenwood Springs and Carbondale in unincorporated Garfield County. And many of you are aware, I know this has come before several of the council before the new council was seated, through public comment to make you aware of the situation there, but their mobile home park is for sale for the second time in five years. This time for a price of $23 million. And that price, while the residents have very quickly and efficiently organized themselves to try to buy the park themselves, and they have the right to do so through a Colorado law. The ability to repay a loan on that amount would make their repayment costs too high. And so the Housing Coalition has been asked to help all the local governments coordinate together to provide some amount of subsidy that makes this option a viable option for the residents. This is an option for resident ownership and for them to buy the park themselves. And so the Housing Coalition has been working with Mountain Voices Project and the residents to pull together a subsidy that makes those lot rents more affordable. We've targeted that amount at $10 million at this point, which would mean that they still need to get loans to the tune of about $15 million. They have lenders in line to give very low interest, below market rate loans that could make that possible. But the $10 million is the part that we've been working on. The Housing Coalition has set a goal to try to get local government contributions to $6 million. And I'm here to report that we're really well on our way to doing so. We have pulled together $5.5 million. That's $1.5 million from Pitkin County, $2 million from Aspen, $1 million from Snowmass, $1 million from Carbondale, and recently $50,000 from the Basalt Sanitation District. So huge thank you to them for contributing to this effort. I think I missed Glenwood Springs is in for $500,000. That brings our total up to $5.55 million and our goal again is $6 million for local government contributions. The residents in Mountain Voices Project have also raised a million from private donors and are still pursuing other private donors and we have some that are very interested in contributing to this effort to get us to that goal of $10 million. So we're asking Basalt to reconsider your contribution tonight. Again, our goal is to get to $6 million. That's a $450,000 additional contributions that we need. And so we were asking Basalt to reconsider that. It would be a commitment to the purchase of the park.

April, we're at three minutes. If you could begin wrapping up here, please.

Sure, it would be a commitment to the purchase of the park and would not be required to be funded and until and unless the residents are successful in making their offer and enclosing on the property in October.

OK.

Thank you, appreciate that information and update and comments.

Thank you.

Anyone else? All right, we'll go ahead and move on to our next agenda item, which is mayor and council reports and comments. So the floor is open.

Yeah, real quickly, I really liked the flyer that came out in the mail about the public arts and police facility. I checked with a few of my neighbors and they hadn't seen it, so I'm not sure.

So, yeah, it went to registered voters in Basalt. So if they're not registered in Basalt, then they wouldn't have received it.

They are.

They are? Okay. Interesting.

I'll take it to Basalt Print and hand it out to the door.

When was it mailed? Two weeks ago.

No, a week ago. I didn't receive it either. Yeah.

I don't remember seeing that either.

Yeah. I got it.

I received it, but I know, like, however this, the texts, I never get those. And it's not, there are some data, um,

want to say issue but there's some squirrely nests with the data I think sometimes because I think it's multiple there's the there's the state but then there's I think also some historical stuff that gets merged with this well just I thought I was unusual adjacent to us I'll reach out to them I'd really like to hear a little bit about the Pekin County Whitewater Park and when that

anticipated to be finished because that thing seems to yeah and Justin did put an update in his report there we did just meet with them talking about the IGA and moving forward with maintenance on that are we anticipating we're moving forward maintenance on that no so making sure that we have agreements with picking County so they maintain it thanks but do you know when the construction will finish off the top of your head Justin, when did they say? Oh, just when the Whitewater Park would be finished. We just met with them.

So there's going to be some conversations in the next couple days about whether they're talking internally about opening it up fully within the coming weeks, minus the prefabricated bathroom. So I think their intention is to open it up as much as they can here for the summer season.

Does that sorry not does that mean they're done with construction or just they were stopping construction for the summer season?

It would. So they're working on finishing sidewalks, making the boardwalk connections, and there's some landscape and grading that they're finishing up. So that's, you know, happening as we speak was happening last week. So they were trying to see how how far they got along. And then they were going to talk internally on when when and how much of the park they want to open up. But how I understand it, in the next couple weeks they'd like to open it up more to the public. And the only thing that is left is the prefabricated bathroom that is set to ship this fall.

Are they doing the fencing? Are they pulling the fencing all the way down?

There will be a wooden fence along the right-of-way between the separation of the road and the park.

The fence that's there, it'll just continue.

I saw him working on it today.

Yeah, just like the split rail is there.

Yeah, I can circle around with them and get more firm dates through to Gloria here the next day or two.

I think that elk run condos are really losing their patience. Okay. not not the fault of the town of basalt and it's going to be a great water park when it's done but yeah they've been i mean i lived there in 2018 and they were working on that area so just like the repeated project so if we could get some firm dates i just know that that would be appreciated

I had one. It's possible that this was stated last meeting, but since there was no audio, I'm not sure. Congratulations. I want to say congratulations to all of our students from Basalt that have graduated or are graduating, including the high schoolers that are moving off to do great grand things in the world, our middle schoolers that are graduating and going on to high school, and then our little fourth graders who are graduating on Monday and going into the middle school. 10 of those fourth grade students, I was told, earned a bilingual pathways award, which means that they have demonstrated bilingualism in Spanish and English, which I think is awesome, and speaks to the bilingual program at the elementary school. and on that same note with the schools wanted to just note that our schools the elementary school and all of our schools are open for enrollment for the next school year if anybody's interested one of the reasons that this has become important to me is because overall enrollment is trending down here in basalt and pretty much everywhere else in the entire valley but I think we face a particularly unique challenge in Basalt because we are closest to Aspen. And so some of our families feel that draw to go up to Aspen because they also have declining enrollment. So they've opened their enrollment. So if you want to learn more about the Basalt schools, I'm sure that they would be happy to talk to you and give you tours. Go Longhorns.

actually on that note unfortunately I didn't remember this until you just said that so I don't have the details but we had a number of basalt high school track athletes that went to state finals and I don't know how they did but that's amazing that they went to see finals and there's also an art show Thursday the 28th this Thursday so hopefully we can find out some more details but

You know, that triggers something that I've been thinking about, too, back in the day when we don't have a coordinated calendar with the school district for their events and the town's events. So home games, parades, you know, art shows, they don't show up. Let's just search the high school or assault school's website. It would be nice to connect those.

Anyone else? I had a question. What happens from last? There was no minutes from our meeting from last two weeks ago. What happens with that? There will be minutes. Eventually.

As soon as Pam can hear them. Exactly.

Because you had recorded it, the audio. So you have to listen to the audio, which is probably maybe hard to hear.

Amy said that she was able to overlay it. I didn't hear it last week. So she's when I spoke with her this afternoon, she said that she had overlaid it. And it is seems to be up and running, but I wasn't able to hear it today. All I was able to get into was the current meeting.

Yes.

Yeah.

I tried to listen as late as. Yeah. Whenever I emailed you. So 2 p.m. maybe. And there was nothing. So we'll follow up on that.

When you say you tried to listen, like the YouTube savings, so that's got audio now?

That's on the Basalt. Like if you Google Basalt Town Council recorded meetings, it takes you to a Basalt site that then takes you to YouTube. Got it. And there was no audio. Yeah. Every time I tried. But there will be. The latest being 2 p.m. today.

Got it.

Typically, if there were technical difficulties, we would be approving the minutes from the last meeting today, and then those would be published.

And I guess that kind of ties into my other thing that in the past two weeks I've learned is I attended my first emergency management committee, and sometimes I feel like coming in, I'm like a new set of eyes looking at things. And one thing that I noticed in that meeting that took away is there's a kind of like a threat assessment document they have. And one of the things they've talked about is like cyber threats for lack of a better word of like the IT infrastructure being a high risk. but not a lot necessarily like a cohesive defense strategy, I think maybe for some of that. There's a lot of talk of wildfire and flooding. I think those things we can kind of visualize pretty easy. But I just think that, you know, even just the work session, we see departments like how IT is like completely offset. I just think it's something that, I think we should look at is just doing like an audit of like, what is our IT stack? What are our vulnerabilities? I know a lot of places that I've worked coming on board, you have to go through like a phishing training on links and stuff like that and reviewing that. I don't know the last time that was done. kind of with the time.

We have a security assessment done once a year, a company called Coalition.

Perfect.

And then we have, I'm trying to get this know before training off the ground. And it's a long story, but active directory really needed to be scrubbed up. And that's been done now. And we have a new contact now with Iron Edge. So it's not it's not lost on me the importance of doing it.

Okay. Okay.

So it's not like it's nothing's being done. It's just not.

Okay. You see it. And when I say nothing's been done, I should take that back. Things are certainly being done. When I brought that up, like the county's got stuff, everybody's kind of handling it. I just wanted to see. I didn't know that that happens yearly. I think that's important. That's all I kind of want to bring up. Maybe that's getting done.

I can send it to you if you want. Yeah, I'd love to see it.

And then also like the IT infrastructure like not having the meeting working online last meeting I felt was a problem and It really limits the ability that people have to like tune in and pay attention to what's going on for sure So I just don't know if that's something we want to like look at Prioritize review.

Is it worth instructing staff to look into upgrades or alternate options.

That's kind of what I'm leaning at, what I'm thinking toward. Do we understand what the root cause of the outage of audio was last time? Do we know definitively what caused that? I believe there was a... Or at least what domain, like, was it grassroots? Was it, you know, Zoom? I don't know.

Yeah, I'm not sure. I think it was a grassroots thing at that point. And I think Amy, not Amy here, or Amy here, but Amy Gob, who was in charge of the government channels for grassroots, I think she discovered that a button had been pushed and it hadn't been mentioned, so... But yeah.

OK. Yeah, I think that's important to understand what the root cause is. And to Greg's point, though, if there's something systemic or a problem in that it occurs regularly, then we need to figure out something else to do.

Yeah, this was an anomaly. This was just.

I'm also thinking I might be a profile. So I think you might have to wait.

So for those who are going to hear, there might have been an issue with the corrupt file. I'll leave it at that, affecting the audio. I share kind of your concerns. I think maybe this is a topic for the retreat. kind of in that tools ways of working you know going forward how can we make sure because i know that was inconvenient for some folks who were um you know wanting to see what was going on last time so it could just be such a high impact event you know

And then, you know, now we can just live stream it ourselves on YouTube or Facebook. You don't really need an intermediary as much. And I know that it's great to work with grassroots, but things have changed and we could be more in control so that there's not an issue with somebody pushing a button. We push the button ourselves.

And on that question, that makes me bring up like all of the citizen boards and committees. Those aren't always recorded, right? But they aren't.

I'm not sure which are and which aren't. They're not broadcast.

No, they're not broadcast.

But that's something else that we could look at because Angela's right. You know, it's pretty, I always say low.

Not recorded. It's pretty low impact. Minutes. Minutes are posted.

People would like to find more ways for people to be able to engage and pay attention to what's going on and be a part of it.

Well, they're welcome to come to the meetings. We don't record them, apparently. Not all of them.

Some people just can't make them, right? They're middle of the day. It doesn't always work for somebody's schedule. And just because they can't make it in person doesn't mean they might not want to watch it afterwards. Or we read things and it says, oh, this committee suggested this or approved this.

We can talk about recording and broadcasting, but

And rather, we're not able to solution anything or show me right now, but I think this is a topic that everybody seems a little interested in how we can find other gear and upgrade this. Yes.

Before solutions, I'm just kind of trying to, exactly.

Yeah.

no great comments any any other comments I did find the timing of the art show so the opening reception for the basalt high school art show is Thursday May 20th from 5 to 7 p.m.

It's in there, yeah, because I went when our daughter graduated like two years ago, and there's some really impressive stuff that those kids put up. It's just in their little lobby, you know, rec room or cafeteria room right there when you walk in.

Anything down here? So the only comments I had, I wanted to give a thanks to the pool staff for helping with our scout swim test yesterday. Everyone passed, including the adults, because we have to take it to where to go rafting over the summer. We all pass our swim tests and you have to float and swim on your back a bit and then do some kind of stroke for the rest. So that was cool. And then maybe a lot of you saw this already, but I just want to make sure everyone was aware. The overdue $40 million in Shoshone funding came through that was at the end of the Biden administration and then was frozen at the beginning of the Trump administration and now... That has been released, and there was a lot of bipartisan effort there. There was a lot of political, a lot to that political backdrop. I'll just leave it at that. But the good news is It's released, I think they're at 97 of 99 million now for those in-stream rights. And then they just got to get through water court. And if that goes the way it's supposed to, we're just basically going to be able to preserve the Colorado River the way it is, even if Shoshone power plant is not running. So I think that's pretty exciting news. Hopefully, there's more money like that release. I know there's some transportation money that RAFTA is interested in, but I'll wait to see what happens with that and report back when we have more of an update. But that's what I've got. So next up, we have our manager's report. So, Gloria, you're up.

Awesome. Thank you. So you'll see that we have the monthly department reports in there. And then I want to highlight that there was something in the consent agenda that council has awarded $220,000 in grants back to the community. And so that's listed out in that consent agenda. So I wanted to commend you for that.

It's working, too. Joe and... Who else? Aaron and Anne's on that. Yeah. Joe Bauer and Anne Stevenson.

And then we just touched on it, but the May 12th meeting had the technical issues with this audio, which we've fixed now, but the recordings will be coming out hopefully soon with that overlay of the audio. So that is what I've got.

All right. So we'll move along to presentations. And we have 6A, our Basalt Chamber Blueprint Data presentation with Chris, and maybe somebody from State Chamber of Commerce, or Tourism Office.

James, if you could . Yes.

Thanks for your patience, too, in this reschedule. We're glad you have a clear window to do this. So the floor is yours.

I'd like to rear their heads. All right. And Amy's on. Perfect.

No. Usually, like, if James is ..

I should put up the manager's report somewhere.

make sure everything's working on my end so hi everyone i'm chris matera i'm the president and ceo of the assault chamber of commerce um with me today um virtually is amy cassidy she's a consultant with the colorado tourism office i'll let her go into her intro real quick and i want to make sure everyone can hear me before we move forward okay awesome

Yes, so as Chris mentioned, I work as a contractor for the Colorado Tourism Office. I've been with them since 2018 and was lucky enough to be assigned to work on this Destination Blueprint program with Chris and everyone in Basalt. So nice to see you all.

All right, to dive in of why we're here, part of this is to reintroduce the chamber and our role in the community with the new council and not have any assumptions of everyone's knowledge and help Gloria out in terms of meeting and greeting different community stakeholders. In addition to the fact that we were participating with this Colorado tourism office destination blueprint grant program, it's a technical assistance program. So part of it included a readout to our elected officials and town staff. So this is part of that. So this will be rather tourism heavy. However, we do more. And then we want to explore different ways to enhance our communication and work together with different departments within the town, with council, and all the things that we do as the chamber, not just tourism related. um so update from us you may not be aware because the joke in the chamber industry is if you've seen one chamber you've seen one chamber because we all do different things we are vastly different from the aspen chamber we're different from the glenwood chamber we're different from carbondale although they're probably the most similar to us we serve three different roles within the community first and foremost we're a chamber of commerce so we do advocacy we're a hub of information for our business community Similar to people who may belong to a professional association like the American Marketing Association, we're that, but more location centric. We are the business association for the Mid-Valley, so it's not just Basalt. Our membership does range from Aspen all the way down to Rifle. We're also what's called the DMO, Destination Marketing and Management Organization. So we do tourism. We are the friendly face of Basalt when people are trying to plan a trip, when they've made it here, when they want to know what hikes to do. We've got three generations together. What's going to work for grandmom and the four-year-old and keep everyone happy? How do we make the most of this valley? Our job is to kind of help them through that journey, whether it's before they're planning or once they're here. and also provide visitor education. We do a lot of work with destination stewardship and leave no trace and all of the things to keep this valley as beautiful as it is. Another arm that we have is economic resiliency and vitality. Some would call it economic development, but that word can be charged, But really maintaining the mid valley is a great place to live, work and play. And hopefully the next generation that's growing up and doing these amazing art shows at the high school that they can find a job later on when they're adults. So we play a couple of different roles. Our current resources is we're a staff of one to two. I'm about to go back to a staff of one next week because of housing challenges for my office manager. We have an office and a visitor center. We are now located behind the art base. We moved about two months ago. We own the physical structure of the caboose here on Lyons Park. You guys own the land. So we're kind of like mobile home. in that sense and our digital media is in addition to the physical presence we have our website social media and again we're also the friendly voice that answers the phone which surprisingly we get a lot of comments on that where I guess that's not the norm for people to call you back Before I jump into funding, the other thing is we represent 400 businesses and non-profits here in the community, again, mostly mid-valley centric. We've been around for over five decades. Before officially being the Basalt Chamber of Commerce, which was incorporated in 1983, We were the Roaring Fork and Frying Pan Chamber of Commerce. So we've been around for a while. And it's really funny to look back. Rick actually shared a piece with us last council meeting that was from 2000. And it was funny because it was a cover of Rude Eye and last year's cover of the magazine was also Rude Eye. So things change, but also they don't. And if you weren't aware, we're the ones who also produce the Discover Basalt magazine. In terms of our organizational funding, we are primarily driven by membership dues. That's the majority of our budget. We do receive lodging tax that was codified by the voters in 2004. So the first vote in 2004 was 1% for the Chamber of Commerce to do destination marketing and tourism efforts, and the other 1% was for post. And since then, it's been layered upon, but we still maintain that 1% that is given to us by the voters. That's about 25% of our budget. And then we get grants and technical assistance. So while this grant did not give us cash, they gave us Amy and her expertize and the rough value of that was, I believe, about $27,000. So that's something we wouldn't be able to do otherwise if it wasn't for these grant programs. And we get other smaller grants along the way, depending on the opportunity or go in partnership with the town. There is no direct town funding. In terms of our chamber-related efforts, it's to promote the members and the business community at large, that Basalt's a great place to do business. We help them navigate things when they get stuck trying to do business here in town. We do a lot of shop small campaigns. During the holiday season, we do the season of small promotion, really emphasizing shop local. We do weekly email marketing campaigns, which if you guys are familiar enough with open rates, we have a 50% open rate, which is huge. And we have a subscriber list about 1400 individuals. So it's a combination of our members and locals, and it's a great way to get the word out. I also know people read it because I leave Easter eggs and people talk to me about them. So it's a valuable resource. And for the business community, we're kind of that help desk. We're sort of your concierge. I'm stuck. Where do I go? I probably know. the answer or how to help you get that answer and for our tourism and destination management initiatives again visitor center operations general promotion of the area bless you our magazine basaltchamber.org we also manage listings on colorado.com which is the number one tourism destination for people trying to find details about an area when they want to come to colorado second is coloradoinfo.com We do a variety of marketing and advertising, mostly in-market because Aspen has a bigger budget than us, so it's a lot easier for them to spend the money and then we hook them once they're here. We also support the Basalt Summer Concert Series. Ever since we handed that over to the town, it was our series for 30 years. And then we also have done the they did what campaign with the Eagle County Lodging Tax Marketing Committee in unincorporated Eagle County. But that was a whole leave no trace type program that was highly specific to the needs based on land manager feedback of the problems they were seeing. That campaign was in response to it. And then we work valley wide with all of our colleagues in the Roaring Fork Valley Destination Alliance. And I'm currently serving on three different groups for the Aspen modernization and air closure that will happen next year. For economic resiliency and vitality initiatives, it's business resources. We are highly involved with the SBDC, a lot with business continuity. We work on getting data on information that is coming from the Kansas City Fed or educational opportunities, a lot of workforce engagement, working with the talent pipeline that's happening at the state level. And then we do receive some funding from Eagle County in support of those economic vitality efforts, but that's not a guarantee. That's something we apply to every year. It was really hard to delineate between the buckets of what is chamber versus what is tourism versus what is economic vitality because frankly, it's all intermixed and a lot of what I do overlaps. But ultimately, the goal is to have a strong business community because that makes a strong general community. If you have a great community you want to live in, you probably want to do business there as well. And the better way to put this was really it's more the roots and everything is intertwined with what we do, and it's also therefore intertwined with the town. Going for our website traffic, we do receive a lot of visitors, mostly in the summer. There are certain obviously key spikes in there, but we are a hub of information not just for our residents, but for our visitors. And our top pages are split between the visitor-specific events of things to do in the area, but also community events. So being that hub of information of when is the lacrosse tournament, when are the concerts, what time is the Sunday market, what's going on for the holidays, we end up being that landing page as well as an ongoing calendar of events. And of course, on the Chamber side, we're also very much known for the ski pass, which is most of my August. And I will let Amy jump in about CTO updates.

Great. Thanks, Chris, and thanks for having us tonight. As Chris mentioned, this presentation is partly a result of the work that the Basalt Chamber is doing with the Colorado Tourism Office. So I want to just give an overview of what that office is and what some of the priorities for the CTO are. So the Colorado Tourism Office sits within the Office of Economic Development and International Trade. And their mission is to empower all to thrive in Colorado's economy. And then the vision for the CTO is to empower the tourism industry by inspiring the world to explore Colorado responsibly and respectfully. One big initiative for the CTO over the last several years was embarking on a statewide and regional destination stewardship strategic plan. We recognize that there won't be a Colorado to visit if we don't take good care of not just our physical environment, but the people that live here, the visitors that experience this, our culture, everything that makes Colorado so amazing. So the destination stewardship is to support a balance between quality of life for residents and quality of experience for visitors while enhancing our environment and our communities. And their definition, I don't need to read it, but this is really here. And this is really what drives the destination blueprint program, which is what the Basalt Chamber is participating in. Excuse me. These are the guiding principles of the statewide and regional destination stewardship strategic plan. But I also wanted to read. I worked on this plan. I was on the team that drafted the plan. And we interviewed over 1,000 stakeholders and partners in the industry and outside of the tourism industry. And we asked everyone what success would look like from the development and the implementation of destination stewardship strategic plan. And that came up. through in the vision statement. So destination stewardship in Colorado is success when our tourism resources and experiences are protected and our residents benefit from and support the tourism industry. Go ahead. So Basalt sits in the Rockies Playground region, one of eight regions in Colorado. which includes pretty much the I-70 corridor from Georgetown roughly to Glenwood, on to Aspen, and then places like Breckenridge, Mintern, and Leadville. The planning effort for the regional destination stewardship strategic plan, that is a mouthful, included outreach and workshops to understand the priorities of destinations and communities within the Rocky Mountain and all of the different regions in Colorado. So the priorities that emerged for the Rockies Playground include things that you would not normally associate with tourism, but that tourism has an impact on and or is impacted by. And so also the regional and statewide plan recognize that there are already a lot of really great organizations doing work on a lot of these issues. And the plan really sought to understand what tourism's role in supporting that work versus what tourism should take the lead on. And that's something that, that's an approach that we took with the Basalt Chamber work through Destination Blueprint as well.

And one thing I wanted to note, one of the things in here is like workforce diversity, workforce housing, some of the things like going back to that tree model with the roots, like everything is connected and the state saw that as part of its destination stewardship plan. Maybe it's not the one taking the lead on workforce housing, but recognizing it is a concern that impacts everybody in these communities. Thanks, Chris. Yep.

Excellent. So what we're talking about tonight or what I'm talking about tonight is the Destination Blueprint Program. And this uses the community-driven planning approach to create a strategic vision for tourism, identify key priorities, and implement projects that support the development, marketing, and management of the visitor experience. And the goals of the program are to support economic vitality and community well-being, strengthen industry leadership and collaboration. And I do want to say that you already have just incredible leadership with Chris at the helm of the chamber here in Basalt. She's very highly regarded throughout the tourism industry collaborates really well with the CTO and other destinations. So that was one we needed to spend a lot of time on. But also promote sustainable and regenerative tourism practices. Really figure out what's unique about visiting Basalt and how inclusive are the offerings for visitors. And then, as Chris mentioned, the technical assistance, which is in the phase we're in right now, is valued at $28,000. It's a hefty grant. The program included the destination assessment, which was work we did starting in August all the way through kind of the end of 2025. We did host a community visioning and action planning workshop, and then Chris received 100 hours of free consulting, 100 hours of my time to implement priorities that came out of all of the work leading into that. These are some other CTO programs and grants and I just want to mention that as a participant in Destination Blueprint, the Chamber is set up really well to apply for and be successful in receiving some of these other programs and grants. And so some of these things are recommendations that I'm going to make as a result of our program that the Basalt Chamber considers applying for going forward. Some of them are technical assistance and some of them are like financial grants. So what did the program look like in Basalt? We conducted our destination assessment. Chris assembled a very highly engaged core team. We had core team surveys and meetings. We conducted resident sentiment and tourism stakeholder surveys. And then the Basalt Chamber has access to the CTO's subscription to Datify, which is they take cell phone and credit card data and provide visitor profile and visitor spending reports. And as a result of the Chamber's participation, they'll continue to receive those reports as long as the CTO has that contract, and then additional background research that Chris provided. And through all of that, we landed on these recommended priorities for what we were gonna discuss at our workshop that we hosted in November. Looking at off-peak tourism, understand make you know ensuring that the community understands what tourism is what the chamber does and what what value it brings to the community encouraging responsible and respectful visitation developing enhancing visitor experiences and then promoting local businesses and experiences so we hosted our a community networking event the evening before our workshop and we hosted our workshop on november 12th rick was there And that was really a visioning and action planning workshop. We created short, medium, and long-term action items relating back to the priorities on the previous slide, and then took that lead partner advocate framework to really understand what the Chamber's role is, as Chris alluded to on the statewide plan. What does tourism or the Chamber take the lead on? Where do they actively support the pursuit of other stakeholders' goals and then where does the Chamber act as more of an advocate? And that was in November. After that, we created a scope of work for the 100 hours of my time of consulting. And the two big deliverables that came out of that are a three-year tourism marketing and communications plan. It's a pretty comprehensive plan, but really what's important are the guiding principles, and those are that anything we do respects the character of the community, supports local businesses and experiences, makes sure that tourism growth is aligned with community values, and then working within realistic capacity and resources, as you've heard, versus a team of one or going back to a team of one. And then we did a lot of work on branding and messaging. And so that involved a brand discovery report. And one of the things, some of the key takeaways from that work are that Basalt, even pre-COVID, post-COVID, Basalt remains approachable, welcoming, and inclusive. There is genuine warmth and authenticity and you can really feel at home in basalt. And the other thing that really struck a chord with me is that access to nature and outdoor recreation is really embedded in daily life. It's in basalt's nature and it does not feel extreme or high performance. And then the last deliverable are some presentations and updates to town council, our core team and workshop attendees. that's the bulk of the work that we're doing it's wrapping up the end of this week and we'll finish up with a summary report and recommended next steps in june

So thank you, Amy. So sort of our next from steps from this is to share some of the details of those plans that Amy has worked on, but find opportunities of where it is lead partner advocate. Where's the chambers lane? Where's maybe the town's lane? Where's opportunities for us to collaborate? Where is it? You know, a letter of support for a potential grant that we go for or vice versa. Having these opportunities for partnership and better aligned in what we're trying to achieve as a community because we all want the same things. Our parts are just slightly different that we play to get to that objective. um so having increased collaboration i know brent and i have been talking a lot about events and what's their purpose and where their opportunities to grow that especially with the less busy season i in general it doesn't seem like we need more events particularly in july but talking to our merchants talking to some other people like fall may be an opportunity But doing in a way that is intentional, that is data-driven and that is adding to the quality of life here for our residents and for visitors and not one that ends up being detrimental. I know we heard a lot during the early COVID years from Aspen where it was like we need to have our dead season because we need to recoup and having that same type of sentiment of listening to the community and making sure that's helping to drive all of our planning. that we're doing for events or other things that we might be driving for visitors and not doing too much at the wrong time and not enough in other times when our businesses may need that help. So getting that alignment, we have a big opportunity with the Aspen Airport closure that's coming up next year. I think it's one of those things where some people are very scared, but I see it more as an opportunity. It's more about how you leverage it. and we have a very strong drive market that comes in the summer anyway so they're not all getting here by plane so how do we make sure that they have a really great experience while they are here and then working together on things like the public art program the historic walking tour things that it's a little fuzzy who may own something but even if we the chamber do not own it part of our job is to help educate people that hey we have this historic walking door hey we have all these amazing public art sculptures the photography on the town's website is something that we write into our contract when we do professional photo shoots the town needs to be a licensee on that so that they also could have really great photos to highlight this area so finding these opportunities to collaborate between our two entities is really important Regular meetings, I have a standing one-on-one with Gloria. I now have a standing one-on-one with Brent, making sure we're continuing that flow of communication. I'm not town staff, but I'm adjacent to and sometimes those behind the scenes conversations are really helpful to have before something launches publicly. again getting aligned on those shared priorities and also providing feedback of the what I see from my perspective the data I have access to that town staff may not that I can help inform from a level of expertise leveraging our roles effectively there are certain things you guys can't go out and advocate for that I can so when I need to stick out my neck we can do that and vice versa and get to the same goal, and include other entities when appropriate. I heard earlier Crown Mountain Park was mentioned. That's a huge one. We have this great opportunity when the lacrosse tournament comes to town, the economic impact that it has, how are we making sure our merchants, one, know about it, and two, are adequately prepared? And then how can we leverage the most of these people who are already coming here? We're not adding anything else, but how do we optimize their time here in this community? So next steps, we'll complete the program pretty much end of the month. Amy will provide the summary report and I'll get a little bit more detail from CTO staff and then just continue with that coordination between our entities and any other key stakeholders while determining that lead partner advocate framework. So as you go into your future strategic planning session, you're offsite. Some of those things to keep in mind of Where's the town's role to play? Where's our role to play as the chamber? Where do we maybe need to bring in somebody else to help assist with getting the message out and get the right people to come to Basalt and support this community that we all love? And that's it. Sorry, that wasn't exactly 20 minutes. I tried to be fast.

You're good. You're good. Thanks. Thank you both. What questions do you all have? I know I appreciate it. I definitely appreciated that last it was a third bullet point like we do want to make sure that we have an ongoing dialogue at the right levels so we especially when things come along unexpectedly you know we have a way to work together opportunities present that we can take advantage of quickly that we have we have ways that we can do that and the lines are open I know you know we have a great relationship with the chamber and it's great you guys are meeting regularly and everything I'd just like to strengthen that and figure that out so that should be a topic uh we have a retreat you know one of them so uh yeah

and one thing is that came out of these conversations was understanding that tourism can take many shapes and forms and a big one is the members of the roaring four club and how much they support our community and i think too when we had the lane christine fire how many people wanted to help our local restaurants especially who may have had a background and that was their past life and they really want to support this area so Some people may view second homeowners as a negative. And I think again, similar, it's all about how it presents itself. I think it's a really good opportunity. These people love the salt and that is a great way to engage and still be nice to the environment throughout all of that. So it's not, when we talk about tourism, it doesn't mean everything to everybody. It's finding the right people that are in alignment with the values of this community and who understand the term that came up all the time was the small town charm.

people who get it and appreciate it those are the people we want to visit basalt and my door is always open for any later questions that you might come up with does anyone have any questions or comments otherwise thank you thank you both again thank you i appreciate the patience getting this on and uh this is on the 21st agenda right

Thank you.

Thank you. First agenda. Yep. I just added it.

There's a lot in there.

We'll have to prioritize that. Yeah. All right. Well, next up, we have item 6B, which is our homestead parking update. We have Gloria, Aaron, and Justin. So looking forward to this one.

All right. So there is a memo in your packet that I'm going to go over. So we've been corresponding with the group up in Homestead who came to us with concerns on speeding, parking, and noise. So in our discussions on December 9th with the homeowner's concerns, they were concerned about the vehicles constantly running a stop sign, which we are having issues with around town. So Public Works installed a reflective stop sign post and put flags up, and we received comments that this was helping, but they would still like speed dips and speed tables. And so we have been monitoring it with our speedy spy that we have. And right now, our speedy spy numbers are there and does not justify additional infrastructure changes at this time, but we are still going to be monitoring that. So we'll continue to monitor that area as well as other areas around town for those speeding. I think one of the bigger issues right now that they've brought up is homestead residents are concerned about non-residents using homestead, using the on-street parking spaces. So there are about 60 to 65 on-street parking spaces. We have 28 driveway access points to off-street parking spaces throughout Homestead. We measure this at 24 feet per space. So we have been monitoring the parking up there. You'll see Chief Munch's breakdown on availability of spaces on the second page of that memo. At this time, we still have not been able to see the area fully parked up, so we have asked the residents to contact the police department so we can document that, because we're really looking to get you all data for that data-informed decision to do a policy change. And right now, we don't see the data lining up with that we have a significant issue that would warrant us to go any further into parking residential tags or something like that. so that that's kind of where we've landed there but we will continue to monitor that the residents did request that we abolish the 72-hour parking rule at this time staff would not recommend that we abolish it from one area of town if we looked at it comprehensively for the whole town that would be a different story but Just for one area of town, it would be, first of all, a little confusing. And we have that rule in place for a reason, to keep our neighborhood appearance, ensure that cars aren't vandalized, and keep parking available. So that would be kind of our... our rebuttal to that request and then we are going to continue to gather more data on the the parking availability as far as the noise goes we don't currently have a noise ordinance in place that was one of the residents concerns and without an enforceable noise ordinance we offered to mediate between the residents and any businesses that they might have a noise issue with But we haven't done a mediation at this point So I know these I want to make sure that the residents have felt heard up there But our recommendation is still that we would like to take additional data, especially this summer last summer We had Midland being worked on so this summer is kind of a test summer to see where we're at with that and Present back to Council if there's significant findings there happy to take questions or direction but I would like to see what it looks like

Yeah, specifically because the memo from the resident committee, you know, names the Sunday market and the Wednesday night concerts. And 2025 data collection didn't start until late August, after which those were completed. So I think it's going to be important to watch it through the height of our summer season. And then, like you suggested, we have more data to know what we're doing to move forward.

I agree. I'd really like to see the summer data once we're able to collect that. One question I had about speeding. You know, this is, you know, in relation to, you know, or when you're looking at it in terms of averages, you know, do you have, you know, It's an average. That's the math. But if you have, what are the numbers and the percentages of people going 10 to 15 miles per hour over? That's what I'm curious about because that's kind of the actual safety-oriented metric, I guess, versus just an average speed. You know what I mean?

So are you asking what we're specifically looking for, for enforceable?

No, I'm looking at, I'm curious, like, how many people were driving, like, 10 to 15 over? What proportion?

Or greater? Yeah. Hold on just a second. Let me just find the number to where we were.

So in one particular speech study, we kind of made a mark of 20 miles an hour and below. And so on that particular week, he said 20, just make sure 20 miles per hour as the absolute speed, not over the speed limit.

1515. Yeah.

And so in this particular week, the average speed was 16.08 miles an hour and there was 3401 cars. And so of those 3009 of those cars were going 20 miles an hour or lower. So there was only cars going faster than 20. There was only 392 going faster than that.

Over what time period?

We had just of those 392, 32 of them were going 25 miles an hour or lower. And the rest, there was no higher speeds than that.

So of the 400...

sorry give me that one more time so the way that i was looking at this bar was um 20 miles an hour right right 3 000 out of 3009 cars out of 3 401 cars were going 20 miles an hour or less

And then of the greater group, you said there were people going. There were 12 or 12. You broke them into two groups, basically. There was. Three or 400 cars.

There was at least 32 cars going more than 10 miles an hour over the 15 mile an hour speed limit in that particular week. Okay. In another week, it was, we had. And you're talking about the week of November 11th? Correct. Yep. Yep. And then on, on the cliffs hillside, um, there was 2,550 cars that week and 2,539 of them were going 20 miles an hour or less. So we only had 11, there was only 11 vehicles going more than 20 miles an hour. Interesting.

So at that end, I mean, that's pretty close. But on the other end, you have a bigger group proportionally going at that speed, you know, significantly over. I would, you know, that would feel fast.

Yeah, particularly on those streets. Yeah. Well, so I feel like the Old Town, Hill District, Homestead area, the parking and the noise are two things that are somewhat unique to that area because of their location and proximity to Midland, right? Like, I live in Elk Run. We don't have people trying to park there and come into town. And we don't have businesses next to us with noise. Same thing can be said for Willits for the most part, unless you're right there in the Willits area in those condos. The speeding, and Chief and I talk about this a lot, the speeding is a problem in the entire town. It's a problem speeding and running stop signs. I mean, every time I see Aaron, how's it going? Well, people are still running my stop sign because I live right in the corner at a stop sign in Alcaron.

You do a great job patrolling it.

Right. They do what they can. And I know it's a problem on, you know, East Valley Road. We talk about the speeding there all the time. We talk about speeding and running stop signs throughout the Willits neighborhood. So I wonder if, you know, obviously the parking and the noise is kind of, to me, a separate comment. The speeding... which is kind of the most important because it's the safety aspect. It's like, what can we do as a town, whether it's just a public service effort to get it out there, to get our citizens to just slow down and stop and be safe in general in every neighborhood? That's not just Hill District. I'm sure Erin has lots of ideas.

That's the million dollar question, I guess. I know Mitzi is working on the stop campaign for a while. I don't know how much that has gotten out there, but that was pretty fun. I don't know what kind of plan words we could do for speeding, but we could probably figure something out.

What's the issue with giving this neighborhood or East Valley Road the speed bumps that people are always asking for? I mean, is it a financial issue? Is it an issue with clearing the snow? Because I just, you know, you hit one of those going too fast and you learn your lesson. And I just don't see why. Is it off the table completely? Are we not able to do that?

We've asked for them and I'll run as well. And I was told it was a snow removal issue.

Snow removal is part of that conversation. There's certainly more expense in adding those speed humps. We actually get received complaints about noise from speed bumps as well. But a lot of that is driven by snow removal efforts and drainage issues that it may And in some particular cases, it would actually reduce parking even further by adding these speed humps.

Is there an alternative that's out there to speed humps that accomplishes the same thing?

I'm sure there are ways to, and this would be a very significant expense, redesign the road in its entirety where you are forcing cars to go slower and having more bicycle and pedestrian friendly facilities implemented within that street. but it most certainly would. You could change that speed limit that way. I'm not a traffic engineer per se, but there are tools in the tool belt that could be added that would likely even more negatively affect the parking there as well.

I think that was the goal on East Valley Road with making it curved, but people just aren't. When it curves, they're just in the middle of the road.

It does bring up a good point, though. And another difference between the Homestead area and these other residential neighborhoods is that we all have sidewalks, and they don't. I don't live up there, but I love to walk up there and I walk my dog and it is scary. Again, I think that we need to watch it over a full summer season. But as was noted, I think safety is paramount and if there is anything that we can do to just make it a little safer, we're making these improvements to Cliffs Hillside Park and hoping that more residents take their children there. But if you feel like you can't get your child there safely, it's kind of a moot point.

It feels like there's some outlier speeders there. Even if it's 30, a few dozen, depending on the week, that could cause a catastrophe, potentially. So I wonder. I know this might be a little provocative, but the speed cameras. You know, like you have to be, you have to go slower. I mean, I don't know how folks would like that. But I mean, with that, like look at Midland over in Glenwood, like people go through there, they drive perfectly through there as far as the speed. And I think that's kind of what we would like to see up there because it's a street on one hand, but I think Angel nailed it. I mean, that's a spot where people like to take a walk. It's almost like a mixed use path with cars effectively. You know what I mean? Because it's pretty. There's no sidewalk. There's different ways to ingress, egress it from either the ends or in the streets in the middle, even the stairs up from Bernard. So I don't know. I mean, that might be something to look into as well. And especially if we have some more data showing some other weeks, like what's going on as far as people's driving behavior. The other quick comment I would make would be maybe this noise piece would be a good thing to collaborate with the chamber on, you know, rather than just us kind of being a go-between in the neighborhood and the businesses. Like if you get the chamber involved to help communicate this, that, you know, this is part of kind of those principles that, Chris was presenting on, like, how do we all kind of, you know, different kinds of tourists, residents, part-time residents, full-time residents, how can we all be together and get along together? And that might be a good way to work with the chamber and kind of solve this with the neighborhood and the businesses. Because they're both cool. You know, the music's cool. We just need to gel as far as volumes and maybe some acoustic stuff.

We have all that stuff. When the tipsy truck came on board, that created a significant impact across the river at the frying pan there with those homes. We enacted a noise ordinance. I don't know if it still exists. And there was nothing allowed outside after 10 o'clock, acoustic, blah, blah, blah. And then on the other hand, with the speed calming and so on, there are portable speed bumps that you can rent that get nailed into the ground that you could also utilize potentially. And then if there's, and you drive over them and there's definitely noise, if you have something in the back of your pickup truck, it's going to jump up and bang down on the bed. But you know, one of the things I, struggle with is all the data informed decision making processes that we use don't really look at too deeply and you are we're getting better at it but listening to the people that live up there and suggesting hey you know we live here we see it every day we don't have the traffic counter the traffic counter that we have is not equipped with the camera as far as i know so we've used them before they have cameras and you can get the plate readers and it's basically good to figure out is it residents up there that are doing this or is it people using it as a bypass to get to rudy during construction on midland both during the infrastructure and everything else all the boats were going that way to get up to because they couldn't navigate downtown they couldn't go through the clark's market parking lot so they were using that as the bypass And a lot of people said, well, I didn't even know that was up there. This is great. I can drive right by downtown and get to Roodi. And that is a huge economic piece of our business community here is Roodi in the summer. And that's come up a lot. And 3,000 trips in a week, that blows my mind up there. Where are they going? I mean, I know the hill's grown up the hill, but there are several accesses further up the frying pan that you can get up there on that are a lot easier. I don't know what the traffic counts were like there five years ago, but I can't imagine it was 3,000.

How the Basalt Connect gets up there too and serves that community and takes Homestead and zigzags up. That could be some of those traffic counts. The 72 hours, How much do you have to move the car to not be counted as 70 that you're?

I can tell you that because I've been off-run. I've been ticketed. They literally chalk your tire. So you can roll forward two feet. And as long as the chalk is moved, they don't know if you've left and come. Sorry. If you've actually left and come back, or if you've actually parked in a slightly different spot, or if you've just rolled forward a little bit.

Well, I'm very sympathetic. I live up on Ridge Road. It's probably me speeding on the days that I'm late for work. And I think it's a tough spot that we're in because that whole hillside community was built way before basalt blossomed into what it is now. And so I do think that it's due for some love. I don't know what that looks like. I'm very supportive of seeing what the summer numbers look like. and then coming back together again in the fall to really dial in a solution to it.

Do we have any information on how many parking tickets owners are paying or they're being ticketed up there? Do we have any idea?

That would take a little bit of time to pull some of that data, but we could sure. I'd just be curious.

I think it is something worth revisiting. I'm sympathetic to the people who live up there. I understand how frustrating that could be, especially some of the comments about people saying, I walk to work. I don't drive very often. I'm in that case. I don't drive a lot of days. So I think sometimes having to move your car when you don't drive just to move your car, I'm sympathetic to what that can be. And also, like I noticed, we'll talk about it later, in the design guidelines, the Midland design guidelines, I think there are some points in that could make this parking more challenging for those residents and so I'm just I'm sympathetic I do feel their pain even though like I don't leave it I don't experience it I just think it's something that we should pay attention to for sure I want to see I really like the point in here about creating a predictable model for other requests we're talking about a parking gate here soon like there are parking issues that are coming up across town and I think it's something that will have to change at some point in the future and like what that looks like it's unknown right now and i think this could be a good example of what a permanent process like maybe that works maybe it's a good spot for a pilot program but i think at this point we just we need more information about it so like of their requests like i am more inclined to like support the idea of waiving their fees that's 72 hour fee um these residents like temporary to understand what this looks like as a pilot program if that means we can collect more data on how many residents are getting tickets and having moved their car like is this an issue um so that's just kind of like my point my thoughts on this is more information to be better i think and i really appreciate kind of rick's point too where it's like it's great to have all the data but if residents are telling us that it's a problem i'm kind of inclined to listen to them

Yeah, I think. Oh, I was just going to say, I think it'll be interesting to see how summer is because there are some Airbnbs. There's some homes up there that are that are Airbnb. You can just tell by when the when there's vehicles in the driveways and not. And they may not know as much as well as our residents do, you know, what the speed limits are and, you know. yeah we walk our dogs and I think people that live up there know that and they know to be kind of go slow around the corners whereas you know somebody that's just renting a home may not know those things so I mean yes and no I think that anecdotally in both Willits and Elk Run at least the vast majority of the people speeding are residents in those neighborhoods

and I happen to know that because I chase my own neighbors down and fuss at them and ask them to slow down and so I know where they live I know the people that are speeding live right down the street from me so that's kind of where I was going with maybe some kind of like campaign of like be neighborly slow down but I also again appreciate that there's a difference between the homestead area and where I live but it does share it with Willits and that it's also a an avenue to something else sometimes, which is where I'm interested in to watch this summer with Midland being fully open. Are people back to using Midland instead of using Homestead as intended?

also that new house up there on Ridge Road that's getting a lot of construction traffic to your point about 3,000 trips because that does seem really high so yeah I think you know there's a lot going on that's a lot of things going into it so I'll be very interested to see you know what we learn

And I think if we get halfway through the summer and the data is overwhelming that there's no parking, I don't see a reason to keep waiting it out the full summer. If it's mid-July and they're skunked, I'd love to jump on that quicker as well. I walk home from work. I'm on Sopris. I walk that area a lot. And I also think when the sidewalk ends after Spur Lane, I wonder if there's some way to separate pedestrians and get them on a little walking trail. Because you can't see around the corner, and you're supposed to walk towards traffic. But then I switch to the other side, and I wonder if part of the reason it feels so fast, even though the data is saying it's 16 miles an hour, is because they're right next to you. And that's uncomfortable. So if there's some other solution, like we can't do the speed bump, but we could do a walking path, I'd love to see some separation there.

Speaking of speed bumps, there is one on Homestead by the stop sign. It needs to be repainted. Thank you.

So we annually we try to within budget paint as much as we can and Those are on the list here for the next couple of weeks that any contractor is mobilized. Thank you.

We may have given you more feedback than we were expecting tonight. But thank you for listening. And I know we're getting near. We're pretty far behind. So I do want to wrap this discussion up and move on to the next, unless anybody has anything else that we need to hit. So thank you both. Thank you to everybody who's been involved with this. And I'm looking forward to seeing the data later in the summer.

And also, thank you to all of the neighbors for getting together. That's amazing civic engagement and much appreciated.

Thank you. It's not easy.

Yeah, you guys are good to work with. Appreciate it.

That's like the best part of democracy.

So next up, we have item 6C, which is our first quarter 2026 financials with Doug. Thank you.

So that knows how to clear a room, right?

Tough, tough grad.

All right.

Well, we don't have the jazzed up version here that we had initially there with Gloria. Back to the drawing board. So we'll start as we always do, a graphical illustration of our revenue and expenses within the general fund. And you'll see that the blue and the red on the slide here to the left, the blue and the red, I'll use my pointer. I know people at home can't see me. I don't know if there's anyone at home looking, but someone looking at a recording, if they can hear, we'll just, James will toggle over where I'm actually pointing to. So you'll see the blue here is all sales tax and the red is property tax. In the last section in your booklet or packet, you'll see that actually through March there was actually a 4% lift on sales tax. That was actually some good news for the revenue front this year. A lot of other categories of income. Is not called cats and dogs with licenses and permits. Building permits is noteworthy as being down for the first quarter where sales tax was up. Building permits was only at 56,000. And the budget is 425, so that's a bit of a softness in that number, at least for the first quarter. That's mainly my comments on the revenue looking at the department expenses the Red is the police department here Followed by admin and then up here. It's actually the It's actually the blue. There's two shades of blue, but the Public Works Department and parks is 11% and then the legislative here is 15 so again these are just percentages of the total go to the next slide here James if you would I'll cover some more highlights here So I mentioned the sales tax being a bit of a lift. Property taxes are, you'll see it's like 50% of the budget because they're front loaded. You pay half your taxes or all your taxes depending upon the election you would do as a taxpayer. But most of our taxes here are front loaded. You'll see that our permit number is down relative to where it was last year. at 200 at this time last year. And then, paging down here, you'll see there's gonna be a miss coming on our grant number. We had contemplated there being a CDOT grant for the sidewalks that would be going in our Two Rivers Road by 7-11, that work. not being done so it'll be a corresponding favorable variance in expenses for the work that isn't done so it's Delta neutral to the budget but you'll see that there'll be a miss on revenue by that grant not being fulfilled this year another front-loaded number just to round out the high percentage differences here is recreation this is principally the camps that are prepaid that are starting now actually that Matt's running with Gary Poffman did you did that in the consent agenda last week any questions on revenue before I move into some expenses hearing none so in the page up just a little bit here thank you legislative areas 409 compared to 105 last year I think this has to really be timing differences because in that 409 a lot of that legislative expenses is frankly the green team and then the events I think why it's it's it's really showing a big difference last year twenty twenty five member of jenny allocated we allocate some of the lodging tax as an offset to uh... the events category student so it's it's like as negative expense that was actually done first quarter twenty twenty five we haven't allocated those expenses uh... that money from uh... the lodging tax yet so it's a showing of uh... aberrant increase when in fact it really isn't. It's just optically because we haven't allocated the expenses from lodging to events in 2026. Does that make sense? Mm-hmm. Do you follow? Okay. And then in the administrative area, it's up slightly, 657 compared to 607. Big area here in expenses is our CERSA. So our insurance renewal, we pay that pretty much lump sum. So that's a big shot. That's like a $225,000 check going out first quarter. that's representative of that 657. A lot of things in here we're really not able to move around. This is our outside legal town council. We have all of our professional services, all of our outsourced IT is in here. We have outsourced HR in here as well. So a lot of things in this administrative area that doesn't really accommodate moving around or some sort of cuts that we're going to be able to gain. At least that's my view. Looking ahead into facilities, go down just a little bit here, James. Where is that here? Hold on. I guess it'd be here, yep, facilities. Included in this number, I mean really this is just maintaining our campus. And the big number in current year budget, which hasn't presented itself yet, is the purchase price and closing of the Midland. And we call it BCC, there are a couple different acronyms we're using to describe it, but this is six units that we'll be closing on probably sometime in June or July. And it's for $2,380,000. Now, when we originally put this, I'm mentioning this because when we originally put the budget together, And when we originally presented this idea, I don't know, gosh, it was back in 2025. The thought was that we would take all of the RITA money that's being generated from the BCC sales, which is probably going to be about $500,000. We have a RITA over here at Salt River Park that's called affordable housing. There's about $600,000 parked over there for affordable housing. There's also a RITA up there at Roaring Fork Club. That's got a fair amount of money. There was a $15 million transaction last year generated a significant RETA. So there's a bit of a war chest there. And there's also money in the Stotts Mills RETA. So we were original thinking was that we would just pay for the purchase price with all of these RETAs. We would just draw down our reserves and pay for the RETA. or pay for the purchase price. But I'm really thinking that as we put through our capital stacks for what we call personal nine Parkview. We're looking at formulating some capital stacks for the police public workstation. There are a number of different projects that's going to require and might my thinking is very thoughtful allocation of capital and priorities and as I was thinking through all of this there are some of the readers are very prescriptive on what they're used for like the Salt River Park 75% of the reader would be affordable housing twelve and a half percent screen twelve and a half percent is what is the other one arts Okay. So, but if you look at the RITA for Roaring Fork Club, it can be used for affordable housing, it can be used for public amenities, it has a wider aperture on the use of those funds. And it's not prescriptive as far as sticking to a percentage. So, knowing all of that, and what we looked through, and I worked with Jeff on this, and James, it's been collaboration of collective thoughts, is that we would the ones that had the greatest aperture for devoting money for the public structure, we would allocate those monies for the police public workstations. That would be the greatest need, and from my understanding, the greatest priority right now by council. So what does that mean? You take one, you take, it's like a game of whack, pop one thing down, the other thing pops up. So there'd be more of a funding need for the acquisition of the Midland. And I know we have, I don't know as much, I don't know anything, but I suspect what we're going to be seeing is likely $500,000 in redas on actual units that are selling at the Midland. And that would be about 25% of the purchase price. So what I'm looking at doing, and just a heads up, is that we're looking at issuing a COP, Certificate of Participation, for the closing of the Midland, either pre-closing or post-closing. Okay, because I don't know if we're going to have enough time to get it done. And that's if I have your blessing. And I'm going to have the two different firms compete on a COP. And I would like to say it's probably a tax-exempt COP. I think that could work. Maybe it's taxable. Either way. I'm going to be presenting probably in, I don't know, June or July-ish, kind of a financing plan just for the Midland. So just, I mean, it took a lot of time going through that, but I think it's important to see how we're, It's going to create a variance to the budget, but we're going to finance it. And I do believe that we can, yeah, it's good currency. We're going to have six units. We have two studios, three one bedrooms, and one two bedrooms. So we're going to have six units. Actually be one maybe for the police. officer who's coming to town so he could actually you know I'm assuming that he that could actually make residence there or to smother people so I believe I believe it will rent if we really have an affordable housing crisis we should be able to rent those and we should be able to rent those for pretty good money in those categories so

So to kind of summarize it there, you're looking at asking us to do a COP for there, probably using that as collateral, and then using REDAS to help with PitchView and the service building.

Exactly. And I put together a rather lengthy memo. You might be surprised by that. But it was kind of showing how the stacks kind of lined up to the actual initiatives. So there is that. But that's exactly right.

OK.

All right, moving on. The police department. So we are at 918 versus 537. A little bit over, we were over. We're actually fully staffed now. We also had the exit of the former chief in here. There was a payment that was issued that you had blessings earned that created the amount being what we're looking at now. One thing will be haven't seen yet but we have it's coming our way is the expense for the dispatch so that will be the Pitkin dispatch just a word on that is that you know we were kind of poking at that number quite a bit and with the we're paying we're basically paying the town we the town's basically paying dispatch services for Pitkin County and Eagle County all under the back of paying the expense to Pitkin. So in essence, EGLE is getting a free ride on dispatch services for calls to basically 2 thirds of the town. So it's been our reality. And I know that Gloria and I, or maybe she'll take the lead or whatever, we'll talk with Jeff Stroll, see if we can improve our number on just exactly the share of revenue to expense to the police department. But that's not a small thing, because it's an expense that's escalating at, I don't know, it's like, it's going to 12, 15% a year. So it's a potential to double like in five years. So it's really something we need to, to lack of, I've been aware of rest, the escalation of that expense. We really need to really get that under control. I hear you get a little pun here, right? And then just wrapping out our expenses here, our street, you'll see there's not a lot right now being spent. It's in the hopper. I know Justin's got quite a bit of work in queue. And then we also had that money in here for 2.6 as capital. Part of that was for the actual sidewalks on Two Rivers Road by 7-11. That's not going to be done. So the expense will not happen. So it will be a positive variance, but offset by the negative variance since the fact we won't have revenue covered.

It will be done next year.

Yeah, we'll do it next year, right? So just before we move in, any questions on that? Kind of went through. Okay, so now just to proof my proof of cash, just to give you a sense of how we ended up first quarter, slide over just a little bit, James, if you would, up to the right-hand corner. Here we go. This is just all of our pockets of money. And this is enterprise hold. This is... all of our funds in general. So we started the year with just under $30 million, and we generated about $400,000 of cash through March. So we sat at $30.4 million. You know, the rates have been, you know, gosh, back in February, the 10-year rate was getting below 4%. I think I got that to 395 or something like that. Now the 10-year is, I think, 450, 460. So the rates have gone up. That's the good news. Bad news is our long-rated bonds are actually experiencing a little depreciation on a mark-to-market basis. But that was the whole idea of doing the laddered approach. So you take the good with the bad, take what the market gives you. That's where our numbers look like in the general fund. Now let's just go to the next slide if we would. Hearing no questions, so let's just go. This is our restricted fund. So all that blue is taxes. This is our post taxes, our tobacco, and our lodging. And we had to go to the way back machine and say, when was the last time the town only had four Rita's in a quarter? And we couldn't find a quarter that was that low. So we had an all time low on transactions, on Rita's. So we are teed up for there being a miss on Rita's. Now the good news, is that we can't go upside down on those funds. And we have money. But it's a bit of a harbinger. Things are slowing down a little bit. Rates are ticking up. Building permits down. Kind of like, OK, just enough. Life speaks to you in messages. It's like, OK, there's a little bit of slowing going on here. Good news is that it's not materializing itself in sales tax. So it was a little bit of a nuanced analysis to that. So let's go to the next slide here. This is just showing revenue and expense by category. I think the only thing I'd point out here, we separate our lodging from two to four. We didn't budget anything for 2% because we didn't know that the lodging tax was going to prevail. But we have generated, we in the town generated $75,000 more in lodging tax, slightly more in our 4% tax. And then you'll see a big air pocket here with our RETAs just being non-existent. And then I think the thing I would point out, some pending misses coming, go to the expenses. I think we'll see a miss in the post. For years, we weren't able to spend all of our money in post because we had so many projects. We always gave money back. I think what we're gonna find this year is that since we put things in the parking lot, like the Rocks Park and the CDOT boat ramp and hillside, so we're pulling money out of the parking lot and we're green-lighting those things, so it's gonna be things that we didn't budget for. So it's going to create a budget variance. But on the other hand, we started the year, started the year 1-1-26 with basically $3 million in the bank. So the post fund had $3 million of unspent money. Now so that we're we're as we green light these projects. We're releasing some of that reserves and I think The protocol is working because the council is weighing in on Green lighting these various projects and having a more accurate presentation of active what the cost is but Nonetheless, it will likely show variance to the budget, as well as our tobacco tax. We've used some of our tobacco tax to pay for the backfilling of some of our shortages we had with law enforcement. Pitkin County filled us in in January, even in February, I think, right? So those invoices were not insignificant. And we did charge that off to the tobacco fund because it was really providing the equivalent of an SRO to the schools. So we had good concurrence of opinion. But nonetheless, we'll likely run a bit over here on tobacco tax. So let's go to the home stretch here. It's the last slide. And these are just all of our other funds. Our bond fund, this is just Eagle County, we have Pitkin County, we got a mill levy, we got a debt levy. Debt levy is a third of our property tax. Property tax is about $3 million in total. A third of that is going to the bond fund, so that's money in, money out. So it's impossible to screw that up. Capital construction fund is our basically the remnants of our taxable bonds issued back in 2021. What we have running through that this year. is the completion of the remaining duplexes over at Stott's Mill, which is on tap for like $2,050,000-ish. And then we have some also money dedicated to the Z Group, which is doing the entitlements to Parcel 9, which is about done. And then we also have some remaining funds for Charles Conniff. and his work on, his firm's work on parcel 2E. So right now this is kind of where we're at on the capital construction fund. We'll also have some cleanup on Midland that needs to happen. We did accrue for all those lights that went in in the spring, the lights that were defective. What we didn't accrue for and which this council for the most part approved were the lights in front of the CC's market and Twin Rivers Association. So those lights are, I don't know where we are with them, but nonetheless, when they come through, there will be a variance to Midland that we'll have to account for. And then wrapping up, water fund is just first quarter activity, pretty consistent with prior year. You'll see a big difference in, I said pretty consistent, consistent with the exception of this TAP fees. This TAP fees were related to the midland across the street that we were paid in January of 2025, which obviously is non-recurring in nature. But the water funds are in TAP. our track for its budget and then there's nothing remarkable in the expenses we look at him as administration a source of water treatment of water transmission of water the big thing coming your way is RFP that's soon to be issued for the metering for the town we've been talking about that it's 975 meters end of life It's probably a two-year project. That's going to be something else I'm going to be suggesting we finance over a potentially 20-year period since that's the life of the asset, maybe a little less, depending upon what the load to carry the debt is. But that's the water fund. And then the Conservation Trust Fund, just rounding it out, is just a rake-off of a lottery ticket. A little piece goes into this fund. It's allocated by the state-based population within various towns and municipalities. And it's usually, it's basically for maintenance of our parks, open space, and trail, another funding source. So that's it. I mean, I think the highlights is that our revenue, some softness, and building permits, it's hard to know where that's going to end up. Cause we're not actually driving that. We're reacting to it. But there's some softness in that. It's good news is that sales tax is a firm number through three months, four months, four, it's up 4%, which is good news. Um, I'm not concerned about the Rita's being soft right now. There's no sense in borrowing trouble on that. Uh, our, uh, our expenses, we're not gonna, last year we had a lot of, uh, Favorable news and having vacancy savings. We're pretty much full staff. We're like down like one person, I think, in planning. And maybe one in police, depending upon how you count people. We're not going to experience the same type of vacancy savings, knowing what we know now. Of course, a bunch of people might quit. Who knows? But I'm just telling you what we see right now. I don't see there being a lot of savings in operating expenses. It seems like the numbers are running tight to budget. And frankly, I don't think there's going to be a lot of tailwind by unspent capital. I mean, we're in capital. We seem to be going about it in a very disciplined way. We're looking at updating it with everybody. We just updated it first quarter. So it feels like we're on it as well. So I don't think there's going to be anything favorable happening there. And we don't have any debt right now. So that could be, you know. So anyway, I just don't know if there's a lot of room to move around in the budget. I know last year we were looking at some room to move around. I think we had more room last year than we have this year. But we're not also in any trouble. It doesn't seem that way. So that's my report.

All right. Any other questions?

Really quickly, but how are short-term rental fees looking compared to last year with the change in the license amount?

Short-term rental fees? Go back to that third slide. Yeah, we received like, Hannah, we received like $15,000.

Here we go.

$15,000, $18,000 like in December. Okay. that was booked as 2025 revenue. That number is about 85. I would say that we had about 45 active licenses last year. Seemed like that was about the number. We don't have that this year. We have some people under exemptions that they need them to prove that they're following the parameters of the exemption. which time we'll adjudicate that. But there is pockets of noncompliance. We know there are people renting their places, they're advertising their places, they're renting their places, and they're not licensed, and they're not remitting tax. We do know that, and that's an enforcement thing. We hired somebody from, I guess it was OpenGov or whatever the firm was that underwrote that software. It was like a side hustle. And he has a way of working through all of the various advertisements to see actually who's in compliance. So we use services from him. And then, unfortunately, some of that falls under Jay's.

We're about 3 quarters of the licenses that we had before we had the short-term fee. We're getting pretty close to what we projected in terms of fees. I think at the last council meeting that you reviewed the fee, we were projecting around $100,000 in fees. We're about 85% of the way there. And we still have some pending licenses. I think some of them are kind of waiting to set up for the summer season. So we might still get more out of that. Thanks.

Any other questions? All right. Thanks, Doug. So next up, we have our council actions. The first one is item 7A, which is a public hearing and second reading ordinance number 7, series of 2026. ordinance of the Town Council of the Town of Basalt, Colorado, approving code amendments to the Town Code, Town Code Section 18-103 to adopt by reference the 2025 Colorado Wildfire Resiliency Code. And we have Jeff, James, and Mitch.

Yeah, I'll be pretty brief on this one. This is a continued second reading to adopt the Wildfire Resiliency Code with some local amendments. We continued second reading to include an amendment for provision to appeal the code officials determinations under the code to the town council. There's a number of areas where there's discretion for the code official to make interpretations under the code, including for certain modifications or accommodations. And there was a request to council to incorporate essentially an appeal provision to council. So that's now included in here. As a reminder, just a brief overview, the state wildfire resiliency code applies to areas that are in the wildland urban interface that are all categorized between low, moderate, and severe wildfire hazard areas, depending on what wildfire hazard area you're in. You have to comply with certain requirements of the code. The code has... Structure hardening requirements and site and area requirements mostly applies to new development. Structure hardening applies to certain additions and repair work. That's about all I have for the overview. This is a public hearing, so we should take public comment, but I'm happy to answer any questions you guys have.

Yeah, let's go ahead and do the public hearing. It's 8.02. I'll open the public hearing. If anyone would like to speak on this... This ordinance related to wildfire resiliency code. Go ahead and either raise your hand or come up at the front. And seeing no one, I will close the public hearing at 8.02 and open it up for questions or comments. Jeff, James, or a motion if we don't have any. I have one question here.

It says, if town council fails to grant owner's appeal to code officials' determination, so I'll stand and be final. Is that in response to what happened last time?

That is generally how an appeal works. And it's just now codified. Our other appeal provision was kind of silent on what effective it is. And this makes it clear here. And we'll come back with an amendment to that other part of the code. So that's my next question. To largely mirror this. It'll match this one. That's correct. Great.

And then my only other question for you is if you could just kind of... It says town council is required to comply with provisions of this code.

So just so that the council can use its discretion to make those interpretations, but it couldn't say, you know, on your case, we just want to endure all of the wildfire resiliency code. That was kind of the intent of that sentence.

But I'm a homeowner and I'm appealing. It's like the case where it's like I have to replace... whatever it is, let's say 20, whatever the amount of siding I have to replace that triggers the whole thing, and I come to council and say, hey, I'm not going to be able to replace this 28% because then it goes over the threshold and I have to replace everything, so I'm going to appeal to council, that wouldn't be a thing where council can say,

we're going to just no so there'd be another area of the code that for there to be for potentially for hardships and circumstances like that but if i think the intent of my intent including that sentence was just to not put counsel in a position of if a homeowner is essentially requesting that the code be ignored with respect to their property, that's not within the discretion of the council. It's to make these interpretations and to use the discretion that already exists within the code, but perhaps in a manner that's different than what the code official, how they interpret it. So on some of that hardship issue, there could be a different determination as to how that could be accommodated.

Maybe another example could be where this appeal provision could be used is up in the Hill District when you have pretty tight setbacks and you have a tree that has to be adjusted and it's right on a property line between two properties and you've got neighbors having issues over the tree. I see that kind of more where the appeal might come in.

So unfortunately, I wasn't here for first reading. So this is the first time I'm looking at this. But the thing that jumps out at me is PNZ requests that this not apply to areas that are moderate, that are lower than moderate or high intensity on the state resiliency map. And I've been working with the Wildfire Collaborative of the Roaring Fork Valley quite a bit in my other life. And that map is the best data that we have right now, but unfortunately, it's looking at wildfire which is defined as vegetative burn and so there are actual holes in the map that look like it's not a high fire area because it's not vegetated that doesn't mean it's not gonna burn so I would say at the very least I would love for this to say like that we will use the wildfire resiliency map until better modeling is available because I

To change it again, the the code, the state code on its own only applies to areas that are in the we the wildland urban interface. And if they're designated on this map with some level of wildfire hazard risk, there is the ability of council to have these requirements apply to town wide. But one of the reasons that this staff ultimately didn't in PNZ, I think ultimately didn't suggest that here It's because the existing town code covers 90 plus percent of what the wildfire resiliency code already does. And there are a couple of areas that we and I think it was also council's direction. We intend to submit a variance application to the state on because, you know, our building official I think really believes in many of the wild, many of the provisions that we have already in the code, in the building code. And if we're going to come back with the potential changes to the code based on some of these variance requests and given that the existing code is 90 plus percent of the way there on the state wildfire resiliency code, Those are some of the reasons why there wasn't a desire to impose the wildfire resiliency code on those areas that don't have some level of existing hazard designation. Why impose these additional requirements if they're not required to and we already feel that they're adequately covered from a wildfire hazard standpoint under the existing code and then again this variance procedure that

um this council's direction staff is looking into yeah and i and i think i think that this is fine and i'm happy to vote yes on it i just want like the acknowledgement that there is better modeling coming our way and that when it comes we need to be willing to pivot and look at that because there's certainly some super spreader homes that are not wildfire because they're not vegetation. And so there are going to be areas that we're like, oh, we didn't know that that was a problem. Right.

Yeah, the main areas in town are in Willits and portions of Southside that don't have any current wildfire hazard designation. But yeah, absolutely. If the mapping is updated, we can bring that back to council.

Yeah. Yeah. I support that.

Yeah.

Anything else?

Mayor, I move that the town council adopt ordinance number seven, series of 2026 on second reading. Second.

It's been moved and seconded. All those in favor, please signify by saying aye.

Aye. Aye. Aye.

Thank you very much. Next up.

Thanks, Jeff.

next we have 7b which is public hearing and second reading ordinance number eight series of 2026 ordinance of the town council the town of basalt colorado granting approval of a site plan review special review ud amendment and housing mitigation report for the development of one deed restricted dwelling unit at 540 basalt avenue salt colorado carlton

Good evening, Council. Carlton Henry, Planner 2 at the Town of Basalt, here to introduce public hearing and second reading of Ordinance Number 8, Series of 2026, to approve a development application at 540 Basalt Avenue on Southside in the Basalt Business Center South PUD. Staff recommends that council hold a public hearing and second reading for this application, which is an application for site plan review, special review, PUD amendment, and a housing mitigation report. This application proposes the development of one unit of deed restricted category housing at 540 Basalt Avenue. For a little background on the site, for those unfamiliar, the property is just under 8,000 square feet and is located at the northwest corner of Basalt Avenue and Few Lane in the Industrial Zone District and, as I mentioned, the Basalt Business Center South PUD. The property is bordered by mixed-use properties to the north and to the west with commercial, residential, and industrial uses in the general vicinity. The south side floodplain runs through the site. However, no changes to the building envelope or footprint are proposed as part of this application. Currently, the site is already mixed-use with the rug wash business on the ground floor and an existing residential unit. on the second floor. The applicant has proposed the addition of a 659 square foot two bedroom residential unit to be de-restricted at category five. The property currently contains one 758 square foot two bedroom residential unit, which is proposed to remain. I will also add at the May 12th, 2026 meeting of the town council, Patrick Raleigh representing the applicant and the applicant team presented the development application, namely the site plan and architectural drawings for review by council and answered questions at that time. At that same meeting, Town Council approved the application on first reading by a vote of 6-0 and set the date for second reading for tonight. As part of this review, the Basalt Affordable Community Housing Commission, BOC, and the Planning and Zoning Commission also reviewed this application and have recommended approval with the conditions included in the draft ordinance. Referrals were also included as part of this application process and written comments from Engineering and Public Works of the Town of Basalt as well as the Basalt Sanitation District were included as part of this application as well as Roaring Fork Fire Rescue. As part of the discussion on the 12th It was mentioned that the town was still waiting on updated language for a parking Parking sharing agreement. I'll call it which has been a draft of which has been included as exhibit e in your packet this evening as part of this application I Two spaces have been highlighted in the associated graphic exhibit to that exhibit for the packet item. And that is shown in front of the Cathers Home showroom next door. Paul Cathers is the owner of both properties and is part of the applicant team for this development application and has worked through and provided this parking sharing agreement as part of the negotiation with town staff. With that, I will also introduce Patrick Raleigh, who's sitting with me here. If you guys have any questions specific to the application and not towards staff, I would direct them towards the applicant team. Otherwise, I'm happy to answer any questions that you guys may have on the application. And as mentioned, it is a public hearing as well, Mr. Mayor.

Thanks, Carlton. Did you have anything you wanted to add now before?

I don't have anything else to add. Thank you very much for the opportunity. I'm here just to answer questions. The only modification was the completion of that parking easement agreement.

So this is a public hearing. So I will open the public hearing for ordinance number 8 and 814. If anyone would like to speak on this ordinance, please come up or raise your hand on Zoom. And seeing no one, I will close the public hearing, 814, and open it up to questions, comments from my fellow councillors.

I have one question. Last, two weeks ago, when we talked about this and you went through all the concerns and everything, you had mentioned there was a note from engineering about the driveway being graded so that runoff doesn't go into the stormwater system. You'd mentioned the driveway would be graded to account for that, right?

The grading... Yeah, for the record, Patrick Raleigh, the grading goes back to a central trench drain on site. So yeah, all stormwater is handled internally on site.

It's not stormwater. It's the rug washing. The rug wash. Yeah, there's just a comment. It says, will the driveway be graded in a way that directs all runoff from rug washing? to the stormwater system. Right. Saying that there was additional runoff.

There is essentially negative drainage away from, you know, to the internal portions of the site. So everything will be handled internally. And I believe, actually, the rug wash should not be using the driveway for rug washing. They have facilities to accomplish that interior to that. I feel like it's always outside. What's that?

I feel like every time I've ever driven by it, they're washing it outside.

They have facilities inside that should handle that, and I think they just use that periodically. I don't think it's their primary source of rug washing.

That was my only point. I remember you saying something about that on May 12th. I don't recall that.

Maybe just that the comments from Public Works would be- Would be addressed, yeah.

Are included as conditions as part of- And I just didn't see that specifically, the driveway, because I saw the parking thing. Last time, I had a bunch of questions and you answered them preemptively. That was the one that I remember you answering. The parking was addressed. I just didn't see it in this ordinance. But what I'm understanding is that falls under the applicant shall comply with all representations set forth in the application. Correct.

So that's covered. So I would say two points there. One being applicant shall comply with the representations made, meaning that they don't change something like the site plan in between the approval and construction.

applicant complying with the conditions and noted in the letter from Public Works yeah that would just be a separate comment but that is captured in the ordinance as well yeah and I actually would just I just received a text from Paul callers that he clarified there is only drawing that's going on outside okay there's not washing so no water that's what Paul said yeah I think last time we asked

to get a better sense of what essential employees would qualify in category five. And if you have that, I'd be interested in knowing more.

Yeah, so James and I discussed this a little bit offline. But we had discussed at category five, you'd be speaking of people like SCEO employees, folks who work at Aspen Valley Medical Center, or the Aspen Valley Health at the Mid-Valley Medical Center, or other employees at the Mid-Valley Medical Center, who qualify as those essential employees, but who are making up to 200%. area median income. It's a niche in there for sure. However, yeah, I guess that's what I have to answer your question.

And essential would be like first responders, teachers? Correct. Okay, got it.

I thought I heard you say SCECO.

SCECO is not essential. It would be non-essential.

Oh, okay.

Lawyer, SCECO is not essential. Yeah.

Okay.

Howard Head, Steadman, those folks who qualify as well.

Cool, thanks.

Other questions or comments? Otherwise, I'd entertain a motion.

Oh, let's see. Mayor, I move the town council adopt ordinance number 8, series of 2026 on second reading. Second.

It's been moved and seconded. All those in favor, please signify by saying aye.

Aye.

All right. Thank you, Carlton.

Thank you. And I'll stay up there.

All right. So next up, we have item 7C, which is public hearing and second reading ordinance number nine, series of 2026. Ordinance of the town council of the town of Basalt, Colorado, granting a PUD amendment to install a vehicle gate in the Riverwalk at the Fry and Pan development, 227 Midland Avenue, Basalt, Colorado. And this is James and still Patrick.

Yeah, once again, we have the applicants here this evening. We've got Patrick Raleigh and we've got Kevin Patrick representing the HOA. The item is a public hearing and second reading of an ordinance that would approve of the request from the Riverwalk Property Owners Association to install a vehicular gate at the Riverwalk parking lot at 227 Midland Avenue as was discussed at the last meeting the background is that Riverwalk currently manages parking in their private parking lot with a permitting system and they wish to install a gate for a more efficient and effective parking management scenario At the last meeting, staff identified that in reviewing the application, there were several referral agencies that provided comments and weighed in. And they included that the fire district needs a Knox box for access. They also included that the police department and public works need a code for access through the gate in emergency and maintenance situations. And that also the police department wanted to turn around so that cars that couldn't access through the gate had the ability to turn around. And so the applicant had... revise their application to provide a turnaround that you saw on your site plan that we've got here. And then also there are other requirements that Public Works required that potholing occur at the location of the gate so that utilities wouldn't be impacted with the installation of the gate. And so all of these requirements from the referral agencies have been included as conditions in the draft ordinance, uh, per the council's motion at first reading, uh, the condition about requiring the bike access through the gate, uh, has been removed. Uh, that was a recommendation from PNZ that bike access be accommodated. But per council's motion that was removed Council approved the ordinance on first reading at the last meeting and set a second reading date for this evening So this evening staff would recommend hearing any comments that the applicants might have taking public comments and then providing council discussion and And if you're comfortable, you could approve the ordinance on second reading. Patrick and Kevin, do you guys have anything to add?

Thank you, James. We don't have anything else to add. We'd be happy to answer any questions. I do have the presentation if we want to refer to any maps or anything like that. But we have nothing else to add from first reading.

All right. Well, let's go ahead and do the public hearing. So let me get some people. Open public hearing at 822. And if anyone would like to speak, please come up to the front, or you can raise your hand. I see a couple hands already online.

We have Ryan Slack. Ryan, if you'd like to unmute yourself to provide comments.

Can you guys hear me? yes yes thank you uh ryan slack 609 sopress um I would just like to, I know I can't direct questions to the applicant, but maybe you guys can afterwards. I want to know how much enforcement has been done on this lot before we take the nuclear decision of gating it. I did speak at the last meeting. Not everyone was there, but I think this is a drastic step in our town that could have consequences on other parking lots on Main Street. And I just think this is such... It's not the community I want to live in. Gated access is, it's just, it sets a bad standard for our town. It sets a bad example for other parking lots in our town. This could be managed with stickers, boots, toe whipping. Like I've said before, I've frequented this lot. I used to have a pass for that lot when I rented an office in Waterlaw. I never remembered it being that full. I've been watching it since the last meeting. It's never that full. I'm sure they're just going to say that summer. But I just, I think this sets a horrible standard in our town and I wonder what other parking lots would be next. And now all of a sudden we have a gated community in our downtown. And i just encourage council to understand that you guys they are coming to you to ask for permission because this is not a normal thing they cannot do this just because it's their private property it is it is setting a bad standard for our town and i'll leave it there thanks ryan

We also have Nick Nagy on the line. Nick, if you would like to unmute yourself, you can provide comments.

Thank you. Can you guys hear me? Yes. Hi, Nick Nagy, 136 Ridge Road. Thank you all for being at a meeting at 830 on a school night. I parked there. I don't park in the lot. but in the morning there's five spaces that are reserved for retailers that i honestly had no idea i was doing something wrong but i get up i get my girls down to those spots we walk through what is considered the safe passageway to school and i'm pretty sure that that whole corridor is protected for that reason and i'm back to my car probably in five to ten minutes All of this has come as a shock to me that I am doing something that someone considers wrong and anti member of the community. In looking at this in putting it on my law hat, I gotta agree with Ryan as far as yes, it's private property. And with that you have certain rights. That said. The town, our community can all do things, we can both do and take actions to protect other values that we want to protect such as walking kids to and from school. Moreover, when those are reviewed, it's going to be reviewed as far as is it rationally related to a legitimate public interest such as supporting public education, A little less congestion on the parking lot over there and the road that feeds the school. I understand the want to protect private property rights, but I don't understand the want to protect them against all other rights and needs of community. Again, thank you all for being there. I don't know which way you're going to vote, but please look at the other side of this and whether there are other actions that we could take that might be a little more community oriented when it comes to protecting the property rights of the owners of the parking lot and protecting the rights and the community of the town.

Thank you all.

Thanks, Nick.

Anyone else? Any hands up? I don't see any hands going up online. I don't see anybody coming up here to the podium. So I'll close the public hearing at 8.27 and open it up to questions and comments from fellow councillors.

So when I've been driving by, I have been looking in there to see if it's full. And I'm not seeing it's full. As you know, I was hesitant to vote for this. And I've been thinking about it since the last meeting. And it just doesn't rub me the right way. We just had a presentation from the Chamber of Commerce talking about the character of our town, small town character, small town charm. And I think that was sort of what Ryan was alluding to, that this just feels kind of anti that small town character. Say that 10 times fast. And that was the thing that came up again and again and again when we did the comprehensive plan. that people said that they really valued here. I have to say that I just feel like the gate is not the right answer, that there are other levers we could be pulling first. We also had a conversation with the folks that live up on Homestead on the hill about parking and speeding up there. We asked them to be patient and to bring us more data and that we would collect more data and they would meet again after the summertime. um and that would that's what i would say here is i i'm still unconvinced that the parking situation isn't being highly pressured by all the construction that's going on and i would i would say that my preference here would be to see more data to see photos of that parking lot full i have yet to see that and then reconvene in the fall for this consideration

Yeah, so I'll jump in and echo some of what Elise was saying. I bike and walk through there all the time for the last eight years coming from Swinging Bridge Lane. I've never once parked there because I am a pedestrian and a bicycle user, but I also have always noted that there are always open spaces so I'm really curious as to the immediate need for this protection and I apologize because I was out of town for the last meeting and I tried to dial in but as we know and then I tried to watch it so if some of this is redundant I apologize but To that point, how much enforcement has been done in the past? How much has been necessary? What evidence do we have that employees and residents are parking on the street because they can't find parking in the lot? What evidence is there that more patrons are parking there since the Midland Avenue redesigned them before? you know now that Midland is fully done. We're going to this parking lot back that will have guest parking available to town this summer. I think that there were maybe some contributing factors that caused you to see more issues in the last 2. You know seasons that that will be alleviated this summer. I have a hard time seeing the necessity for this and Part of the reason is to is you know what Ryan and Emily said which is it is just not what we I don't think it's who we want to be. I want to see a big parking gate across our parking garages and doing it here sets a precedent or press our parking lots president for other ones like the one but took behind one 32 and you know there are other business owners that I go sweet now we can do this and that is just simply not what I want to see in the town of assault.

Thank you. Other questions or comments?

One quick question. Did you talk to the yoga studio?

We did. And she is going to instruct her that she doesn't need the parking, actually. and that she will instruct her patrons to either walk or use alternative means or to park on the street but she doesn't believe that she needs the parking spaces we left it that it would still be open that we would continue to talk to her and provide parking as necessary

Thanks for doing that. I have pretty similar feelings of just in terms of consistency. We asked Homestead to wait. It seems fair to apply that logic evenly to wait for the summer. I won't repeat what you all said, but I'm fairly in line with that.

I had a question about, well, first of all, I wanted to admit, like Mr. Nagy, I did not know I was doing anything wrong. I tell my kids, meet me at the spot after school so I don't have to get, you know, in the traffic. And they run across the bridge, you know, I'm probably there for four minutes, but... didn't know either and now I've taken notice of the nice red signs and I'm I'm wondering if maybe the signage could be updated in a way because it you know I don't think Nick and I are the only ones they're just not noticing but this you know it clearly says it but I don't know if it just blends in or what you wouldn't think it's a red sign And the other thing is, I was wondering, how is the parking shared? So how is it metered out and allotted? So you have a yoga studio. That person, if they're renting, when they sign their lease agreement, are you saying you get this many spots? And then for Water Law, whoever else is back there, do you allot certain spots to them? I mean, have you guys, is there a parking plan within the community?

others there is a parking policy adopted by the board and that allocates per tenant and per space that owns it parking spaces and it has largely to do with the size of the unit and the demand of the unit so i have four employees i have a parking pass for myself and my four employees have a parking pass as well

And then how does it work for businesses that have visitors.

There are the the 5 guest parking spaces which are immediately off of Midland and there's 2 additional parking spaces within that would still be available. If a code is given to granted to those people.

I would just say like I did not to echo all the comments like I I'm also conflicted. I do feel strongly. I understand it is private property. So I do think that there are rights that you have. The part in the ordinance under 2B, though, where it says compatible with the character of the surrounding area seems like where we're getting stuck. I don't know if it is. It's not prohibited by the master plan. It was, but then it was taken out of the most recent master plan. So I do hear the comments about waiting, that there's been a lot of changes recently and kind of similar to what we just said to Homestead. So that is kind of my inclination, but I am sympathetic. I do understand that this is your area. You're seeing it more than we are. If you're telling me that this is a problem, I'm inclined to believe you. It's just the heart of these comments we've heard where it's kind of a big step in a direction that we haven't really opened that door yet. So I just want to be like careful and cautious with it. So I'm inclined to also not really support it, but just at this point, just seeing that we maybe need more information, need to see that more throughout the summer, summer homestead. It seems like there are parking challenges that are popping up, not just in your lot, in neighboring lots, and I think that we want to see an approach that works, and that's going to work for other neighborhoods and other buildings.

And maybe there's a way that we could do something more holistic. I mean, maybe that's where we need to start from.

Because, I mean, I also like, you know, I've been booted and I've been turned away at gates. I'd rather be turned away at a gate than get booted. Like, getting a boot on your car is miserable. It's a very, like, confrontational discussion between the person who put on the boot and the person whose car it is. Where a gate, you just, it's pretty clear. So I do see that as potentially a better solution. It just, the challenge for me is that one part of, and I think that's just like standard language in these ordinances of, is this compatible to character of the surrounding area? I'm not sure.

Well, I think there's just been a general belief in the public out there that trespassing on private property is okay. You know, I mean, I see it all the time. I manage 200 homes, and we have problems with trespass using the courts, using the ponds, using the amenities of the properties off the river, on the river. We've installed cameras. It's part of stewardship. And unfortunately, our back country, our side country, all these areas that are private ranches in some cases, that's how a lot of the mountain bike trails basically got created was by people exploring off into private property. So, you know, you have a small-town character thing going on that I look at that as people respecting private property. There's areas along Willits Lane where there's no trespassing signs, you know, because it's private property and people access it for fishing, and there's a lot of undefined along the river where you can get in and out. I think that... What you guys do is you have an HOA. You have dues that pay for maintenance of the parking lots, snow removal, striping. We are allowed to access the property through the river trail that you deeded to the town as an easement. You've accommodated the swinging bridge trail. I just think that maybe the gate's a little too severe, but the general messaging here that I'm hearing from earlier with the Chamber is we have a responsibility to manage the natural resources we have, and part of that is protecting private property rights. Those are the areas that are preserved for everybody to be able to access, whether it's through the Rio Grande Trail or other places. But you talk to Reno or Billy or any of these guys out there, They go to extremes to protect their agricultural lands and all that. It's just an interesting problem to deal with because it's not just your parking lot, it's the whole valley. Frankly, when I see somebody ducking a closed rope, a rope and a closed trail, it's just a lack of respect. And if you could convince people that a lack of respect is part of small-town character, that'd be beyond me. I think that gating it, I don't know what the data shows. I go through there. I've been through there thousands of times. And it's not always full. But the point is people have paid for those parking spaces when they buy the property. And if I had done that, I would object if somebody was in my space.

i'd expect the hoa management team to do something about it so that's where i'm at on it um thanks sir so yeah it's like a last time i'm i'm not supportive of this but i you know that the the perspective i have it is private property but it's not an authorized I don't know if it would be a use, but to put a gate there, it's not an authorized, uh, it's not authorized in the PUD. So, and that's, I don't, I don't know how many PUDs downtown authorized gates, if any, but you know, the character part is somewhat subjective, but for me, the bicycle access like that's a showstopper for me. But even, you know, honestly, the, the, the walk-in traffic that will occur at the retail locations. You have Monkeys, Posh Peacock, Basalt Firearms, Fire and Pain Anglers, the Salon. Those are all potentially places where people are just going to walk in off the street. There's seven guest parking spaces, but in the application from last time in the packet, I understand there's three guest parking spaces beyond where the gate would be in the surface lot i just think that having people codes to get in and it's it's too much friction it's going to drive people that should be parking off street because that's the way the apple the original application development was designed It's going to drive those people onto the street and put things out of balance. And then I tend to agree subjectively, though, with the community character part. I don't think it's great that I don't want to see gates up and down Midland for the hotel and for you guys and for all the different lots. But I think there's some pretty clear with public access to retail locations. This doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. I'd like to see other solutions used. I mean, like the sticker. A sticker on the window is not a boot, but it's kind of like, well, I got to get a razor to get this off. It's serious enough. Maybe it will deter somebody doing it in the future. just other methods like that to enforce the parking versus just put a gate up. So that's where I stand.

One other thing.

I'll let the applicants respond, but I did just want to make one comment because I know Angel wasn't at our last meeting. It's just a reminder to council that there is a public pedestrian easement that goes through the parking lot up to Midland, and that's not being affected at all by this, and that The reason for removing the bicycle condition was just introducing bikes into where traffic is when there's an existing area for bikes to go on the pedestrian easement. You can just mountain walk your bike. Yeah, that's too much. I make that comment. Just so everyone. I'm not a fan of that.

One other thing, too.

Just to be clear on that.

i think you gentlemen agreed that you would participate in a discussion on a holistic plan for parking in downtown the last time you were in here and that you should we could look at that in the context of what's going to happen you know from now on as we redevelop downtown and the homestead problem gets a solution arrived at and several other things that impact the whole vehicle access issue

That's a discussion to have with our full membership. I certainly can't bind the association. I'm in favor of always speaking, but as the president of the homeowners association, I formally withdraw the application and we will deal with this otherwise. We have tried booting. We have tried stickers. It is somewhat interesting that people that don't live there or be there all the time say that the parking lot's not full. It is somewhat interesting that people say it's out of character because it's going to interfere with my parking in the parking lot, which is private property. It's unfortunate that we're at this position. We do face this problem. It's not manufactured. We don't want to spend money on this gate. We're compelled to spend money on this gate because the cost of not spending money on the gate and having enforcement is greater. But we withdraw the application.

Thank you very much. Thank you for your time. Thanks for your time. So next up, we have item 7D, which is the public hearing and first reading ordinance number 10, series of 2026. Ordinance of the Town Council of the Town of Basalt, Colorado, approving amendments to Town Code Chapter 16, zoning to establish an expedited review process for affordable housing projects to comply with State of Colorado Proposition 123. Ms. Carlton and James.

Hello again. I'll reintroduce myself, Carlton Henry, Planner 2 with the Town of Basalt. Here to introduce Ordinance Number 10, Series of 2026. Again, this is public hearing and first reading. Sorry, there's a typo there. Which would create a new article of the Town Code in Chapter 16. This would be Article 23, expedited review for affordable housing in accordance with State Proposition 123. This article would include four subsections related to applicability, review timelines, appeals, and vested rights. For a little background on this project, some of you may be familiar, the town is currently undergoing an update to the land use code. As a part of this process, staff became aware of a return to Proposition 123 that would be required from the Department of Local Affairs in the year 2026. As part of that process, the town would be required to show that it has met its requirements from the first phase of Proposition 123 in regard to creation of affordable housing units. And additionally, to adopt a set of expedited review procedures um to incentivize the creation or development or protection of affordable housing should the town meet these two criteria the town of assault would continue in the future for the upcoming grant cycles be able to qualify for funding through proposition 123 that is then doled out by dola the department of local affairs What you guys see in front of you here is language related to that expedited review procedure that the town of Basalt would be establishing for development applications which meet the state criteria for affordable housing. Those criteria include projects of which at least 50% of the units are deed restricted affordable and at which the average AMI would be at least 60% area median income for rental projects and at least 100% area median income for sale projects, or I should say at

Minimals, not more than not more than sorry.

And I will add just as a piece here, why are we splitting this out from the larger land use code process? So the hope is to have those land use code amendments in front of you guys by the end of the calendar year. However, DOLA is also including some additional financial incentives for municipalities that qualify ahead of that requirement. At the end of last year, they were offering $50,000. At the end of the second quarter here, end of June, they're still offering $45,000 for municipalities that are able to meet both criteria that I explained there. Proof of hitting our goals for the creation of affordable housing and proof of adoption of an expedited review procedure. I will note that, yeah, staff and design workshop have just split this out as a separate effort here that's still running in parallel with the other work that we're doing on the land use code amendments. And I'll just note on process, the proposed code amendment requires review by planning and zoning commission, which reviewed this application on April 21st of this year. And that's because this is part of the land use code section of the municipal code in chapter 16. Then additionally, approval by town council is required for adoption of the draft code amendments that are included as part of this agenda item this evening. At that April 21st meeting planning and zoning commissioner reviewed and approved the draft code language by a vote of five to zero And again an ordinance and the draft code language is included herein I am happy to answer any questions that you guys may have on this Jeff and Jeff has also looked at this and has been working with staff and the town manager as well on on this effort. So yeah, happy to answer any questions you may have. And as I mentioned, it should be a public hearing as well.

Thanks, Carlton. We'll open the public hearing at 849. If anyone would like to make comments, come up to the podium, raise your hand. I'll close the public hearing at 849 and open it up for questions or comments.

So just a clarifying question. I'm understanding correctly that this expedited review process would only apply to housing developments that are 50% or more deed restricted, as well as a maximum of 60% AMI for rental properties and 100% AMI for purchase properties.

Correct, yeah.

So a very limited number of developments, if any, that we would ever have within our limits because of the cost of development.

That's correct. The state allows for a little bit of variation to that language, which we've been talking through both with the land use code working group, as well as planning and zoning commission. And so part of that allows for adjustments to those minimums with regard to AMI. So you can go above and beyond. So you can say either you can drop that percentage and say we can incentivize projects that are less than 50% affordable. And so we could just say anything that meets our minimum, like if you're hitting the mitigation rate, we are gonna incentivize you through an expedited review process. or you can raise that AMI floor and say we will accept projects of greater than 100% AMI for for sale development or greater than 60% for for rent development and allows municipalities for some local flavor. We'll call it on that. Okay. There's been discussion on it with a number of, I would say, constraints locally. We're hoping to see how this plays out. if it goes a year and we get three applications that meet it and staff is scrambling to try to meet the state requirements as well as our new code language while managing you know all of the rest of the workaday things that staff you know has that'll be a sign, right? If we don't see any applications and we're in a conversation in the future that we'd like to further incentivize by adding some of that local flavor and raising that to actually use it as a real incentive and not just meeting the criteria set forward by DOA, we can by all means do that. And that could be in six months when we come back with the land use code amendments at the end of the year. That could be in a year. That could be in three or five years. So that has been a part of the discussion at the land use code working group as well as at planning and zoning. And kind of the direction from both groups was just let's start with the base and see how the reaction is from the development community.

Does that mean we could also raise that 50%? Could that turn into 75%?

No, so you can bring that down. So you can lower the threshold there by encouraging the development of... developments or applications, I'll say where fewer than 50% of the units are de-districted. So that would be like easing the threshold or you can ease the threshold in the other direction using AMI, but you can't raise the threat.

I got it. And then what about the 90 days? Is that also like, it has to be 90 days. We couldn't make it 120 or has to be 90. However, there are opportunities for.

Changes to that particularly when you're seeing an incomplete application or when there's a change to an application that requires Staff to pause so we're calling that a pause or and there are stipulations at the state level that allow for staff to you know work with those changes and

And then my only other question I had.

I'll just piggyback on that. The statute, this is not a very well fleshed out process within the state statute. It defines, as Carlton said, what are the projects that qualify? And then the process is this 90-day process. And it applies to each step within the development process. But there is the ability for extensions when you're requesting additional information from the applicant, and that can occur a number of different times. So this process can get extended out, but it is set up for an administrative review for kind of this narrow scope of projects.

I'll add one more piece there. For larger projects where you're going to have significant referral reviews, think FEMA, LOMRs and CLOMRs, so serious floodplain review, or further discussion with technical experts. we're gonna be doing our best and the state has done its best to direct municipalities to capture those conversations at a pre-application meeting. And so we wanna be working with good faith actors who are developing in the town. And if people are coming in and wanna have a predominantly deed restricted affordable housing project, the hope is that we're gonna come in, have a good faith conversation with good faith actors who come to the table with all of the boxes checked. And when that 90 day shot clock starts, we're going to do our best to make sure that we hit, you know, the marks and hit that timeline.

Then my only other question I had was about the part where it says for the for sale housing units means a monthly payment is less than or equal. I think So this would be done during the initial entitlements and development. It might get built years later, right? And so my point is just like calculating somebody's mortgage payment could be really challenging when we're talking about something that's going to be sold years in advance. rate changes, people need PMI, there's just a lot of things there. Is that standard how things are currently done?

I would say so currently that comes from HUD. It's a HUD definition, so that's a federal government definition. And how an applicant or how a development team meets that is somewhat outside of the scope of this language.

If that's fair. Yeah. I could just see that being a point where somebody might argue like, oh, we're going to sell them and this is what their mortgage payment will be, but maybe that's not very realistic.

Yeah, our housing guidelines actually cover that. The housing guidelines identify when that price is supposed to be calculated. It's like 60 days before expected CO, I believe. And the 30% of somebody's income That's also from our housing guidelines. It's consistent with kind of our requirements in the guidelines too. It's CHAFA-based, right? It's HUD and CHAFA-based.

And I guess that's just like what big picture what I'm seeing like this. This seems like this puts a lot of kind of pressure on like the planning department, the building department to meet these deadlines. And maybe that means other projects get put on hold because this one needs to get fast-tracked. Um, and I guess I'm hearing like you guys feel comfortable with that.

I would say that we feel comfortable with the languages drafted. And that was again, part of the discussion in responding to Angela's question. Part of the discussions that we had at the working group and with planning and zoning was around, you know, uh, folks literally asked that question was, do we feel like we're comfortable incentivizing a bunch of these applications? And the response was, let's start with what the state's giving us.

To kind of meter it in and kind of experiment on how metering it in goes, you know, in terms of a comfort level.

And again, there are a number of different ways or vehicles for addressing that. The state has a number of different grant programs for housing-related specialists in a planning department or a similar role. It may be in the future a goal of the town council to pursue a position like that and to pursue grant funding to fund a position like that. I'd say currently that is something that's outside of the scope of town staff.

I think this is a good example of Denver making policies that don't apply to the realities of a mountain town community. So I do think it's pretty unrealistic that we're going to see developments within these categories. So I'd like us to keep an eye on it and come back in six months, come back in a year. If we haven't gotten an application, I know Pitkin County got a rural resort application. income petition approved at 120% Summit County got a hundred Lake County got a hundred Vale went for 160 and then withdrew their application so like there's a sweet spot in there but I think it's reasonable for staff to say we might not have the bandwidth and we need a dose our way into this I'll just say I'm supportive, but I want to make sure we come back within a year to up that or apply for a rural resort petition if possible.

I would just make one quick clarification there. The rural resort income petition opens up a number of funding opportunities for the town. However, there are abilities here within the Prop 123 regulation that allow for the town to capture some of those higher incomes as mentioned without doing the rural resort income petition program so we can just make those tweaks ourselves which i think the state is learning from some of the challenges with the rural resort restrictions or the maybe front range dominant restrictions that really have not been working in mountain communities. So now in this legislation, there is some flexibility for us to make those changes and tweak those dials a little bit locally without the state's input.

That's helpful.

Any other questions? Otherwise, I understand a motion.

I kind of agree with Hannah, and also the term affordable housing is kind of becoming overused. I mean, Pekin County's new growth advisory group, what they're going to be talking about is community housing, which doesn't really have anything to do with 60% or 100% AMI. It's more about who can afford to purchase a deed-restricted house in Pekin County. And the last thing I saw was the average cost of living in Peking County is about $157,000 annually. And the high end of the income in Peking County is $131,000. So the opportunity, I don't think it gives us any more strength in our negotiations with developers either at some level until it's kind of fleshed out and you know we see what happens and we have right now we're having good success with land use applicants that are coming at the 50 threshold with deed restricted units we have annexation powers we have a lot of other land use levers that you can pull to get people engaged in this community And I think that this is another staff management issue that might be a distraction during a developer's application. If it takes three years to get through the process anyway, what does this really expedite?

Well, I think that's one of the reasons we wanted to keep the AMI levels low, because council does have the flexibility to negotiate up to 50% with higher AMI levels.

Why do we need this?

Because it qualifies the town for state funding.

and so yeah the state has given uh municipalities um these directives that if you want to participate in prop 123 funding you need to follow basically you have to adopt the checkbox yes you have to check these boxes it's not that's the only advantage we're gaining Funding.

We want to stay in the game.

Yeah. This helps us stay in the game.

We're not just talking about the $45,000. Right. This is correct.

This is more of the whole Prop 123 funding that we would be eligible for. The $45,000 is a small job.

I was like, is this a typo? Yeah, I was like, no.

We're doing this for $45,000.

My point was that in exchange for adopting this, that we'll never really see at those levels because it's not realistic in this area. We get money? Yes. Easy. Easy vote.

Yeah. The next funding window, I believe, is three years. Three years. Three years at a time. So it would be from 2027 through 2029 that we would then be qualified through this. The $45,000 is for the six months early kind of buy-in. It's a small local planning capacity grant.

Can you use that to go to affordable housing or can that go to?

No, it's a local planning capacity grant, which is a specific kind of DOLA grant. So we would have to apply with an idea in mind for what that would go towards.

Do you have an idea in mind?

But it would be planning related. Yeah. Okay. Local planning capacity for staff.

They want to give us money. I want to take it, so.

Mayor, I move to approve ordinance number 10 series of 2026 on first reading and set the public hearing in the second reading for June 9, 2026. Second.

Ladies, let's go.

Does dedication of a parcel

One of the criteria that we could be with our own properties in terms of.

No they're looking for like code changes and kind of incentivizing development through those code changes.

So my ask is, could you do a bullet point for the second reading and say, here's the six things we're going to take advantage of for applying for these grants?

Maybe a better review over what Prop 123 is and how it contributes to funding at the local level.

can do. And we got a motion on the floor. Would that help?

Yeah, I think so.

We need an amendment to the motion, which is there's one on the floor. And she left the room.

So who said second?

So what's the amendment for? To add a background on the Prop 123. We can just bring back that information.

We can just bring back that information.

It's been moved and seconded. Pam, will you please call the roll?

Sure. Let's begin with Angel Dupre-Bouchard. Yes. Greg Schaffran. Yes. David Knight. Yes. Elise Hoddle. Yes. Anna has stepped out. Angela Anderson. Yes. And Rick Stevens. Yeah. Motion carries six to zero.

Thank you.

All right.

Thanks.

Cool. All right. Next up, we have 7E. Thanks, Carlton, for that. And 7E is Public Hearing and First Review Ordinance Number 11, Series of 2026, Ordinance of the Town Council of the Town of Basalt, Colorado, adopting the Midland Avenue District Design Guidelines and approving amendments to Basalt Municipal Code, Chapter 16, Zoning to Amend Section 16-29, C2, Downtown Business District, and Section 1630, CSC Zone District. This is Carlton and James. So the floor is yours again.

hello again um here to introduce uh as the mayor just noted public hearing and first reading of ordinance number 11 series of 2026 for adoption of the midland avenue district design guidelines and the associated code amendments a little background on this i know we have a new council back in july of last year town council passed a resolution to approve a contract with gmcha architects who's been our consultant working on this project As part of the 2020 Basalt Master Plan, there was a directive for council and staff to establish guidelines to protect the architectural and historical character of downtown Basalt. 2025 is a milestone in the history of Midland Avenue and downtown Basalt with the completion of the Midland Avenue Streetscape Project and the beginning of the development of the Midland Avenue District Design Guidelines. The town, as I mentioned, brought in GMJ Architects, a nationally renowned historical preservation and architecture firm who conducted a thorough review of Basalt's historic Elements and created a set of architectural guidelines for staff to use moving forward on development redevelopment and rehabilitation of historic structures in our historic downtown The creation of these architectural design guidelines gives a toolbox to use both for folks in the development community and members of the public to understand how to incorporate quality historic architectural elements into development in the town. The proposed design guidelines would be applicable to development and redevelopment in the c2 downtown Business zone district as well as the CSC zone district earlier this year Town staff brought a draft of these design guidelines to town council for a work session whereby the design guidelines were moved into a final draft and and town staff worked with the town attorney to develop a set of code amendments which through reference adopt the Midland Avenue district design guidelines by adopting the code amendments through reference it would be similar to things like the community housing guidelines or the public works manual whereby staff is given a set of guidelines to direct policy and regulation that exist outside of the municipal code but are noted for users of the municipal code through reference and directed towards those documents staff returned with the final draft of the midland avenue district design guidelines as well as those code amendments and brought that item to a public hearing at the Planning and Zoning Commission. Similar to the last item, the code amendments are located in Chapter 16 of the Municipal Code, which requires hearing at Planning and Zoning Commission as well as two at Town Council. On May 19th, last Tuesday, Planning and Zoning Commission reviewed the ordinance and held a public hearing in accordance with Section 16.267 of the Municipal Code. Planning and Zoning Commission approved the ordinance unanimously. With the condition staff address a public comment given during the public hearing. The written response from GMJ Architects was provided for you guys on your desks this evening. You also received a letter from Ms. Laura Main, which I also understand was included both as a part of the packet and provided printed out. Many of the concerns brought forward in Ms. Mann's letter were also addressed in the email from GMShade Architects. With that, I'm happy to answer any questions that you may have. As noted, this is a public hearing.

So let's go ahead and do the public hearing for this one. Opening it up at 9-11. And we have somebody coming up, so...

My name is Cynthia Milling, and I live up on Ridge Road. I have a very strong design background. I also work for Gensler and Associates New York office, one of the top design firms in the country. So my first question about the design guidelines, I came to the PNZ meeting last week and I was really concerned about some of the designations. So I brought up this question as to why the Midland Hotel is designated pioneer vernacular, which is essentially a log cabin with a gable roof and log pieces. And it was wonderful that our group here, they got through to Jessica, and she wrote me a letter. And I'm really thankful for that and her response. But I'm also becoming more and more concerned about our guidelines. If you were to look at the second paragraph, it says that the Midland Hotel is not formally registered. So therefore, it's a period of significance, which means to be open to interpretation. So I'm really concerned that we have design guidelines that are open to interpretation. And I'm also concerned of how many other properties in town, landmark properties, that are open to interpretation.

And so the significance for each property is identified here, and I wonder if they're accurate.

And I really think a lot of this needs to be reassessed. Historically, maybe that's what Jessica's indicating here. I'm not really sure. But I thought that the Midland Hometown might be more Queen Anne, but it might still be more 19th century commercial. So I think that we need to have a more professional view of this because she seems to think that it's open to interpretation, the guidelines that she's created for the designation. So that to me is really concerning. And because I know I don't have that much time and we're all tired, I wanted to go to the next note. There's this concept of alignment of the properties. So historically, the depot and the hotel were on an angle. And the reason that was is to allow the trains to move around. And in 1919, they moved the depot to align with Midland Avenue. And a lot of the CT zoning says that the commercial property should be aligned to Midland Avenue. The depot in 1919 was realigned 80 feet to the southeast to Midland Avenue. And so there seems to be this concern now, all of a sudden, that this one property, I think, and there may be others, I haven't studied that, but the Midland Hotel needs to stay aligned the way that it is when historically other properties have moved to become aligned with Midland Avenue. And also we don't have trains anymore to worry about. So I think that section needs to be readdressed significantly because, the sister property the depot was allowed to move historically and i don't understand why this needs to remain where it is um and my third it's a it's a three minutes now so oh i have one more question i'm sorry that's yes maybe i should have been quicker um i am concerned also about this certificate of appropriateness there is a very small font that identifies that any developer needs to be compliant with the guidelines, which I think need to be readdressed. I don't think some of the information in there is accurate. And the word compliant is extremely strict. That means you need to sign something that you don't agree with before you even have a discussion with all of you. So those are the three things I've got over now. Thank you for your time.

Thank you. I don't think we have anybody else in the room. I don't see anybody else online. Close public hearing at 9.15. And open it up for questions or comments from fellow councillors.

I would be happy to respond to the comments. Yeah, please, if you don't mind. Yeah, no problem. So a few comments were made. One, I'll just make note of some of the historic processes that are available. So one, we do have a local historic registry, which identifies local buildings of significance, which was conducted in the 90s or early 2000s?

90s, late 90s.

So we do have a local registry which identifies important buildings. However, as Jessica mentioned in her email, this is not synonymous with a national historic registry whereby you would have a full team of architects who strictly focus on historic preservation come and identify the architectural character of all of the buildings in a given district. And it's the understanding of staff that this is not the desire for the town of the salt to come in and pursue historic national historic registry status at this time. Although that is an avenue that remains open to us. I will also note that There is a wide set of architectural elements that are available for buildings looking to redevelop. And so while these guidelines have identified certain areas of significance and buildings that meet those eras or exhibit features of those eras as identified in the design guidelines, Development teams looking to redevelop a given structure or property have a set of tools at their disposal which are not prescriptive and do not require following the exact preexisting features. While preservation is encouraged, it's not required. And then finally I'll note with regard to something like building placement there is a waiver process for these design guidelines should any Should a redevelopment Or a team Not want to follow the Midland Avenue design guidelines. They can apply for a waiver and and make their case to council as to why their redevelopment should not follow the Midland Avenue district design guidelines and council can make a determination at that time. There are also waivers available for individual elements. so should you know somebody come in and look to redevelop we'll just use the case of the railroad hotel and say we love everything about it we want to keep it all but because of the building placement stipulations you know we don't want to meet that anymore and just ask for a waiver from that one element in the design guidelines and that's available to applicants as well james is there anything else you want to add to that

I just would point out that this isn't just applicable to the historic structures. The guidelines are applicable district wide. So even in redevelopment of non-historic structures, these would apply. And you have the ability to get waivers on individual elements or entire developments. And then maybe on the certificate of acceptance, staff added language there's language in the draft guidelines in the certificate of acceptance that's included that says that you either need to comply or apply for a waiver so it's not not just you're signing off on complying as the applicant yeah

That helps. This is intended to provide some clarity, but with flexibility in order to maintain the character. We talk about character and use words like that a lot, but now we have something that people can read and look at. What does that mean? But even then, with the waiver process, which I think everybody has expressed in the work session process, we have to have because There are going to be instances where, like Carlton's example, maybe we do something a little different, and there's a really good reason, and it's going to accomplish what we're setting out to accomplish with the design guidelines, but it might be not exactly what they say, but the outcome will be what we all intended throughout this process. So, yeah, I think that's – I'm happy for that because I think some of the things that have been brought up – They should be, but we have to have ways to kind of deal with that stuff. And I feel like we do.

I had a couple questions, but I'll be quick. I know it's getting late. 4.1 on page 50, if you're looking at that last bullet point, open space must have, it's just like not worded very well. Kind of like a typo, but I would also stumble, I was looking at that, particularly thinking, I like to see bikes and e-bikes mentioned in there where it's talking about open space. accessible pedestrians there is a note under sustainability and six one on page hundred about bikes um but just something i thought in there the other one could you could you um repeat i'm sorry which yes the last it's the last bullet point in four one where it says open space must it's just it's not right you see i'm saying the wording is just a little like stumbly and There's a word missing, I think.

It says open space must abut the pedestrian walkway.

I see. Yeah. I thought that was trying to say about. About. Yeah, yeah. I thought there was something else in there.

Yep.

I was just kind of in there. I was looking through there thinking also like considering bikes. Gotcha. Like bike racks would be something I would note. And then the other thing I just wanted to point out kind of in general for us to think about where it talks about paseos. Connecting to the residential hill district and then the property owners and developers strongly encouraged to incorporate our hands paseos as part of future projects and then it goes in on page 54 talking about parking and encouraging developers to pay the fee instead of parking and what i'm getting at is these guidelines are going to put pressure on on that neighborhood we just had was telling us about the parking problems to have more people those paseos is getting people from the midland district into these residential neighborhoods and they're telling us that people are parking there to come into the downtown area and these guidelines kind of encourage that to happen and so i just think it's something to be aware of is that I can see this contributing to that neighborhood's challenges that they've been talking about with parking.

Duly noted.

Yeah, just something for us to think about going forward. The other one on page 57 under landscaping. It says new turf installation is discouraged unless the space functionality would greatly benefit from the inclusion of turf. And then it says non-functional turf will not be considered. What is non-functional turf?

Yeah, so we had an extensive conversation and recently passed regulation to make the town of Basalt compliant with state regulation regarding nonfunctional turf. Nonfunctional turf is essentially turf grass that serves no discernible purpose. Think about it as turf in medians, turf, little strips of turf between a sidewalk and the street. that require irrigation, maintenance, often through gas-powered equipment, and don't have any functional use for people. And so the hope is to eliminate non-functional turf in as many places as possible, and it's now required to eliminate non-functional turf in redevelopment and new development in the town of Basalt.

Got it. Basically, it's consistent with state . Yeah, I'm just like a new guy.

I'm just trying to catch up, learn these things. The other question I had was on page 80, where it talks about the first bullet point. Buildings may qualify for a partial third story for certain allowed uses.

What are those uses? Those are dictated in the zone districts. So in C2, you can have a third story if it's a hotel. You can have a third story if the second and third story are all affordable housing. I believe that those are the two. So there's a place somewhere where that's... In the C2 zone district, yeah.

Those are my main questions on that.

Someone mentioned the beginning of this discussion was back in the late 90s with Anne Freeman, and the goal was to meet the desire of Basalt's citizens to maintain a Western railroad town heritage. And following that process, we were written up in the Washington Post, and the quote was, it's a quintessential mountain town. And the phone started ringing off the hook. and i had to look up the word quintessential at the time given my background in the english language but um i think that this thing could use a little more detail i i agree with the letter writer here at the end let's get it right from the start i think she says i think that you've raised a couple points that are interesting on definitions the redevelopment scenarios you can drive 14 miles and see what's going on the fees that you pay in lieu of parking They're not a barrier to entry anymore for developers that want to redevelop in downtowns like here and Telluride and everywhere else. It's an interesting problem to have, I guess, to entertain someone that wants to come in. I look at Two Rivers, Heathers, Midland Shoe. What is the potential there on those sites? And then again, with realigning Tempranillo's site potentially, what are you really creating there? A very narrow corridor and a very difficult situation for automobiles. We've often talked about an off-site parking structure somewhere, but somehow fees in lieu of never really make it to definitive parking improvements. We improve the parking we have or modify it, but we haven't really necessarily added any over the years so I would maybe just let this percolate for a while and see if there's more public comment and you know come up with a couple redevelopment scenarios that are realistic and the waivers have to be not an easy you should it should be easy to qualify for a waiver because it'll just it just they tend to stack up on one on another you get one why we also need this now we could use this too and it just continues the discussion for way too long so um and we've seen that over across the street you know everywhere and any anywhere in the core you know, it started with the building we talked about earlier. There was a third building proposed behind it on the river that went away. So, you know, I think there's enough here to do a little more digging personally. I mean, we can improve it and bring all this back on second reading, I guess, but

Carlton, since I'm new to this, can you just for the record address Laura's question about why the hillside neighborhood is no longer, just how the boundaries were determined for the design guidelines?

Yeah, so the initial RFP for this project was for inclusion of the hillside neighborhood and for a set of residential design guidelines in combination with the commercial design guidelines. And there was not an appetite for that. last summer. So there was extensive conversation at council and I think some folks who are currently sitting on this dais could speak to that as well. But ultimately it was that the hope was to retain our commercial core, which seems like it's, you know, part of the community and everybody has a stake in it. But to let people make their own decisions on their own private property, particularly on their residential lots. And so that was removed from the RFP. The proposal that was given to us by GM Shea was revised down to just focus on the commercial core and to remove the residential portions of their proposed work, scope of work. And we went forward just pursuing the commercial portion of that.

At least I think there was kind of a sentiment that there's maybe more pressure on the downtown Midland area immediately than there is in the Hill District. So see how the Midland design guidelines go and then maybe you could look at that in the future.

Didn't we have a house up on the hill get scraped? We have. We've had a couple. Okay. Thank you for explaining.

My understanding of these guidelines and my hope for what they will be for the town is that it's a jumping off point. They're not design rules, they're design guidelines. Because my opinion is that ambiguity is sort of the enemy of progress. So if somebody is starting on a redevelopment or building something, I think it's kinder to have guidelines for them to see as a place to start than to just start in the abyss. So I'm supportive of these guidelines for that reason. I do think that it should be easy to request a waiver because they are guidelines and not rules. I don't know how many meetings we've had about these. I feel like this has got to be at least the sixth one. I think that the people who have the most trepidation about these guidelines are looking at them as though they're rules. And I don't think that was ever our intention, was to say these are the design rules. And I know this is petty, but I do think that the certificate of appropriateness is rubbing people the wrong way. Nobody likes the way that it sounds. We're talking about small-town character, and that's not it. So I don't think you need to change the intention of what it is, but I can't even say it without laughing. It sounds pretty uppity. Just call it something else. think I think James misspoke and said certificate of acceptance but I think that sounded a lot better certificate of appropriateness makes me feel like I am being judged by somebody far better than And I don't like it. Are we on what not to wear? Yes. Yes. Thank you. It feels like my clothes are being judged by someone fabulous. I don't like it. Change it. I think everybody agrees about that. So, yeah, that's just my two cents about the guidelines. They're guidelines. They're not rules. And I think people should be able to apply for waivers.

Well, and Greg mentioned the non-functional turf ordinance, but I kind of look at these similarly. You have the requirement portion, and then there's the kind of inspiration portion that people look at something that they use the requirement for it, and you have something that includes native or non-functional or the elimination of non-functional and the development of native and they go that looks great where do i go for that and we have a toolbox of how to native your your front yard right and then they do that themselves they look at what's next door that was redeveloped commercial and then you go to the toolbox and you can do it yourself when you renovate your space as well so that's kind of how i've been thinking about it personally and it's and this is

I can't remember the gentleman who came who said that this is superior to having sort of a design board, right? And I've had experience with design boards as well, and I do find that those are much harder to navigate. It's kind of up to how the people who showed up on the board are feeling about your project that day. I remember planting Wanting to plant, there's a list of plants that you can plant in your flower beds here in Willits. And these are the plants that I picked. And then they said, but we don't really like these plants. Because too many people planted that plant. So you should pick these other plants. But I'm like, but here's the list of plants. And so I see this as like, here's the list of plants. So thank you.

So earlier tonight, we had an applicant withdraw an application because we sat here and so staunchly defended small town character. I see this as we kind of have to honor that sentiment here. And these guidelines are helping us in that defense of our small town character. I do have a question, Jeff, that you can probably help me with in addressing Laura's comments. Are there any other properties that are affected by the orientation and placement slash original location requirement? And if not, are we singling out that property? And do we open ourselves up to a potential for litigation?

I'm not sure what other properties are affected by that design Standard I don't know you get I can't tell you we'd have to do some research Which we could before second reading that's what I was asking for I think the same thing is because I get a couple redevelopment things

And look, honestly, the redevelopment of Tempranillo personally terrifies me. It does. And it's a very real possibility because it is for sale. And... I understand Laura's concerns as that property owner, right? She wants to maximize value of her property, and I appreciate those concerns. But then at the same, you know, on the other side of the coin, I'm trying to envision Midland with the property pushed up, you know, to the sidewalk line, to the zero lot line. And I think that would be a real loss. But legally, you know, can we... single out that property if it's the only one um and kind of to her point tell her that like we're kind of like dictating and taking possession of her front yard yeah I guess maybe we'll bring more information back for you guys for second reading on that issue that I think those are

certificate of appropriateness issue and again i don't think that the intent of the regulations was to certainly not to make although it's an open space from an aesthetic and from a development and you know for me i don't know we we're on that property the existing building envelope there's not any public use of that of that area that's still private property this is where within the site that development is permitted to occur But we can bring that back for a second.

Yeah, it's not public use, but it's certainly the aesthetics of it is public benefit. Do you know what I mean? Like the fact that you get to walk by and it's this beautiful lawn area and not a building facade right there.

I would also make some street on the side.

Well, we even put a design element into it during the streetscape. We have the railroad tracks that we like put the different colored cement in there. I don't know what the materials are called, but to celebrate it.

I saw this as like, I think to the point of that letter is like, this does individual, like we're talking 11 buildings here that are listed as contributing. So like it does specify specific buildings to be preserved. So I kind of saw her letters like, well, that's kind of the intent of these guidelines is to preserve spaces like this.

I don't know. And there's, again, within James, maybe, or Carlton, correct me if I'm wrong on this, but, you know, with The elements for the development of the lot are, these are addressed in the design guidelines, but these are more architectural in nature. There's a separate process for, you know, within any application for amending a building envelope on an existing, or on a property like this for redevelopment that is layered on top of this that

this isn't that would come into play through a land use application yeah yeah through a historic designation we've got certain site plan review requirements so changing the location would kind of fall into that historic section of the code but There were a couple things that I think counts mentioned so far that they want a little more information on for second reading so that alignment Yeah, the certificate of appropriateness yeah title the Kind of reviewing maybe potential for several different development scenarios and we could bring back some information on that and and then looking at what other properties might be subject to the location issue related to the open space.

Is there still a lot of questions about the right-of-way behind Two Rivers and that quote alley that doesn't really exist that exits up onto Homestead?

No, that was dedicated to a pedestrian easement maybe five, ten years ago now. There's not full public vehicular access. Stop short of that, but pedestrian access is preserved.

All right. Any other questions or comments for this evening? Is there a motion?