Council - Regular Meeting

It is 615. I call to order the City of Glenwood Springs City Council meeting. It is September 3rd, 2026. And Ryan, would you please take a roll call?

Mayor Dane. Yes. Mayor Pro Tem Zielinski. Councilor.

Hello.

Councillor Smith, Councillor Schachter, Councillor Schmoll, Councillor Wymer, Councillor Townsley. We have a quorum.

Excellent. Thank you, Ryan. Do we have any changes on the agenda tonight? We'll see none. We'll move into disclosure of Councillor conflicts of interest with items in the agenda. Also nothing. Then we'll move on into citizens appearing before council and a possible council response for items that are not on the agenda. So I have a whole bunch of names here for the bear awareness. And since that is an agenda item, I'm going to hold off with you guys until we get to item nine on the agenda. And then you guys are free to talk. So we will start with... Correct. Thank you. Rachel. Hi, Rachel.

Hi, guys. I already asked the other neighbors to speak before me because I'm not in a good mood and I need to calm down.

Shouldn't we have the bad news first and then the good news?

Give it to us.

All right. We'll move on to Jennifer Barnes. There you go. Please come forward. State your name and whether you live in city limits or not.

My name is Jennifer bombs and I do live in city limits.

Thank you. Just real quick. Sorry. You have three minutes or reset. It's all good. It's all good. Don't worry.

Good evening members of the City Council. I am speaking today to address the severe parking deficit created when Bennett Avenue recently striped with parking spaces. I want to share the hard data that my neighbors and I gathered directly. To understand the full impact of these new painted lines, a neighbor and I knocked on every single door on the street. The feedback was unanimous. Residents can no longer park near their own homes and often can't find a spot on the block at all. The size of the parking spaces has significantly cut down on the amount of cars able to park on the street. Here is the math from our canvas. Under the new layout, the painted lines leaves us with 51 designated parking spaces. Our door-to-door count identified 54 resident vehicles. That 54 car baseline does not include the manor apartments, downtown workers, tourists, and visitors. The manor apartments residents are limited to one vehicle per unit, but many units have more than one, sometimes three. That adds over 20 cars to the street. Downtown workers, employees routinely leave their vehicles on Bennett to go work their shifts. Tourists and visitors use our block every day as overflow parking for downtown. That means that before a single worker, a tourist or man or apartment residence parks, we already have a deficit of When you add these groups together, the real demand on Bennett easily reaches 60 to 70 cars competing for 51 painted spaces. We want to work with the city. Here are some solutions that we came up with as neighbors. Remove the painted lines. Establish residential permit, ah, residential permit, ah, residential parking permit zone. Increase code enforcement. We knocked on every single door because our neighborhood is at a boiling point. We asked the council to review the restriping, consider our data, and work with us to restore functional parking on Bennett Avenue. Let me repeat this again. Around 60 to 70 cars are competing for 51 spots. Thank you.

Thank you for being here. Kelly Seven. No, let's wait till the end.

Hi, Kelly's Evan, and I do live in the city limits. All right, thank you. I'm just going to reiterate. I was really excited when the lanes, when the lines were painted on the street, I thought, yes, this will help us condense some of the parking and be more efficient. But due to the, the angle at which some of these they're pretty extreme diagonal angles, more like 45 degrees. We lost a, And we were trying to gain more efficient parking we ended up losing between five and 10 spots from the diagonal that they were painted and excess space around driveways and where the roads come in so that's kind of where this came to a crunch is now we. we're having to park a block up or around the corner or stop in the street to unload the groceries, you know, because there's nowhere to park. So I think the residential parking could be a good solution to this. And that would have a lot of support, I think, from our neighbors.

All right. Thank you. Emily McKittrick. Did I say that right? Maybe. McKittrick. There you go.

HAB-Juliette Boone, Emily mckittrick city resident Bennett avenue resident, I was one of the canvassers of the neighborhood opinions of parking and which was a unanimous boo. HAB-Juliette Boone, I am this many of my comments were already stated, I would strongly push for permit parking or residential parking something that would at least limit the parking on Bennett to people that are actually living there. Thank you.

Okay, thank you. Okay, back to Rachel. How are you feeling? Better?

You know me, you know I have a problem with anger.

I'm trying to be nice.

Please be nice. Okay, my name is Rachel when I live 728 Bennett. I've lived in this house for 31 years and the parking gets worse every year. And I came to you, this is my fourth time, the first time to say, you know, we have spaces between the cars. Can we put lines to prevent that? Well, now we have designated huge spaces between every car on the whole street. The neighbors that I've talked to, they all want the lines gone. Two neighbors are too afraid to come and speak to you. They're intimidated or whatever their issue is. People are just not, they're like, I'm not talking to city council, whatever. So I'm the troublemaker, you know, I'm the one that comes and complains. I've also learned there's this in the 80s that the lack of forethought was implemented where people can build apartment complexes or apartments and not consider parking. So that is another issue. that I would invite you to look at that and maybe make that, any more building downtown, they have to provide parking instead of just bringing in more people and more people downtown. The manor, when they move into the manor, they are given a sheet of the rules, Manor One and Manor Two, And one of the rules is they can only have one car per person. And for example, one of the residents has five vehicles. So that is another issue is we have the manors that park on our street and they have parking behind the manor too that is always empty. Why aren't they parking there? You know, if, if it's going to be empty, why can't we park there? Anyway, there's so many layers to this and it's, it's gotten to, for me, it's gotten overwhelming that I came in to try to improve and now it's worse. And so, yeah, I'm frustrated. You know, I tried to do something and now it's worse.

All right. Thank you. Thanks, Rachel. Let's do this. Anybody else here for the parking situation on Bennett? Okay, please come up. Yeah, please come up. Please state your name and whether you live in city limits or not.

My name is Al Seaver, 714 Bennett. And the parking is totally out of control. There isn't anybody that parks there that doesn't complain about the parking. I know it's not this council's doing, but somebody approved that parking and it's not working. The person that Rachel was talking about has a car collection. He has... 10 cars in Glenwood, according to his conversation that I had with him a couple days ago on the sidewalk. 10 cars, half of them are parked on Bennett. Every couple of days, he moves the cars around, and it's just an hour's worth of shuffling cars. The problem still hasn't been addressed. We're at a point where We shouldn't have to take it anymore. And it's really upsetting the neighborhood. There's war out there between people that want some order and people that don't care. One guy had a pickup truck parked in front of our house at 714 Bennett for six months. We finally got code enforcement to look at it. It was moved. Where did it move to? Down on River Street. It's still in that same spot after, what, five or six months? There's no control. There's no following any rules. This guy works at a local store and there's a big parking lot in the back of the store and people park their cars there, sometimes just to abandon their vehicles. He gets to, because he takes care of the parking lot with a broom and a shovel, he gets to move these cars and he gets permission, I believe he gets permission from Walmart, to Just take the cars. He's got every couple of weeks, he's got another car. He had a place in the Denver area where he collected cars. Now he's got somewhere around 20 vehicles and probably a little less than half of them are parked in our neighborhood. We can't do it anymore. I'm 81 years old. I'm tired of walking two blocks to park my car, wondering if it's been vandalized by who knows which group. There's time. I'm sorry, but thank you for your time. Please give us a break and do something about this. We need the council's help. All right.

Thank you for being here. Okay, one last call for parking. We're going to do this a little differently since we have interest groups here. If I see no more parking, then I'll bring it back to council quick for a couple of responses, and we'll start with... Council Townsley, since you asked first, please.

So thanks, Rachel, for, you know, your piece is good. You guys came. So if there's somebody out there that's afraid to come to Council, Rachel came to Council, asked for lines. We painted lines. I'll bite, you know, without looking at what might have happened, you know, something different happened. Those lines. Also, when I went over the other day, I parked my truck, which was a pretty good sized truck. But if the lines were shorter, code enforcement could get me because my truck would stick out of either side of those lines. So it's a problem. It's a residential area. Let's keep looking at it and working at it together. But council is definitely responsive in, hey, let's put lines on it. We tried it. It looks like that's not a good solution. So let's talk about it and move it. But I would hate to think that there's people out there that are afraid to come to council because we don't listen to them or don't try to act on it.

Okay, thank you. Councilor Schachter. Well, it's my ward, and I think we are responsible. Like Councilor Townsley said, we made an attempt, but it's not the right attempt. I think we know the tools are there. That doesn't make it easy. We can get rid of the lines or change the lines. I know it's complicated, but I believe at least part of the downtown core, the most closest to downtown, is probably time to examine residential permits. And and and it doesn't have to be the whole downtown core. I'm upstream. Um, and enforcement is always pressured because of staff, but those 3 tools, I think we need to look at them. Um, and I believe we have to. Put residents 1st and those that work downtown. They got 7th Street, the parking structure when it gets rebuilt, and there's room upstream. So if they have to walk five blocks or four blocks, that's probably okay. But I hope we combine these three and come up with a better solution. Thank you, Rachel, and the neighbors. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Mayor Pro Tem Selinsky, please.

So this is a question for, we'll start with you, Steve. I know we've talked about, there's another neighborhood where there's a commercial entity that has a number of vehicles that are parked in a residential area. And we talked at that time about, you know, is there any guardrails around how many vehicles you can have to one address, something like that. Is there any precedent or any model for that?

I don't know of any model for that specifically there was another neighborhood that came in front of Council not too long ago. wanting us to impose two hour parking and then give them permits that exempt them from that. And I think what Council did was direct them through a process where they would go out and get signatures from neighbors, and this is exactly what we want, but we never heard back from them okay.

So there's one option. The other thing I know this is it puts a little bit on us on the residents, but I know code enforcement isn't going, they don't patrol and like mark cars like we do for like two hour parking downtown. So if there's a vehicle that hasn't moved in 72 more than 72 hours, I was to say it certainly can be less than six months. you have to call and report it and i know that that can be frustrating because it does put the responsibility back on you but that's how that process works so if there is somebody in your neighborhood who is not being a good neighbor and leaving their vehicle seemingly abandoned for weeks at a time call code enforcement and that will be enforced but that's the process for that okay thank you council townsley

I would just add, because I'm kind of in the middle of this, I also used to live on that block, for those of you who don't know me, but I know that Al's run out of his time, but he's told me personally that they've talked to code enforcement and they've had a really hard time getting response on the cars that are out there. I had similar experiences a long time ago, but so that, I don't know, that's a tough one, you know, to give them that advice and then go, okay, are we really enforcing that? So I'll just add that for him at this point.

Chief? Joseph Derson, Chief of Public Safety. That's come up, and we ran some statistical numbers, and so some of those specific ones you're talking about, we were able to dispel some of those allegations that, in fact, we have been out there. We had the dates, times, the amount of time we have been out there and responded to that one particular individual, so I'm not really sure where that one was coming from. I'm not trying to call you out, but when we were asked to do that, we did provide the statistical data to show that the code enforcement team has responded to that.

Okay, thank you for that.

And for the neighbors, if feel like you're not being uh heard or there's some kind of extended process for you i welcome you to call me i'm on the website joseph daris is my name if you don't know and you can email me directly and we can have somebody call you within you know six or eight hours to take care of that some of these things are certainly at the street level i might not be aware of all those or the deputy chief who oversees that division in particular you're welcome to call us we'll make sure we take care of it for you guys thank you okay thank you chief any other responses from council

Okay, so the only question I have, and it's for Steve. Sorry. Um. Is there anything we can do, like, immediately to relieve the situation a little bit, like, remove the lines, maybe, or or shorten it? But I I don't know just anything to help. Um, and I I know things take time and I know we're we're reassessing the parking situation town wide. What can we do now?

Would it be okay with, uh, you guys if I talk to my staff and we got back to you at the next meeting? I know that's two weeks away, but would that be okay?

Yes, if that's where we are. Like I said, immediate relief would be great.

But yeah, it's just hard for me to actually make a decision. I know.

No, I get it. I get it. And I understand you have to talk to staff and engineers and all that kind of stuff.

So yeah, let's do that. And what I would say is, you know, we'll talk about it. And if we come up with something that works, I'll email you guys. And if everybody's okay with it, and our attorney is okay with that, not being an illegal meeting or something, then we'll take action.

Okay, I think I think that works at least something something's moving forward and I think that's important at this point because yeah some of you have been here a couple times, we need to address it so okay great.

Special.

Or we could do a special meeting quick too, if need be.

Yeah, I guess what I would say is that let's see what staff comes back with in the next couple of days. The city engineer is the traffic engineer for the town, has quite a bit of latitude and authority. Steve and I can talk about what that process is. I don't know that it would be one that necessarily we would need your approval to execute on. But let's see where we're at when they come up with what they think is a workflow solution.

I think that's fine. I think that works. Councillor Smith.

Thank you. Either in those future discussions, we should bring information back or now if you can, can you remind us where the active Dave Kuntz, I am limited enforcement extends we've got we've got code enforcement with special license plate readers that do some. Dave Kuntz, ticketing for cars that sit there longer than the time limit. Dave Kuntz, What geography is included in that.

Dave Kuntz, I don't know exactly it's not that big an area really I mean it's just kind of contiguous right there to downtown so it doesn't extend out to Ben and I don't even think it goes to Blake.

Okay. Thank you. Okay.

Okay. Excellent. Well, thank you. I feel okay. Things are moving. So let's see how it goes. Give them a little time to figure something out. Like the others have said, we tried lines. The lines didn't work. Let's figure something else out.

And I'm Steve Boyd, the city manager here. You are welcome to email me if you have ideas, specific ideas that you would like our staff to consider, please. Easy to find, steve.boyd at cogs.us.

Okay, excellent. Thank you, Steve, for throwing that in. All right, so parking done. Let's move on to the next, whatever it may be. And I also understand that maybe some of you are here for bears as well. So the bear item is item nine on the agenda, so you're going to have to be patient for a little bit, but we'll get there. Okay, who else is here for something that is not on the agenda? Please come forward. State your name and whether you live in city limits or not. All the way, all the way.

Please. I just don't want to blow my time. My name is Judy Haynes and I'm a resident. I'm going to be talking about 100 Midland Avenue, as you know. So this saga has been going on for since 2004, 2005. I wrote you all a letter. I'm hoping you got it and read it for a moment. So we've been, for a lot of different reasons, from staff errors and omissions and choices, we've had this code violation going on, even when we didn't know it was really going on. And it has been clear that it's been, unfortunately, it's been looking like we're favorable towards the landlord and the tenant. As we look forward to what we wanna do, one of the most important things we can do is to show that we're neutral. And that means the city's attempts to enforce this is done in a neutral way, so that we can't show favoritism towards the landlord or against the landlord. And as we as we move forward, we're going to have to have ample evidence that we have, unfortunately, that we've had to notify the landlord multiple times, tried sanctions, all the other ways that we've always sanctioned a tenant or excuse me, a landlord. And that would show give us a record of neutrality. That's all I'm asking is that we have that record, because if we go ahead, we're going to be looking at a law that says you have shown no action. that shows that you've been neutral towards this entity now or in the past. Also, unfortunately, and I'm not slamming Mr. Hanlon, but because he's been the attorney of record for so long, they're gonna be able to look at that record and see what perhaps his advisement has been, whatever. And that might be something that we don't want to have out there as a big issue. So perhaps having counsel that would be outside of their city might help us be able to make a good case. And also not shine a spotlight on the staff at this point in their previous actions as much as it could be shown. So that's my ask is those two things is please slow down and sanction the landlord as usual and perhaps looking at an outside advisory for council as we move ahead. Thanks. I appreciate it.

All right. Thank you very much. Anybody else here for items that are not on the agenda?

I'm here for the bear issue on Bennett, but I thought that was maybe going to

Yes, like I said, we'll do the bears and item nine. It's about four items to come. So got to sit through the rest to get to talk bears. That's how we're going to do this. No, well, she hasn't yet, but I kind of closed the parking. So if I see nobody else, I will close the public portion for items not on the agenda. We already did responses to what was necessary. I'll move into item five council announcements. Do we have any.

Councillor townsley please just one quick thing from the parks and rec meeting last night. The fire. What's the right word? fire level has been lowered back to one so that that makes a difference if you're going to go out this weekend and do something in a fire pit in a campground in a normal area. So those fire restrictions have changed due to the the rain and whatnot that's come through. So kind of a nice to be going that way instead of the other way.

Thank you, Councillor Schachter, please. Two quick ones. reminding public community centers reopened and kudos to our staff. There was a bunch of work done and if nothing else, I hope it makes the absence of the community center make everybody feel fonder about it because it wasn't available and it is and it does impact the community and thank you very much. And also a reminder For those of you that may not know, our Citizens Alliance, the Glenwood Citizens Alliance is emphasizing Love Glenwood this week. And a reminder that some of the things they stand for regarding potential quarry are not finished. And it's still an open issue. And Love Glenwood week is underway. Thank you. All right.

Thank you. Any other announcements?

Councillor Weimer. I just want to say I got a social media thing. If you guys don't know, there's an Asian market tomorrow's opening day. Where the old adventure store used to be. Outdoor. So it's now an Asian market. Fresh stuff, frozen stuff. So I for one am like super stoked. So I'll see you there tomorrow.

Okay, excellent. Good announcement. Anybody else? All right, so none. We're moving into consent agenda. Item six tonight, and I am entertaining a motion for the consent agenda.

Do you mind reading what all is on the consent agenda?

Absolutely. Okay. I'm not going to let her do the motion with them all read. So Mayor Prokofiev. You have to read it twice. Yeah, I'm glad I don't have to read it.

I move to approve the consent agenda item A, which is the August 20th, City Council meetings, NMB, which is Resolution 2026-21, Resolution of the City of Glenwood Springs, Colorado, authorizing and supporting the application for a grant from the Garfield County Federal Mineral Lease District for the replacement of rescue equipment for the Glenwood Springs Fire Department. And item B, which is ordinance 2026-18, an ordinance of the city of Glenwood Springs, Colorado, amending title 070 of the Glenwood Springs Municipal Code regarding the regulation and permitting of electrical vehicle charging projects within the city. On second reading.

Okay, we have a motion for consent for the item stated to approve. Looking for a second. PB, Harmon Zuckerman, Council Townsend second that excellent motion second to prove PB, Harmon Zuckerman, Call for the question.

PB, Harmon Zuckerman, It's unanimous. It passes.

All right. Thank you, Ryan. Moving on to Proclamation for Restoration of Fire Bell. Chief, you want to lead that one?

Yes, sir. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Again, Joseph Barrett, Chief of Public Safety. Before you get into the resolution, I'd like to introduce to you former Fire Chief Jim Mason here. He has a couple of friends with him. I think we're going to ask you to come forward and have Mr. Chief Mason come up as well. In the way of background, I'll let him explain it more in detail, but he came into possession through generations of this fire bell. And I have a photograph here that I'll share with you in a minute that was from one of our initial fire engines from many, many years ago. And it came into his possession and he took it upon his own. a volition to do a lot of restorative work and to what you'll see here in just a moment today. And then we're going to prominently display that bell and some of these photographs in fire station number two downtown. So I do want to express our gratitude to Chief Mason and some of the work that they all put into that. So thank you, sir.

Thanks for the introduction. Now, everybody, come on up, whoever was involved in this, please.

So I have my friend Brett Morrison. He was also on the fire department for a period of time. Can we just wait? Yeah, come on down. I'm very happy to say that we have Annie and Christy Zanconella here, who was his daughters and grandpa. Their grandpa was Bruno.

And then we also have Joe and his wife, Debbie, who is Joe Zemlok.

And so we have everybody represented here today that Bell is being dedicated to, with the exception of Rick Wilson's wife, And it was immediate family and I was unable to get in touch with them. So, but anyway, Rick was a firefighter. He's the only firefighter we've ever had that died in the line of duty here in Glenwood Springs. He had a heart attack and on a fire call and I've survived that so He, between the Zankanellas and the Zimlocks and Rick, it's a very deserving group of people. The Zankanellas were synonymous with the fire department around here for years and years and years, as was Marty Zimlock. And then of course he married a Zimlock, or he married a Zankanella. So, you know, it's quite a history lesson here for sure. So anyway, Brett was able to find this bell and kind of rescued her, if you will. He called me, and I've known about this bell for years and years, but never had seen it. And so when it came into my possession, I said, well, I can try to shine it up and build a little stand for it and do what we're here to do. So that's what we did.

Excellent. Well, thank you for the history, for the background. Thank you guys for being here. And thank you for all you have done and are doing. And to all of the first responders, thank you so much, guys. We couldn't be here without any of you. We know how important this is. So for that, we do have, and I'm reading the proclamation, a proclamation for the fire department's antique belt. Whereas the City of Glenwood Springs and the Glenwood Springs Fire Department were founded in 1885, and whereas the Fire Department's first documented headquarters was not established until 1898 at 824 Grand Avenue, and whereas because there was not an established headquarters, the method of alarming firefighters most likely would have been a large bell. And whereas the worst documented fire in the city of Glenwood Springs was the Hotel Glenwood fire in 1945, where it's reported that four to six people perished. And whereas the Foster Hospital was next door, and thanks to firefighters directing water onto the hospital, many lives were saved. And whereas this bell was initially on the city's first fire truck in 19... which replaced horse carts, and whereas this bell was destined for the landfill when it was saved by the late Captain Marty Zemlock, and whereas over the years this bell has changed hands from former members of the fire department when former firefighter Brett Morrison passed possession to former Chief Jim Mason. And whereas former Chief Jim Mason took it upon himself to restore the bell to have it prominently placed in station number two. Now, therefore, I, Mark O'Dame, Mayor of the City of Glenwood Springs, Colorado, do hereby proclaim that this antique bell is to be stored within the Fire Department and thanks those for their work in preserving the history of the Glenwood Springs Fire Department. Witness thereof, I have Harantu set my hand and caused the seal of the city of Glenwood Springs, Colorado to be affixed this third day of September in the year 2026. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, guys. I appreciate it, Council. This is this bill. That is so awesome. I love this kind of stuff. Look at that. This is awesome.

Just so you guys know, look how tarnished it was. And look at Jim's good work. This is awesome.

It's fantastic. I have to do it.

Yeah, there you go.

If I may, real quick here. refurbished and presented, blah, blah, blah. It was on the city's fire truck, 1917, Brockway, America to France, dedicated to all who came before and served our town in memory of Chiefs Bugo and Buzz Zancanella, Martin Zemlock, training captain, and Rick Wilson, firefighter who died in the line of duty. So there you go.

Thank you so much, Dad. This is awesome. Thank you.

Very cool.

Whereas.

And whereas.

Yeah, there we go.

We can just move it to the right a little bit. I don't mind looking at it.

Yeah, right on.

Okay, that was a nice moment tonight. I have to say that was lovely. That was great. I love this kind of stuff. I'm glad it I'm glad they brought it forward to us. This is this is very important. All right. So moving on with first actions and presentations, and we are talking about the urban canopy of city trees. And this is Dan Roper. Maybe his last stint, but he's still here.

Hi, Council. Good to see you at the end over Park Superintendent. We've been asked to share just a little bit of an update on our urban canopy, our urban forestry program that we have here in the city. So over the past few years, we've worked really hard to establish a program to better support the trees and the green spaces in our community. So we just wanted to give you a little update on what that looks like. So just to think of it as, you know, our trees and green spaces are an incredible asset to our community. And they're something, you know, that we spent money on and they're worth protecting for what they provide for our community, what they provide for our environment are both equally important. And just kind of some quick facts here, just in the past few years of our program, so this is 23 through 26, you know, looking at like last year, you know, half a million cubic feet of water is moving through our urban canopy. Over, you know, 2,700 pounds of pollutants pulled out of the air. And, you know, 6 million pounds of carbon over their lifetime. So, and we can get to that of how we calculate that and how we keep track of our trees. So this program, you know, has been built as parks is split out with our downtown and urban core. Eric, you met Eric earlier, our arborist. And that is a role that is in our code that we are to have an arborist on staff, either myself or somebody else. So we actually have two, which is incredibly helpful for us. Just some few quick highlights. Looking through what we've been able to accomplish over the past few years has been pretty incredible. We've been a Tree City USA municipality for a long time now, and we want to continue that. So what we've done is starting to engage more with the public through our Branch Out program. So that's through tree giveaways, through any type of outreach that we can help with our citizens. And I think that is something that we definitely want to see continue on. And also not only with tree care, but helping to get trees back into the community as we lose them. So the one way we do that is through our right-of-way tree care assistance program. So we have money budgeted every year for this. So citizens are allowed to apply for tree care assistance up to $2,000 that will match in funds that go for those right-of-way trees. Some of the troubles, or not troubles, but some of the challenges that we've run into a little bit is explaining to residents what the right-of-way, what that means. So typically it's the sidewalk to the top back of curb. In other places where there's not a sidewalk, it's a little bit of a gray area. So I think that's one thing that probably in the future that we would look at working on in particular just to help define that area a little bit more. What we've been able to do really though is help with high risk trees. And that could be either through our door hanger program. So if we see a particular problem or code enforcement notifies us of an issue, we can hang a door hanger on their residence home, call us at this number, we'd be happy to help. And our help extends beyond the right of way tree cares as well too. Like if you have a tree of concern on your property, our staff is happy to come by, check it out and offer a recommendation Our funding is just for those right-of-way trees, but we're happy to help out in any other way possible as well, too. So a lot of it with our Branch Out program, you know, it's been pretty broad-reaching. You know, I think some of you have been recipients of our free tree giveaways in the springtime. We're hoping to continue that as well, too. I know that this year for those recipients, it was a bit low. bit of a challenging year, given the lack of moisture. But we definitely want to see that happen. The other part of it, too, is our large volunteer effort, not only through tree plantings, but tree care, fire mitigation projects and all that. So it's been a joint effort with us. Roaring Fork Outdoor Volunteers has been an immense help with that as well, too. Um, so the, uh, the, the number of trees that needs, uh, care, uh, is it's a high number, but it's a, you know, the challenge that we're willing to meet for sure. So, um, I just wanted to touch base a few, you know, about a few things. When it comes to trees that are stressed out from heat, lack of water, you know, I'm sure you've heard a little bit in Carbondale, they have identified the emerald ash borer. Like on wood, like as far as we know, it has not been identified in Glenwood Springs. The plus side to that, Being where we're at is emerald ash borer doesn't transmit like it does on the East Coast. Even in Boulder, Lakewood, any of those areas that have had infestations, it doesn't move at the rapid rate. Now, that being said, we struggle more with what's called lilac ash borer. So that's actually coming from the West. It doesn't have the same immediate effect, but it has a profound effect on our ash trees. I think some really good examples are in front of Soper's Elementary. And those ash trees that you see, they're really struggling. And a lot of that has to do with the lack of water, for sure. The other issues that we see are pinyon ips beetle. So above Linwood Cemetery, you start to see those pinyon trees that are starting to rust out. They'll turn brown really quickly. So we're right in the peak time of bug movement for pinyon. for especially pinion Ips beetle for sure. So these fire mitigation projects we're doing, we're avoiding those trees at this time, waiting until the winter time when they're dormant and then removing the trees. We've seen movement in the town. If you haven't noticed at the community center, large number of the pinion trees have died. We've had to remove them. The trees that we've lost in Two Rivers Park, particularly the Austrian pines, they've been pretty susceptible to pinion Ips beetle. Of course, we keep track with Colorado State Forest Service of all the other issues that we see with Rocky Mountain Pine Beetle and such. Just a quick one about hazardous trees. I think going back to our work with code enforcement is really important that we can reach out to homeowners and residents to help them with their trees before they actually become a problem and they're laying in the street or on our neighbor's home. We've talked about right-of-way tree care assistance program. And I just want to bring to, just so you know, on our website, and then some of this may change, but under the parks website, we have our community forestry program. We have links for our right-of-way tree care assistance program, tree care tips, and all of that. And the tree plotter program. This is where all of our information comes from. So that's 6700 trees that we currently have inventory in our city. So those are only right away and trees that are in parks. So the The company that generates this website, they sent a crew out to measure all the trees, give their initial assessment of it, its condition, approximate age, and all those things. So that's where we can pull that stormwater data from, how much water is being pulled out, what's the filtration of the air look like. So I would encourage you, and this is... public facing. So we as the staff have the ability to take a deeper dive into our tree canopy, but there is a ton of information that can be accessed there. Your most common species, where they're located, and then it also goes as far as, if I can get there, to break it down by, sorry, I get there. It's a little slow, but anyway, as it catches up, it's an incredible asset to us. So I would encourage anybody to check it out for sure. Our fire mitigation projects will continue into this fall and then into winter. We still have burn piles to take care of at Linwood Cemetery. There will be some at Wolfson through a project with Rocky Mountain Youth Corps. In the next month, they're going to be two weeks of removing Siberian elms from the Wilson area. And then the pile burns that will happen up at Oasis Creek as well, too. So I don't know if it's going to load here, but it does break it down by census block, too. If you have the opportunity to go through, it can show what that canopy coverage per census block looks like as well. So that's the short of it and the quick of it.

Okay, great. Thank you, Dan. Back to us. Questions to Mr. Roper.

Councillor Smith. Thank you. Thank you, Dan. You mentioned that part of the stress, at least currently, on the trees that you're needing to either remove or mitigate is lack of water. Until a couple of days ago, it hadn't rained in a long time. What other factors... What was that lack of watering?

Yeah, water and heat have been the tough ones for sure. And a really light winter. That's been a tough one. And I think the struggles we're seeing are in the parks for sure. I'm sure you've already seen some trees starting to turn yellow or even get a little crispy. I think that's... rebounded a little bit with the recent precipitation, but it's the right-of-way areas that are the struggle for us. And I think for us as a staff is to determine the right species in the right place. That maybe planting large stature trees in that right-of-way strip isn't the best place for it. We encourage property owners, landowners to push that tree back on the other side of the sidewalk. It makes a huge difference.

Because it's got hard, hot surface. Yeah, it has room to grow.

And it's a double-edged sword there, too, that if you plant a large-stature tree next to a sidewalk, eventually it's going to make that sidewalk buckle, and then it's going to become a tripping hazard. And so we need to think about that as our canopy matures. I think, you know, as we talked about earlier today, that that 800 block of Grand Avenue, we have a lot of mature trees, and that we need to be thinking about what that replacement looks like. So we need to be really smart about that.

is since, if I understand right, the right-of-way trees are trees to which you can provide some financial assistance and certainly some technical advice. Is it up to the adjacent property owner to water those trees?

It is that the adjacent property owner is responsible for the care of it, although they still do have to apply for a permit for removal. So we can still handle that portion of it.

But is that part of the watering problem? Are people not Are they too worried about their water bills or otherwise not watering enough?

Yes and no. I think the lack of snow would play a larger role in that. But to your point, especially in parks, when we look at watering less in parks, it's balancing that with trees and how do we move forward with that. And I think for us, it's just a period of change in our irrigation practices and what that looks like.

Thanks for that, because that was my very next question. In the parks themselves, I know you're being very selective about watering turf during these days, but you're able to zone it somehow to water the trees?

As we make changes in our irrigation system, I'll be honest, our staff spent a lot of time watering trees this year, and those were newly planted trees. The first couple of years, those were the most critical years.

Great.

Yeah.

The city's 2024 climate action plan calls for a very specific increase in overall tree canopy from 24% in 2024 to 50% by 2050. How are we doing on that with all the struggles you have at the moment?

You know, I think that we've had a fairly successful success rate with trees. You know, if we're at a 50% success rate on new plantings, I think we're doing pretty well. But what we're doing is we're being smart about where we water. I'm sorry, where we plant trees where there's already irrigation. So we're not creating more work for ourselves. So that's the really important thing, you know, so.

Thank you and, finally, as we anticipate the next phases of lake avenue reconstruction stretch of street that does have a lot of that planting strip between sidewalk and curb are they going to be implications from that construction project on some of your some of the right away trees.

Yeah, there may be. I would say that, you know, we in Public Works have worked really well together to find solutions for those problem areas. And there may be areas where trees are lost. You know, we'll take Center Drive, for instance, that there were there were a lot of trees that had to be removed along Center Drive this year because of sidewalk issues. And also that space was damaged. less than three feet in a lot of places. So what we did is part of our tree giveaway program, we offered up three trees for those residents that lost trees. So we're trying to offset that as best we can.

Thanks very much.

Thank you. Any other questions? Okay, we'll see none. Well, thank you, Dan.

Yeah, thank you.

giving us an update.

Mr. Mayor, could I just interrupt for one moment? As you know, Dan Roper is moving on to another opportunity. And I just wanted to say thank you, Dan, and express my appreciation and that of staff. You are a capable and dedicated public service servant, and we're going to miss you. And we wish you all the very, very best. Don't be a stranger.

Couldn't have said it better. Thank you, Dan. Okay, bear activity. Who's gonna start that one? No, Steve, Steve's gonna

Thank you, Steve Boyd, city manager. As we all know, bears don't have a lot to eat right now. There's been a lot more bear activity recently. I'm very concerned about this, and I think it's going to get worse as they try to put some weight on as we go along. We're seeing a lot more interaction in town. We're seeing a lot more aggressive behavior in terms of trying to get to some food. they're going to get angrier, they're going to get hungrier, and they're going to get more aggressive. Some time ago, I think it was last year now, council made a very thoughtful decision to increase significantly the fines for people that didn't secure their trash. And your last direction to me was to enforce that with kind of a zero tolerance policy, which we've been doing. And that's been fine. What has changed is bears are smart and they're strong and they're going to do what it takes to eat. it's causing a problem in two ways. One is that we've all seen the videos where a homeowner or a property manager does everything right. They've got a bear wildlife resistant can, it's properly secured. And a bear will work on that as long as it takes and they can bend bars and they can get into that trash. We then show up with a 200 or a $500 ticket and it doesn't feel very good. We did everything right. The other issue that is coming up is that we have to write that ticket to a human being who's standing in front of us. So there can be an administrative assistant or something for a corporation. We walk in the door. He or she has to accept a ticket, a violation with their name on it so that they're responsible for that. They can pass it up the chain, but it doesn't change the fact that that also doesn't feel very good. So I know we've got people here. You may hear from some that say we need to triple the fines and double down. You may hear some people say, I did everything right, and this is unfair. Normally, we've been working on this, and we've got some ideas and solutions. Not solutions. There's no good solution. But normally, we would do this in a work session. But we wanted to do it so the public could weigh in. And if you would like to give me different direction, you're able to do that tonight. So I don't know. Is Becca still there? Is there anything you want to say, Becca? You good?

Do you want me to go now or do you want me to re-vote?

Well, if you have something to contribute to the bear activity and stuff, please come forward. Yeah, if that's OK.

I think that'd be very helpful.

Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Steve. Hi, Becca.

Hi, I'm Rebecca Cass. I'm the Glenwood Springs Wildlife Officer of Colorado Parks and Wildlife. Some of you may have seen me. Some of you may have voted me in public. It is one heck of a bad year out there for bears. Just in the time since you guys began the session this evening, I received three different bear calls from State Patrol Dispatch. I'm currently the on-call officer covering three counties. Just to meet tonight. I've been on call for the past 24 hours, and I'm on call until tomorrow morning. That being said, my team is also short-staffed. My team is also short-staffed. The bear problem in town is... a lovely combination of a lot of things. I am currently working on my master's degree, not attached to my job, but in something also related. I wrote a 20-page paper last fall about bear conflict in Colorado mountain communities. There are literally hundreds of studies that have been done by us, by California, by the state of Nevada, by the National Park Service about what actually helps mitigate bear conflict in municipalities. It is instituting a requirement for bear resistant cans across the board. And I'm not talking just commercial dumpsters with a bar. I'm talking metal lidded dumpsters and requiring the appropriate use of them. The other thing is having and maintaining a good fine structure and code enforcement structure. We have good code enforcement here. What I have heard from other folks involved in the completion of fulfilling those tickets, prosecuting those tickets, however you'd like to say that, is that currently the municipal code is likely too vague, which then also leads to those people who have done everything right and receiving tickets when they're also actively trying to mitigate, which leaves a bad taste in everybody's mouth about how we're all handling bear conflict. So mandating bear resistant cans, and I understand since we have one trash hauler in town, that might be feasible, but it will take time. And consistent enforcement of that code Also not allowing bird feeders or feeding of squirrels in town is also likely something that needs to be addressed more heavy-handedly. And that is, again, something that would have to be written in the municipal code specifically regarding seasonality of feeding, when it is appropriate, how it is appropriate. I know there's already some measures in place Unfortunately, there is so much else code enforcement already does for us. They can't be out there policing bird feeders for me. And I'm one person and I cover two counties. And that's just when I'm doing just my job, not helping cover for the rest of my team. It's a lot, and I appreciate the position and the explanation of hyperphasia. I also just want to be clear, it's not anger or aggression outright. It is a territorialness. Bears have always been here. Bears will continue to be here. And it's not necessarily anger either. They're hungry. It's like, if you can think about the hungriest you've ever been, And that's sacred for this batch. I'm sorry, guys.

Thank you, Becca. Thanks for all you do. Thanks for being here. So I guess if we have no other speaker, maybe we'll do questions quick, but she just left. I'm sure we may have some questions. Do we have any questions to Steve at this point? Councillor Smith, start with you.

Thank you. Just to follow on Becca's comment and Steve's as well, there have been some articles in our paper and in the Aspen paper recently about this, so there's some extra data in there. One of those is that we're going into the final phase of storing up for winter hibernation and bears, an average bear was eating 22,000 calories a day. You know, we, three or four maybe. So they are really, really on the hunt to emphasize this. My question is, we did have a work session a few sessions ago about moving to universal airproof cans with, we were kind of working through the mechanics, whether they're lashes or buttons, or where do we stand on that process?

So there's a little bit of a complicated issue. And I don't know if Matt wants to come up and address that or not. But we have been thinking about that. It's going to require some kind of a change in the contract that we've got. And we've tested a couple of solutions to see how they're working. And I'll let Matt finish the answer.

So a couple of things. She's great, by the way. She's amazing. She's everywhere. It's unbelievable. And she's calm. And tonight I feel like she's not calm because this is massive problem for her. And she knows it's a problem for all of us. I saw for reference, a three yard dumpster the other day, upside down with the bar still up with metal lids and the bear ripped the lid open. So you got to consider that. these bears are hungry and they're going to do whatever they can to get anywhere. They're actually trying to chew open the five gallon compost buckets now that people put out on Wednesdays. So trying to secure trash is becoming harder and harder and harder thing to do. To answer Councilor Smith's question, we are meeting with Mount Waste and Recycling next meeting to have a conversation. The things that they are putting together for us is what would it be a standard rate increase from last year to this year if everything was normal? What would it be if we bumped trash rates 30%, which we probably are going to do next year at the landfill? What would it cost for everybody to be on wildlife resistant cans? Once again, they're wildlife resistant cans. I have seen these cans opened by bears. So they're resistant. Even the Kodiak cans are not full bear proof. So depends on what level of anger they're at or hungriness, whatever you want to call it, they will still get into something. They are going to bring that forward to us. I have some numbers, but I would like for them to bring them forward. Come on up. She's going to correct me on all kinds of stuff.

Also to clarify, bear resistant cans are only bear resistant for a certain amount of time is what they're certified for and also only when used correctly.

Yes.

So our lovely folks that had talked about parking earlier, I actually bumped into one of our guests here in the front row this morning while I was out there prior to trash pickup in the alleyways over behind Ben and Blake. There were seven bear-resistant cans that were overfilled that the bears had gotten into and dragged trash down the alleyways prior to pickup. There were also many non bear resistant cancer were out prior to trash pickup and prior to the appropriate time for them to be placed out. So they were out. I was out there around seven this before seven this morning because I had about 15 minutes before I had to go to a different meeting. But between 630 and 645 I saw Three bears over there, seven non-bear-resistant cans out prior to 7 a.m., which, unfortunately, this time of year and with the bears we're having, it's too early. The bears are going to get into it anyways. And then bear-resistant cans that are just not being used appropriately, and that's a problem in and of itself. But they also are getting into metal dumpsters. We have them ripping off metal waste.

Sorry. So I guess next week we'll have, or two weeks, we'll have a conversation about cost. The question is, is what are we going to do with that? Is, is a wildlife resistant can for everybody in town solve the problem? If there were that many of them that were already overflowing and not being used properly, fine. Everybody can pay more, but maybe half the cans in town are actually not being used properly. So at the end of the day, it's not trash in the cans. It's people putting them out too early. It's people over stacking them. It's people not using the containers correctly. It's a whole pile of things, which is why this is a massively fascinating conversation for me. If you could get public to accommodate what is right, And what we would ask them to do, this would probably be less of a problem. But if it's less of a problem and there's that many bears in town because they're that hungry, they're going to find anything that they want or need to accommodate for not starving to death. So it's an interesting conversation. But next week, we will have prices for you for if the landfill goes up a certain percent, another certain percent, and if we're going to do all wildlife-resistant cans, how much that would cost. Mountain Waste would most likely ask for their five-year extension immediately because they have to pay for that. Um, their number was close to a half a million dollars to accommodate removal of the cans. We currently have replacements of all the cans we have in the purchase. And then the cans that they've already bought that are in town, they don't have much of a use for. So then they'll have to figure out what to do with those things. Maybe they get recycled, maybe they get put into the stream, but they don't exactly know, but we'll go over all of that stuff in two weeks. Um, And then we also had a conversation about straps. That is a very large time suck. It's a lot of labor to do that. We tried to put 50 of them out. We had people who were willing to help us. We accommodated for 34 or 35 of them the first day, and then we fought for the next 15 to try to get them to leave their cans out so we could put them on during a certain timeframe. So imagine doing that with 2000 cans. um so it might just be easier and less costly to just switch to uh wildlife resistant cans if that's the direction we want to go i'd be super interested if you know about any legislation coming up that the statement mandate everybody have a wildlife resistant can i'd heard of it a couple years ago that that might come out the state may mandate it so we may just be ahead of the curve kind of conversation at that point which we do that a lot So I'm open for conversations next week. You'll have pricing for all of that. Not next week. I keep saying that on the 17th, you'll have pricing for all of that and we'll be able to make some decisions moving forward on how you want to accommodate. It will not be inexpensive.

Right. Thank you. I'll follow up by me. And then one more separate question. I'm pretty sure an expense like this replacement of all cans or otherwise is not in the budget proposal that we reviewed a couple of sessions ago. Would this be a change to the 2027 budget?

Yeah, there's no appropriation in here for this specifically, so we'd have to appropriate those funds.

And we would need to do that rather than collect it from rate, trash rates.

I don't know. I mean, that's open to discussion. I'm certainly not opposed to finding a way for the city to kind of pitch in to help solve this. But we probably need to have more discussion before we make a decision on that.

And then two specialized questions. City Council not long ago also had a work session about possibility of commercial food establishments having compost requirements. Does that affect this or is that just another container that's vulnerable?

Our kind of plan is that downtown, at least for our plan, where we have the compactors downtown, we would probably swap out one on each side with a large compost dumpster, which are a little bit more security depending on which ones you buy than a regular dumpster would be. It's got the opening lids. As long as people lock them, they're harder to deal with, and hopefully a bear would just move on kind of thing.

Because that's where it was headed. If the really smelly stuff... really appealing materials can be even more secure. The other dumpsters might be less attractive.

The problem is just human nature once again. Compactors are basically impossible for a bear to get into if you close them. I have video of people leaving them open. People walking by and just opening them up for the next time they may come by and go to the restaurants and they may come back two hours later and throw things in there. You have to close things and secure them. If you don't, then it's just leaving an open container for a bear. So if you have the nice compost containers where the lids flip open, you put stuff in there. If you don't do this and that, they're basically useless also. So it's training people. And then the conversation also recently, I'm not going to quote numbers. It's quite a large number. There are quite a lot of people that come into town, stay for six months or less, and then leave again. We have a transient type community. How do you train all of those maybe thousand plus-ish people every six months to accommodate for our bear problem? So it's, like I said, it's a fascinating problem. I'm glad we're having this conversation. I'm sure there's a lot of people would like to input on this also. You have an expert over here, obviously. I'm just telling you costs, which we'll talk about uh, in two weeks. Um, and that could be rolled directly into the costs of the service. If you want to reduce that a bit, we could pay for some of it. Um, if you want to reduce that even more, we could talk about it, pay as you throw costs at the landfill for just citizens here, which would not be affected by the 30% increase. There's a whole bunch of things we can do to try to make it as affordable as humanly possible. But at the end of the day, if you leave a wildlife resistant container open or stack it with extra two bags, is it resistant to anything? It's not. So it's human nature and getting people to do what you want them to do just to protect the bears, and that's a difficult thing to do.

Thank you. And very last question. Where do temporary and portable food vendors, food trucks, dispose of their traction? Is that a weak point in the system?

I do not know the answer to that. We'd have to ask Trent. They have to have disposal programs already built in for their waste, their water, their trash, all those kinds of fun things. Mama Pierogi's down there. They use the compactors, and they're very good about it. I have seen them. They open them, they put them in, and they close them. I love cameras.

Thanks very much.

Appreciate it. Thank you, Mayor Pro Temselinski. Thanks.

So just brief. Um, first of all, I think that I know that you just said that they ripped the metal lid off, but I do think that we should probably just not allow plastic top dumpsters in town anymore. I think that that is like, yeah, that could be a code change. And then the other thing is, I think, I'm wondering how impactful education would be. For instance, I rinse out all my cans before they go in the recycling. I compost, so I don't put a lot of super smelly trash in my trash. And luckily, we don't make a lot of trash, so my lid is always fully clothed. There are some things that we can do, I think, to make all of this function. We have a lot like Bree is amazing with getting information out. I think right now, everybody, the bears in the front of our mind, I think it's an opportunity to capture an audience that's paying attention. and give them some really clearly identified best practices so that we don't have people doing so many things wrong, either out of ignorance or laziness, but then there's kind of a community shame factor, right? Like some peer pressure to do the right thing and not be part of the greater problem. And so-

I think she can tell you about it. I think she has an editorial that she's been working on to try to get out to the public to have part of this conversation at minimum. We have asked Mountain Ways what it would take to go around instead of doing the yellow tags that we do, but hit every single residential can in the spring with a can with a bare information on it so that it's right in front of you when you do that. And we can hit the commercial businesses fairly easy. There's not that many of them. There's not There's 4,000 residents and there's 400 commercial tech businesses. So they're a little easier to get a hold of. And we're going to be talking to 70 of them because the restaurants are going into this compost conversation. So, you know, we can definitely get the word out there. I think the easiest way for residents is to stick something on the top of the can. It's yellow and they have to read it.

How impactful was when we first started the single hauler and we had the recycling and then there was like a list of things that you cannot put in that recycling? Like I know my husband was putting every night I printed it and I put it on the refrigerator and like, I'm assuming I know for my trash, it's gotten better. Has that been impactful through the community? Or is it still been a problem getting non compliant stuff in our recycling?

I have to talk to Stacy to see how many fines we've issued in the last six months. I don't remember it being very high. And the threshold for trash within it is pretty low. So I would have to actually sit down with Stacy and just see where that is at this moment.

So if we had something like that, like maybe in our multifamily units where people there is a higher turnover, we have something that's posted in their trash areas. um strs if there's something that had to be posted up you know kind of with the licensing and things like that there may be a way that we can do a better job of communicating our community standards cool thank you counselor the yellow tags is kind of where i was

I'm going to tee up this question or this series of questions. Is the yellow tagging, is that still, is that an ongoing process? Yes. To expand that to create other tags right because so so my mindset initially goes to, we need to find. This this needs to be more of a fine driven, this is a, this is a resident landlord apartment manager responsibility and the town can only do so much and. And you leave that compactor open, you need fined. You put out your trash before 7 AM, and you need fined. Everywhere else I've lived, you were fined. And side note, Jersey City, it's not a fine. You go to court. And then you have to talk to somebody. They have, it was like the first Monday of every month was trash court. It was, it was ridiculous, but it was effective. Uh, I speak from experience having to have to go to trash court. Um, and, and so I'm just, you know, if we were to go down this path of, of the, you know, these mechanisms, these processes in these permissions, PB, Harmon Zuckerman, I'm going to guess that that looks like something like a a a moderate, you know, an updated contract with waste management. some process, either waste management's responsibility or a town responsibility, code enforcement, or what have you to go out and do the inspections and to have the authority to place these stickers, levy these fines, whatever that process is, as well as some resolution around find schedules, e-schedules. Am I missing any decisions in there that we would need in order to fully actuate this thing?

Can I make two clarification, one suggestion? Yeah. One, it's mountain waste recycling is our, I don't want to insult.

As I said that, I was like, yeah, it's mountain waste recycling.

They're doing a good job of this thing. One, we already find people with the gel attacks.

That's to be overstuffed though, right?

Or is it... There's multiple fines. There's recycling fines. There's overstuffing fines. There's all kinds of different fines that are levied against those people with the yellow tag. So my question to legal would be is... Can that be expanded beyond just the cash cans?

What it takes to expand the infractions.

What would occur with that is the person who is doing the review of all of the cans prior to them being picked up, they basically get in front of the truck and they're six blocks ahead kind of thing, but may need 12 blocks ahead to stay ahead of it. But it may take them a little bit longer. They could just build that into the contract. 12 extra hours a month or something to that effect.

And maybe we're super generous in the first times of warning or it's a fine along with some information all slapped onto that, onto the top of the thing.

I like slapping the information on the top of the thing, early, late winter, early spring to remind people the bears will be coming back out again. We dealt with this last year. If you remember this conversation, these are all the things that you can do to accommodate not having bear issues in the near future.

as they wake back up because they have been trained to come into town at this point some of them so they're going to come right back here hopefully not and it's just so often that they get in that trash one time and they're lost they become a lost creature you know because of the habit and the taste and it's like you know you just there's so little room for for error here there's so there's so little time for war you know warnings to be effective all things that it

Carl can weigh in at a different point, you know, and we can have conversation with Mountain Waste and Recycling. They're happy to put tags on. They're happy to do what we would like them to do per the contract. We would have to rectify the contract at that point and add things to it. Yep. Which will probably be if you want to do these wildlife containers, which we're going to talk about in two weeks. We would have to adjust the contract anyhow at that point. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean that's just i'm speaking aloud. It's where my head is at the moment, and that I was just curious as to what it would take to get from here to there. If we were to make something like that happen. Thanks.

Okay, thank you, Council town.

So the the other the other side to that, because I just I had a conversation with somebody when I was parked over at City Market today, and I've been an abuser of this situation. But I've also lived downtown where, if you've got a People come and just pile trash in your backyard in the alley. I've had people dump five gallon buckets of oil and just set them in the back for me to deal with. And commercial, anything where you've got a dumpster, people coming and using it, it seems a little, especially in a year like this, tough to find people. for something that they've got no control over whatsoever. I mean, yeah, you see there's two sides to that argument. I'm not here with a solution. I don't know which is the right way, but I think you got to look at both pieces of that.

That was my defense at trash court, by the way.

Did it work? And it doesn't, but I used to live next to a fourplex, and they had a full-on dumpster out back, and people came in all the time, and I'd see other people from, you know, that's not the car that lives here, just dumping their trash. So I don't know the answer. I don't think there's going to be an easy answer, but I think, like Steve said, we maybe need to look at this in a way that this is kind of an unusual year as well in our other things.

Okay, thank you. Any other questions? Well, I do believe that in two weeks when we talk numbers and possibilities that we should allow a little extra time to go through many scenarios. Like Council Townsend just said, I don't think it's right that you find somebody that does everything right, but the bear just outsmarts us. And on the other hand, if you have a double stacker, yeah, that's a problem. So I think we need some time to discuss all this and have possible paths forward in all different directions.

Councilor Townsend is 100% correct. We have that problem where people overstuff their trash can. Like when I left it this morning, it was perfectly fine. If you're going to do that, take your receipts out of your trash. Really easy to pull it off, open it up, and figure out who put the trash in.

Well, you could also take a photo of your trash and say I did everything right. You can, and then you can put stuff in later. I don't know. I know that I, yeah.

The trash trucks are extremely smart nowadays. They have seven or nine cameras on them. They're not AI driven. So when they drive by, they see everything that's going on with the truck internal to the truck in front of the truck and with the can. So if you say, you know, you left it one way and it was another way, they can actually see that on the camera prior without you even have to see if it's, but it's, he said, he said, she said, okay.

Yeah. I just think we should have plenty of time in that work session to talk about a whole bunch of stuff.

Is that where we're going?

We're going to public input. Thanks, Matt. Thanks, Becca. All right, let's see. Let's go down the list. Let me go down the list first, and then I'll call on the people that are not on my list. So Mike Henry, please. State your name. Are you living city limits or not?

Councilman, council lady. Mike Henry, Blake Street. Lived in Glenwood area for about 40 years. I've been in town for 30 of those. I've watched the bear population and management problem evolve. And we're a bunch of humans reacting to a wildlife problem. And there's very few things that are less manageable than that. So what I'm asking for is for city council, and speaking as a small businessman, to team up with the business community. and the residents rather than fine. Because not that a fine is not appropriate at times, but you heard a wildlife officer talk about it. I think if you even talk to our police force who's enforcing this, they'll tell you that you're holding people accountable business owners, citizens that are, the vast majority are doing everything right. You know that when a problem occurs, it's mostly a small amount of people that are doing it. There is absolutely no way as a property manager to surveil a situation and hold a 25 unit apartment complex accountable. So when that ticket is written, whether it's piled up after the fact or overfilled or the bear, the most likely problem that's happening now from what I can see, and we manage quite a few units, is that these bears have superhuman strength. There's not a container out there that's going to stop them from getting in it. So when that happens, what's happening is the citations are being given to the human beings, mostly who are doing their job. And so that really is an assault on the business community. And as councilmen and business people, we need to figure out a way to team up And do our best for this. Because guess what? There are certain biologists, and I was going to ask the officer because I know she's working on a degree in this. There are certain biologists that wonder how long the hibernation is going to be this year. Because we know they'll go in late because they're starving. And they don't have a time clock when their biological clock tells them to wake up. We don't, and this is an unprecedented drought, so we have a series of circumstances coming together. But unfortunately, what I see from our perspective, and there's quite a few more that I think that will show up from the business perspective, is that the businesses are being levied fines for a problem that is uncontrollable. The mechanisms don't work. The systems don't work. And so we just have to get together and figure out a system and get together. Bridges, not walls.

So thank you. Appreciate that. Thank you. Scott Hemmon, please.

Hi, I'm Scott Hemmon. Live in Glenwood downtown. Been here since 96. Into the microphone. Thank you.

Perfect.

Did you get it? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, a lot of great points made out here tonight. I remember, it seems like 10 years ago, it might be longer, less, when we first had the locking bear cans come in and we're clients of the current trash provider and we went out and bought the new $400 bear can and they're very substantial. They have good rims around them and all. And the city saw in their wisdom to... dictate who we were going to get our service from, which was the same service company I had, and what garbage cans we would use. And they quit picking up our big garbage can with the nice protective rim on it and gave us this crappy city can, which you hear being beat in the alley upside down every night. You go out, you look out down the alley, there's four garbage cans upside down because they know when you beat plastic garbage cans on the bottom, they fail. So we had one fail on us. It didn't lock really well. I was like, I knew that could be an issue. And so we called the city. We got the fine. We called the city, said, hey, please bring us another garbage can. They're super responsive. put a bag of garbage in it. The day it got there, the very next morning, they had pounded that brand new garbage can until it was open in the alley again. So now I have the old garbage can with the metal rim around it sitting out in the alley, hoping that they'll pick that up because I can't afford $200 fines. And so I find it extremely frustrating that the city has foisted this program on us. We're basically the victims and you're fining us for it, which in my mind's eye is ridiculous. The bears, as we've already discussed, are super stressed. They're not going to make it. When they go into hyperphasia, there's going to be bad contact with people. And we don't need a bear court like you had out east. The state owns the bears. You guys are in charge of the public safety. You need to get rid of the bears. Just get rid of them. In town, you say, oh, they've been here forever. You know, if you got bears in Denver, they're going to get rid of the bears. We're in a town. This town's been here. We just celebrated the bell. It's a hundred and some years old. Control the bears in town. You guys are public safety. The state owns the bears. We're the victims. Thank you for your time. All right. Thank you very much.

Terry Gelino. Please state your name and whether you live in city limits or not.

My name is Terry Gelino, and I live on Bennett Street, 714 Bennett. I've been here for 25, 26 years, and the bear weren't a problem. I had one bear in my yard maybe twice. 25 years ago and the last five years have been interesting. I love that we have just one company going through town. I had six garbage trucks every week going past my little rental unit that I built in my backyard. I choose, I truly believe If you're a roofer, you got to be smarter than the rain. And if you have to deal with bear every day, you got to be smarter than the bear. I have a tenant and we had some trash issues because the bear would beat the can until it opened it. And I basically explained to him, you got to keep your stinky trash in a bag. at your sink and you can put it in my basement and on trash day we bring it out if you've got super stinky trash put it rinse it out put it in your freezer Add it to the trash on trash day. It just, to me, it seems like a simple solution. The bear can smell food from six miles away. They say if you have an M&M in your pocket, they can smell it from a mile away. If you're putting all your stinky trash into your trash can, if I was starving, I'd probably beat on the trash can too. There is a solution here. It's education. I know that a lot of my neighbors, I have eight trash cans open this morning, up and down my alley on Bennett. There's no fine from what I understand on a Thursday morning. So everybody puts their trash out now on a Wednesday night. I don't know if that's true. I've just heard it through the grapevine. I've never seen it that bad. This morning was the worst. That's how I met Becca. She's amazing. She has amazing information. I didn't know that I could use hornet spray. I'm unusual in that I'm not afraid of bear. I work in my garden and if I have a hose in my hand, I can spray them and they go away. If I don't, I usually have a pitchfork nearby and I yell and run after them. But she told me to use hornet spray, which I always have. She said, don't use bear spray because I only have 25 by 100 feet and I've got two buildings on it. And so if a bear runs through my yard, which they do every couple hours, three hours. Anyway, thank you for listening. Thank you for being here. But I believe that we can live with them.

We'll figure it out. Awesome. Thank you. Al Sieber. Please state your name. You have to. Yeah, you have to. Sorry. You're being recorded. Please state your name and where you live in City Limit one more time.

My name is Al Seaver, 714 Bennett. The reason that I'm up here a second time is I wanted to commend this lady in the door this morning. Shortly after 7 or a little before, she was out in the alley. Terry went out with her trash, actually to water the plants back there. And this lady was out there taking care of business. She came up to us, and she explained what was going on, why she was there, and gave us an overview that we had never had before. information seems to be pretty good when it comes from somebody that knows what she's talking about. So I wanted to say thank you to her specifically and the city council. I wanted them to know that she's a good person. She takes time to talk with us, not at us. We appreciate her. Thank you for your time.

Thank you very much for that comment. Daniela Cole, please. Please state your name and whether you live in city limits or not.

Hi, everybody. Daniela Cole, Roaring Folk Valley Bear Coalition. I live in Carbondale, in Garfield County, though. But because I have the Bear Coalition, I wanted to talk to you about something that I believe is becoming a serious public safety risk. It's the continued use of non-bear resistant dumpsters and dumpster enclosures in prime black bear habitat. Most places I see have aesthetic dumpster enclosures. They look all pretty with plastic lidded dumpsters and no bars. These dumpsters are not bear resistant and in prime black bear habitat, this should never be allowed. And I'm specifically talking about the Meadows, which is a new development, a new condominium place where they just, I think they opened in 25. The residents started reaching out to me in June, which I reported. I didn't have at the time any videos of any bears. But in August 26 and August 27, I got supported video, I mean photos I sent you and videos of the meadows at Flat Top View. And I also spoke to those people. And I did not understand why we would have a new development like this. Why would they have something that has open dumpsters with a plastic lid, not even a bar? And then giving these bears continued access to these food rewards makes them even bolder, more aggressive and food conditioned, as we all know. They're no longer wary of humans. It also creates generations of food conditioned urbanized bears. And what's happening now is probably not going to go away. It's going to get worse, the weather. climate so this increases the risk of dangerous human bear encounters and is why i believe needs to be addressed proactively before serious incidents occur and i'm really hopeful that city council and planning and zoning will change language in an existing ordinance or create an ordinance mandating bear resistant trash infrastructure for both existing and new homes or developments Recycling also is becoming an issue and has been for several years. And also, ideally, dumpsters should be housed, most dumpsters. And I've seen them. I've seen them up valley and also down valley. They're housed in concrete steel, I mean, concrete buildings and also steel enclosures with secure metal doors to prevent bears from tipping them over and gaining access to the contents. That's just... What i'm trying to tell you and there's like. there's so many places out there that actually especially up valley they've dealt with this for a long time and they're getting to the point where they it's all you can only do like. Concrete enclosures and with metal doors. And some of them I've seen recently on a patrol that I went, they even have it enforced with metal wiring.

But then again, if somebody doesn't want to close that door or lock it, they're at the same place here.

It's really education and also like individual trash cans, you have to rinse them out and clean them.

All right. Thank you for being here. Thank you for your comments. So that concludes my list, but I see many other faces here. Anybody else would like to come forward?

Please come to the microphone.

State your name and whether you live in city limits or not.

Suzanne Henry Blake Avenue. Thank you. I manage about 600 doors in the area for a property management company that I own. We have done everything right. We have bars, we have metal lids, we have locks, and they are still getting in. And the minute they get in, we have the Glenwood Police Department at our door issuing us a $1,000 ticket. So when the locks aren't big enough, we get a bigger lock and they still get in, we get a $2,000 ticket. So in my opinion, it feels like a target. We're small business owners. We're doing the best we can. We're being penalized and punished, monetarily punished. So I don't know what else to do. I mean, I don't know what else you can do to keep these bears out. We've done everything we can. And they just keep showing up with these $1,000 tickets. But Mountain Waste is here. He didn't sign up, but he wants to talk to you because he's been an advocate trying to help us out, which doesn't matter. So if you want to talk to him, too.

Thank you. Who else is here? Please come forward. Please state your name and whether you live in city limits or not.

So I'm Nick Blanton with Mountain Waste and Recycling, district manager. So I know the bear problem is an issue. We've been fighting right now trying to get equipment in from our vendors to get the bear proof containers. Right now we're working with Aspen as well on the 96 gallon bear proof that are certified. It's just bears are going to get in these cans. It's hard. I know they say that their certification, that it's grizzly proof, right? But it bears a bear. It's going to figure it out. It's going to get in there. The biggest thing is whatever we have to do as the trash provider, whatever the city needs, we're here to support and try to fix things. because obviously a lot of people are suffering right now with fines. We're hearing about those. I know right now we're still waiting on inventory to do replacements for customers. It's tough right now. It's like everybody's ordering all these bear-proof containers, and we got our orders in, and now we're on a waiting game to get these in to get our customers switched out and manpower. I mean, the manpower right now is we're bringing people in next week to help kind of switch out some stuff that we've got in. um we just yeah from another site right um so we're just we're trying to do our best to help out the city the customers as well um you know we you know we we definitely uh value this the city um and what you guys need from us we're willing to help out in any way shape so yeah that's all i got all right thank you thanks for that anybody else please come forward state your name and whether you live in city limits or not

My name is Jeff Carlson. I live in City Limits, just a few blocks away on Colorado Avenue. Thank you. My wife, Kristen, wanted to be here tonight, but had a prior commitment. So these are her words she asked me to share. Dear neighbors, we have grown deeply concerned about the public safety threat from bears. We know that conditions beyond our control, such as weather changes and scarcity of food, are factors in the increased number of human-bear interactions this year. However, there are issues that we can and must address to improve safety for humans and bears. We need waste management services and strategies that implement proven methods to deter bears. Several years ago, our son's fourth grade class at Glenwood Springs Elementary fought for and won regulations that required all residents to purchase wildlife resistant trash cans and employed enforcement officers to find residents who did not comply. We understand that some neighbors find these measures onerous. But even though some people do speed, we continue to have speed limits because having them makes us safer even though some do not follow those. Why is trash management, which has become a public safety issue, treated any differently? It takes just one unsecured trash can or a dumpster in an alley to attract bears into our neighborhoods and yards. We understand that government services come with a price tag, and we are willing to pay our reasonable share to improve trash management in Glenwood Springs. What we don't want is a partial solution that's not enforced. Living in a high bear activity region, Sector 8 of Colorado, we believe it's imperative to require the use of heavy-duty, wildlife-resistant cans and or locked dumpsters with metal rather than plastic lids within city limits with no exceptions. The citizens of Glenwood are not code officers and cannot be alley monitors. Most of us have jobs and kids and busy lives. We need our city government to implement proven wildlife management strategies, offer concrete solutions to reduce close encounters and regulate compliance. As for the fees that sufficient trash management requires, we have already incurred significant property damage expenses, and property is the least of our concerns. Hungry, acclimated bears are a danger to themselves, our pets, and humans. Children, teenagers, elderly people, parents with babies and strollers walk through our neighborhoods. Please don't wait for a tragedy to act. Our tourist town will not prosper if we don't more diligently mitigate wildlife encounters. We are your neighbors and we need your leadership to be good neighbors to all the residents of our town and to the bears that endanger themselves to access our unsecured food sources. Thank you for your time and leadership.

Thank you for being here. Thank you. Anybody else? Here about bears? No. All right. We'll wrap up the bears. Um, yeah, let's see anybody online. No, see none. Back to us for questions, possible comments. We'll start with Mayor Pro Tem Salinski, please.

So yeah, I mostly just have comments. So I think that we should look at code changing for the dumpsters. I just think that it's just silly for us to install plastic lidded dumpsters. And I agree with the commenter from Danielle that for multifamily, we should have an enclosure. I don't know from the trash hauler how like onerous that is to get in there and get a dumpster.

depending on the dimension of the enclosure. So like we have specs. Please come forward, sorry.

Sorry, do you mind? Thank you.

Yeah, just depending on dimensions of the enclosures, we have specs that we have on our containers. As long as they meet our specs, we should be able to get them in and out, depending on the size. Some of them have wheels, some don't, depending on where the location's at and how safely we can get them.

Okay, because I've got a condo down in Newcastle in Riverview or River Park, and it's in a regular, it looks like a garage. It's like fully enclosed in there, and I have to assume that that's probably like best practice.

Yeah, I mean, we have containers that we can roll out. Our drivers have plenty of different options when it comes to picking up the trash, right? We have front loads that have containers. We have rear loads that have wheels on them as well. So we have options for sure.

Okay. So you know i'm just sitting here listening, and I think that you know the recurring theme that I've heard is education, which I think we're on. I think we need to be recognizing that we need to you know have some changes so we probably need to look at what that looks like and then work with our business community know that it's going to take some improvements, you know, maybe down the road. The state will have some grants for infrastructure improvement, you know, kind of like maybe the city can come up with some sort of a program where we have, you know, kind of like the facade grant improvement to try and make our downtown prettier.

Can I add something real quick? Yeah. We already have a grant for enclosures. We do. Yeah.

Fantastic.

So it's $750 per household, up to $2,500 for commercial and multifamily residential businesses. We just got the money from CPW, I think it was.

Fantastic.

Maybe a couple of months ago we found out about it. So we've got that being rolled out at this moment. But it should help with residential issues. We also need to talk about how much we're going to enforce trash cans in alleyways. They're not allowed to be in the right of way. So I'm OK with going down the alleyway and throwing the cans back over people's fences, if you would like us to, and see if that's effective. Because when the bear is in your yard versus the alleyway, you pay a little bit more attention. That is also a code thing that's already there, and we can find people for that. How hard do you want to do this?

So in the interest, as I'm going to continue to comment, I am... a gentler enforcer. I'm more of like a middle of the road person. So, you know, I know that there are people out there who are doing everything right that feel like they're being unfairly penalized. I would like to work with those people. I love that we have this grant program or this, you know, I think that's exactly what I was hoping for. And then those who are just like defiantly not complying, I think they should get the dumpster or the can in their backyard. But I don't think we should start there.

So I didn't get to say this earlier because unfortunately my phone rang. There have been two different studies in the past 10 years out of Aspen. Aspen has some of the most atrociously strict trash codes in the entire state. Other municipalities in the area have taken that and softened it and implemented it for their own at varying levels of effectiveness. But the studies that we've worked cooperatively with the city of Aspen to do Education has no impact on human behavior change. Zero.

Not surprised here.

Unless there is actual punishment involved or an actual personal effect to them, they do not care. They went and knocked on 240 different homes. to try to deal with a residential trash problem in Aspen. And they did door to door education for three straight weeks. And do you know how many less trash violations they had? I'm going to get zero. Do you know how many trash violations that they reduced by after implementing a strict fine structure for that same neighborhood? They had a 45% reduction in trash violations. And these are all considered high risk very tight townhome neighborhoods. Yeah.

So to your point, Sometimes you do things not because it's going to work. That's why I do bear wear tape. And so we start with education so that we can say we did our part. And then when we come down hard, we can say, but we told you. So this is how this has to go. But I am of the mind that this process we can do because we just heard two different voices in the same room saying, bigger fines, we're being unfairly fined. And so no one's going to see things differently. the same way. You know, no group of people is all going to see the same way.

I'm saying that I think we need to fix the municipal code to actually address the violations.

But that will take a minute, so let's start with the things that we can do right away. That's my opinion.

Okay, thank you. Councillor Smith, please.

Thank you. Becky, I think this question is probably for you. Becca, sorry. We talked a lot about trash because it's visible, because it's very appealing. It's what they want. What about other conflicts, other intrusions into houses, either currently parallel to the trash invasions? Or if we were just able to solve the trash problem, would they start turning to our back doors? And what anticipation do we need on that?

You say back doors, like people don't leave their screen doors open and then leave their homes unattended for hours during the day. I understand we live in the mountains and I understand most of us don't have air conditioning. I don't have air conditioning. But the most frequent home intrusions that we see in my entire team, so I am part of what someone referenced as sector eight, we're area eight. So we have over the past 20 years had one third of the total bear conflict of the entire state in our three county area. Every year, my team has one third of the entire state's bear conflict. That's Aspen, Vail, Glenwood Springs. Those are our three big municipalities. People do not lock their cars. People do not close their windows. People leave their screen doors open or have paddle handles on external doors to their homes and do not lock their doors. Most frequently, home entries are occurring because bears are opportunistically finding the way to somebody's back screen door, pushing in the screen door while they're not home, and then eating all the food in their kitchen, and then going, oh, all these really cool boxes that people walk into have food inside. And unfortunately, then that becomes a pattern of behavior because as we've seen with the bear-resistant cans, once they've figured out that they can get a food reward from something, they continue to replicate that behavior ad nauseum until I get to show up with a very fancy box and give them a free ride someplace else. Unfortunately, home entries while people are home is a human health and safety concern and we do have to remove those bears because we don't ever want somebody to walk into their kitchen and come nose to nose with a bear. That's a dangerous encounter. That's why intervening at the people have food or coming into town to find that food at the trash level, at the protecting your backyard pets. So chickens, ducks need to have hot wires. That's something we tell everybody we contact out here. If you have backyard poultry, you have to have a hot wire around it. So that's an electric fence for those that aren't familiar with that colloquialism. And then fruit bearing trees are generally one of the other massive attractants in town for bears. as everybody can attest, there's practically no fruit on any of those fruit bearing trees in town either this year. So last year when I was telling people, hey, I'm just glad they're not in your trash. Sorry, they're destroying your apple tree. This year I can go, sorry, your apple tree's dead from last year. They're just going to keep getting in your trash because I don't want to put hands on a bear that I don't have to. If it's doing nuisance behavior and there's something we can do to prevent them from getting to the level where they're habituated that severely that they're starting to look at our back doors and our windows, we try to intervene at the trash level. And that's why we're asking you guys to work with us.

So trash really is the front line at the moment, even though kitchens also are a problem.

Well, so trash is the stinkiest thing we put out there, right? And so if they're coming up and investigating the stinky smell right outside our house, which is our dumpster, they're naturally going to keep sniffing around, and then eventually find their way to our windows or our kitchen if we're cooking with our windows open at night. All of that is a scent attractant for bears. As somebody else said, the M&M in the pocket thing is not necessarily true, but they do have a sense of smell almost 80 times stronger than a bloodhound. All bears, regardless of species, have ridiculously strong senses of smell. The scent of trash is an attractant in and of itself. The trash itself is then the food reward to pair with the attractant, and then them coming back through the trash, which they know is a food source right now, unfortunately, is then driving them to spend more time in our neighborhoods and around our homes, which is then leading to them to investigate our back doors, our patios, our grills, our chicken coops, and then it just continues to spiral, which is why early intervention is the massive part.

Perfect. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Councilor Small.

I appreciate everyone thinking that City Council can fix the problem. As you appreciated from Rachel who came to us with the parking problem and we fixed it with striping that made it worse. Similarly, these bears don't care about any of our rules or customs until they learn them. And if you think Becca or you think our code enforcement, people are going to be out in the alleys enforcing all of that stuff by choice, because that's what we told them to do. They're not going to be in all the places they need to be, even if they did their very best. So I encourage citizens to educate their neighbors. I encourage citizens to do their part to make sure that we're not exacerbating the problem. We'll do what we can to deal with it, with enclosures and cans and specifications and codes, and we'll try to do what we can to help alleviate this problem. But we've now got probably three generations of bears that know about how all of this trash system works. Two? More than three?

So just as a fun fact for everybody, bears learn 80% of their foraging behavior in their first year of life from their mom. So all of those cute little cubs we're seeing in town right now that you see previous years, in town in the trash all the time that is the only way they know how to eat on the landscape so when they're cute and adorable this year when they're cute this year i have to go out and set a trap for them and take them someplace else or remove them next year because they're no longer that cute little 25 pound cub running around they're 100 plus pound bear young adult bear that's actually a true danger to people just because they don't know better

We've also got a whole lot of rentals. We've also got a whole lot of people who come here from places that don't know anything about bears and property owners that don't educate their tenants about what the bears are going to do. So no one thing is going to fix this problem entirely. And even if we did everything 100% right, right now, this year, We've still got two generations of bears that are going to have to be retrained. So it's going to be a process, folks, and it's going to get worse before it gets better. Let's work together and all of us do our part.

Thank you. Councillor Townsley, please.

Just one thing, since we've had somebody here, really appreciate you coming from waste management. Mountain waste, I don't know.

Sorry. You know who you are.

You guys do a good job. The other thing, and I would encourage staff, as we look at this, if we are going to do fines and whatnot, but if we've got, like having a dumpster with a plastic lid, obviously, from listening to everybody tonight, it makes no sense. But if you can't replace it with anything right now, Let's let's at least hold off on the fines until we do have it, because you're telling me that essentially, which makes total sense. Everybody's asking for the same product right now and you don't have the product as much as you'd love to give it to us. You can't give it to us.

Right. Yeah. So, I mean, as as business owners, we're getting calls every day. I'm going to get switched out with with with. metal lids, bear proof. Um, it's just, it's tough right now. The market is high right now because of bears. Um, everybody's ordering, um, every waste hauling site is, is looking at it. Right. I'm, I'm a small town, Kansas guy. It's never seen a bear in his life. So, you know, this is new to me too. And I'm like, we got to fix this. Right. Um, but yeah, it's, it's definitely something like, you know, as the business owner, I mean, they're, they're doing what they're supposed to, uh, if they're calling in and doing that, I mean, that's, that's, they're, they're doing that at least their part on that side of it. But, uh, But yeah, it's just for us, we're inventory-wise, we're ordering, we're waiting on shipments. It's just, it's tough right now. We're still waiting on Aston shipment for their 96 bear-proof cans that are Grizzly certified.

And I think Ray's got the, you know, it's not going to, it's just not going to get fixed. It's like, you know, we're not going to fix inflation in our town and houses are going to keep getting more expensive. Bears are, you know, especially right now, between now and when they do hire an aide or whatever they're going to do this year, it's just... I don't think the problem is going to go away. I think Mike had a really good point. Let's just work together at trying to mitigate it the best we can, get people on the right path. If we're going to change things out, let's get it changed out. Let's get on that path and get there. In the meantime, let's not beat up on each other because we are all members of the same community here until we get it done. But, you know, it's like to think that this problem is going to go away between now and when it starts snowing hard. It's just not going to happen. I think he's right. Let's work together. Let's get a solution in place that's the best we can do. And it's still not going to solve the problem. I mean, I want to watch Matt toss in the cans over the back of the fences. I think that'd be cool.

That's for a time Saturday.

Well, the only guy here that could do it. It would be fun. But I would just encourage us all, no matter where you stand on the problem, to realize that there's no answer to the problem. We just can try to do the best we can do and work together on it. keep us appraised that, you know, could you put us on top of the list or something?

I'm doing right now. You got, I know you are, man. There's so many cities that are calling. Hey, I mean, we got Newcastle, Sill, all these other towns up towards Aspen. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's crazy to see that this is what's happened, right? I mean, it's my first year here. I started a year in April, took over this district and never seen a bear in his life. So it's, it's something else. Yeah. Yeah.

Thank you. Mayor Pro Temselinski.

Sorry, one more thing. So on that video that you referenced about the bear that flipped to the dumpster, there was a comment on there by a gentleman in town that has the skill to solder something together or weld something together to do like a retrofit for a lid. Is there any measure of that that's acceptable if somebody in the community is industrious and a little bit entrepreneurial that wants to retrofit, a shoddy plastic lid with some metal, corrugated metal that they purchase and put the bar over? Or is that something that would be deemed destroying your property?

It would be destroying our property only because is the way that these are designed, right? So whether they're front load, rear load, how they dump, there may be an issue where we can't dump the can. At that point, now we have to scrap that can and get a new can out there. And if we're doing that, it's going to be definitely costly.

Got it. That's why I asked. Thank you. I would love that.

All right, thank you. Any other questions or comments? Okay, we'll see none. I got a quick question for Becca. Do you have a good count on how many bears we have coming in and out of town?

On a given day in a specific area?

I'm sure you know all of them by name.

So how many? Just as an example, if we all face this way, so between the fork and that hillside on average... thursday um because it's trash day um i can and i wish i was joking this has turned into a game with my mother on the phone how long does it take me to find a bear i can usually find a bear from any place in town within seven minutes um on average between the river and the hillside just in this grand avenue corridor I'm averaging between three and six calls a day of bear sightings. Is that all the bears in town? Absolutely not. Mostly because people do not want to call me because they think I'm going to do bad things to them. Honestly, it's just helping me keep track of where they're at. Because I also am keeping track of, on the other side of the river, over on the Midland corridor, I have four different sows with babies. So I have four different mamas that are not getting into trash and have young in tow. Two of them are not in the best body condition, but I need to know where they're at and what they're doing because I'm trying to make sure that they're doing okay and that they're not getting into trouble and their babies are okay. That I have a regular rotation on. I also have two of the biggest male bears I've ever seen that have come up over the hill from the dump and are hanging out over in the Midland corridor now. Down in Carbid, I have between four and six bears depending on the day. North of town, I have a handful of young ones that are running around. So it could be between two and four depending on the day of the week and if it's rained recently. And then West Glenwood is its own problem. But it varies dependent on the temperature, if they're coming through to get water, how they're interacting with each other. And I want to say on average, there's about 16 bears a day in Glenwood just on a quiet day. Like on an average summer day right now, there's 16 bears in Glenwood.

Wow.

Thank you.

I knew you had an answer. Councilor Townsend.

You mentioned something to somebody about hornet spray. Is there anything that we should know about that?

This is more of a question. How many of you people own bear spray?

No.

How many own bear spray in this room? How many people own bear spray? Okay. How many of you have ever practiced with it? yeah okay so uh in the woods is the perfect place to do that um bear spray in some of our very close confined housing especially our older stuff that is there the houses are smaller narrower lots and likely do not have air conditioning if you deploy that in between your house and your neighbors and your neighbor has their windows open guess where it's going In your neighbor's window. It can be dangerous for care and other pets just because we all live so close together here in town. It can be dangerous if we're not using it correctly or at least practicing to use it correctly.

Okay, thank you. You good, Dave? Yep.

All right. Council Weimer. Hey, Becca. I have a family member.

Yes.

Unincorporated Garfield County lately has been thinking slash talking about feeding the bears out away from all of the on a ranch, on a farm, out away from all the buildings, at least they'll have something to eat. My question for you, just how bad of an idea is that?

So, okay, so remember that fun fact I told everybody earlier. Bears learn 80% of their foraging behavior in their first year of life, okay? They learn how to use habitat as well in their first year of life. We in Colorado have not baited bears in a very long time. It was outlawed in the 90s. States that do bait bears have been conducting some really phenomenal bear behavior studies in regards to remote feeding. The most recent one was released at the International, or not the International Bear Conference, the Western Association of Wildlife Agencies Black Bear Workshop two years ago. Bears that get a food reward, even in a remote location, no matter how natural, and I say natural because human grade food, human grade fruit is not natural food for bears. I need to reiterate that ad nauseum because people don't seem to understand that. If they get a food reward at a location, they will come back. because they make a map in their brain of where they get food on the landscape, because that's how natural order works for wild animals. If they get a food reward there again, they will start almost doubling the time they spend in that location until the food resource is exhausted in that area, or until the next season it's available. Even if you remove that food source from the landscape after one year, after five years, the bear will still come back to that exact location where the food had been previously and spend up to 10 minutes, even with no food present, just walking around that area where that food had been previously. Everybody talks about, oh, well, if you put enough food out, it'll be like catmine with the fish run, like when the salmon are swimming upstream.

Right.

Those bears still fight and kill each other actively. You are then condensing the problem. And I also want to say that seeing the bears during the day, bears aren't nocturnal. Bears are nocturnal in town as an avoidance strategy to avoid us generally. The reason we're seeing so many sows with cubs in town during the day is because the males are also hungry. The males generally come out at night. They will also eat the young. It is an avoidance strategy. nature is not a pretty thing, and condensing large populations of bears in those areas, the already heightened amount of injuries we're seeing on bears in and around town because of territory disputes, because they should not be this packed into town, are only going to get worse and result in more bears being injured or dead. And then it also will teach them that they need to go up and walk around whatever random ranch we're throwing fruit on this year and continue wasting their energy to walk over there at least once per day for the next potentially 10 years to see if that food source is still by chance there. It is a very bandaid on a bullet hole kind of effect. It makes everybody feel good, but it really just makes it so much worse long-term.

I'll pass that along.

Everybody's asking. Name and name.

All right. Let's do final round of questions here. If I see nothing, I see nothing, then I thank you all for being here. Thank you all for being here. Thank you so much for all your comments. We will pick this back up with our trash discussion in two weeks and talk some more bears and what we can do and what we can't do. I know you will be. So please come back. All right. Thank you, guys. Thank you very much. Moving on to item 10.

For that work session, I was planning to be there just to let you guys know. And then I've helped work on municipal code refreshers for other municipalities. But I have to run today.

Okay. Thanks, Becca.

All right.

Thank you, guys. Thank you. Same here. We'll see you in two weeks, I assume. Item 10, Ordinance 2026-19, an ordinance of the City of Glenwood Springs, Colorado. Guys, can you go out and chat?

Hello.

Thank you. I want to wrap up. 2026-19, an ordinance of the City of Glenwood Springs, Colorado, approving the franchise agreement with Comcast of Colorado. Nine LX, LLC? Nine or IX? I don't know. It's probably nine.

Plus nine.

Yeah.

Carl, please. Thanks. Good evening, counsel. We should have been here with this agreement at least twice since the last one expired for a variety of reasons. A lot of changes at Comcast, a lot of changes in personnel. I'm going to start with what a franchise, this franchise agreement isn't. So in Colorado, you can't franchise telecommunications or data. So this is not talking about whether or not your Comcast internet works or not. It is talking about, for anybody who still has cable TV and dwindling numbers, it relates to cable TV and cable TV revenues when you think about the 5% franchise fee. The last time these types of issues were addressed were in the 1984-1988 Cable TV Act at the federal level. So that's kind of how far removed we are from what's really going on today, which is part of why I think you got an email from a vet that kind of listed out revenues and they keep declining. It's because nobody actually uses cable TV anymore. But what this does do from the standpoint, there is a revenue provision, about a 5% franchise fee for being in our rights of way. More importantly, what it does address is Matt's and his team's relationship with Comcast as they try to work through things like pull attachments, being in the right of way, who gets notified, who has to move things, things like that. That's the bulk of what these agreements are around. It used to be we'd have lengthy discussions about public educational and government channels, paid channels, how many there were, how much time we got, how much money they were contributing to them. Turns out we don't do any of that stuff anymore because we all just use Zoom or put it on YouTube or there's a lot of other ways that this all happens. So that's what it's not. So it's just this very limited five-year franchise related to cable TV services only. In our rights of way, 5% is the maximum you can charge in a franchise agreement by law. So that's why we're at 5%. We try to do these when we work in other communities. We always do any of these with cable at five years. It used to be historically franchise agreements were a minimum of 20 years. Sometimes they went up to 40 years. That's not the way it works anymore. especially in something that is is really disappearing so anyway that's what you have in front of you tonight um in the larger scheme of all of the things the city does it's a very small piece of revenue in a very dwindling market space so with that happy to answer any questions matt's here can talk through he and i have been working on this agreement for It was probably the first time it got picked up and we just kept having turnover. I am drawing a blank, unfortunately, on the latest Comcast rep. He is getting finally across the finish line on the corporate side. So that's why we're finally in front of you.

All right. Thank you. Let's see. Council questions to staff. Councilor Schmall.

Carl, I read in the agreement where this is this is. Supposedly only applies in one direction of information. The cable coming from through the cable into the house, right? That's what we're...

Right. If it is a TV channel in a conventional sense. If it is data coming into your house, it actually doesn't apply to it.

How do you know?

You don't. I mean, I'll be honest. In Comcast's defense, they've always been very good about, I think, doing a reasonably decent job of reporting what is actually revenue that relates to cable TV that is part of their bundle, along with phone and internet and all that kind of thing. The reality is this is not very much money. It never was that much money. I couldn't tell you. There's no way for us to know what's going in versus what is data going in and coming out.

We also get to audit periodically. When's the last time we audited Comcast?

I don't know. We haven't had an active agreement in probably 10 years. And before that, I can't remember us actually doing an audit. There may have been, I think more data used to be exchanged like in the early 2000s when this was a kind of a bigger deal. I think the last renewal that I was involved in was probably 2005 right before I left as in-house counsel.

Without annual reports, I mean, we don't have to do an audit. We can, by this agreement, ask for an annual report.

Yeah, absolutely.

Have we ever done that?

Don't know. There again, we haven't had an active agreement in probably 10 years, so we wouldn't technically have the ability to ask. We certainly can moving forward if you want to. Like I said, I.

And performance evaluations are also in here.

Yeah, I mean, they are there again. We absolutely can ask for that. Like I said, we haven't had an active agreement in a number of years. So moving forward, we believe in all of those things. We can certainly ask for them. This is one of those things where it's a non-exclusive franchise agreement, not that anybody else is knocking down the doors to provide cable TV in town. So we absolutely can ask for all of those things. I think that the reality for the customer base is, I don't know that it's going to change the customer's experience a lot to ask for those things, but we certainly can.

Matt, did you want to answer?

In 2023, when we started at the Star Station, whether it was Andy back then, I did ask for an audit just to see where the 3%, 4%, or 5% would have us fall. And he did give us information on how many people were receiving cable TV within the Glenwood Springs boundary area, basically. And he gave me the 3%, 4%, and 5%. So it was a minor version of an audit, but he did give us information on how many people. And he's less. So that's why he gave it to us at that point so we could kind of see what revenues might be coming in at that moment. But we expect it to continue to dwindle because of the Hulus and all the other cable channels that are out there that aren't technically cable TV anymore. It's just streaming services. They don't fall into this.

And it's down to... 46,000 last year is what we took in from this. So I guess ultimately my question is, why do we wanna renew this thing? What do we even care?

It has more to do with our relationship with them and our rights of way. Anytime that we have the ability to kind of manage how they or the gas companies are in our rights of way, we try to do that. Obviously there's some overlap between their types of facilities that are in our rights of way. whether it's cable TV or not and so I think we get the benefit of that because as you know in Colorado you can't franchise telecommunications and they actually have a right to just pretty much tell you they're gonna tear up your right-of-way and tear up your right-of-way so this gives us a little bit of that it doesn't you know it's not like we're gonna kick them out of our right-of-ways I don't think we would want to cut customers off and so actually entering into the agreement you know, to the extent there is a customer base here in Glenwood, to the extent that it allows us the ability to manage our rights-of-way, you know, that's really the purpose of the agreement.

Why don't we just write a new agreement that covers what we want and satisfies them?

Because it's kind of a term, it's kind of a, it's an agreement of art underneath the cable frame. This is that agreement. The franchise is that agreement that gets us those couple of things that we want.

That takes me back, though, to the verifying two-way. Because if we're going to have an agreement, we should enforce the agreement. And we're not going to have that with this because it is two-way. It's not coincidence that when my girlfriend shops for a dress on my computer, I start getting ads for dresses on my computer. It's two-way communication.

It is, and that we can't regulate. It's data. That's data. That's not cable TV. You didn't collect a channel.

It's affecting their revenue, and we're collecting their revenue.

No, but we can't ask for that piece of the revenue. We can only ask for a piece of the revenue related to cable TV where you collect a channel.

That's why we don't have a franchise agreement with Lumen. Right. Lumen is only data.com.

I totally recognize that there is no distinguishing between all of those things. If you can get Congress to provide an update to the case law. We would be in a much better position, but we can't get Congress to act on actual meaningful regulation in this particular space. So this is what Comcast and we are working with is a 1984 piece of legislation.

The agreement is good to have because they are required to move their stuff free of cost as long as we warn them in advance. And even if we don't warn them, they're very good at working with us. It's just like Black Hills. They have to move everything free of charge. If I need your gas line over there for this project, they do that for us. It's free of charge. If I go to Lumen and say, hey, I want to underground your line across Sayre Park, that costs me money. because they do not have a branch-based agreement and I do not have to do anything that they don't want to do if they have an existing cable in place. So it is nice to have these. I know the revenue is null, but at the end of the day, it's good to have the agreements because they're required to move stuff for us all.

And also give us, you know, there's a whole section on them when they do projects, how they notice, how they permit, all of those kinds. Those are good for us. And I would want to have those things anyway. Like I said, going back to like the underlying data versus cable. Yeah, it's just kind of a joke at this point. Yeah.

I hate participating in that sort of thing. Too late. I don't like sitting here. Too late.

I don't disagree, but it does have some benefits to us, Darren.

Counselor Smith, please. Thank you. Have we alerted the Historical Society that they should acquire a cable television while they still can?

That was such a dad joke, man.

Yeah, that was. But it is a highlight of the evening.

All right, Councilor Schachter. Are you ready for a motion, Mr. Mayor? Let me ask the public quick. Thanks, guys. Anybody from the public here online? Seeing none, close public portion. Bringing it back to Council. We're entertaining a motion in Ordinance 2016-19 in Ordinance of the City of Glenwood Springs, Colorado, approving the franchise agreement with Comcast of Colorado 9 LLC. Councilor Schachter, please.

Do I have to read that again since the mayor just read it? Yep. Yes, I do. All right. Of course. I move we approve ordinance 2026-19, an ordinance of the City of Glenwood Springs, Colorado, approving franchise agreement with Comcast of Colorado 9 LLC.

Thank you, Mayor Pro Tem. Second. I have a motion to approve in a second. Any more discussion? Seeing none, call for the question.

It passes 7-0.

All right. Thank you, Ryan. And that was our last action and or presentation for this evening. Moving into council comments. We'll start with Council Townsend. No, Council Small. Mayor Pro Temselinski. Excellent. Council Smith. Councilor Schachter. I wasn't ready for that one. Sorry.

I do have a peep. Microphone, please. Thank you. I do have a peep and we'll be asking counsel for a head nod if possible. This month's counselor article, thanks to Bree, is I did it and we're talking about the street tax and everything Matt and Ryan have accomplished and thanks to the taxpayers. Related to that, my wheels started turning and go, what else can we do to protect that work? And what I'm asking council to consider to ask Steve and Carl to come up with some suggested ordinances and rules for weight limits, particularly in our residential streets. It'll be different on my street. It's an artery or whatever. It'll be different on Grand, different on Midland, but we don't have significant weight limits and haul routes, and that might be a reasonable thing to begin to protect our investment and our infrastructure. So I'm just... There's a lot of information I sent to them. It's not relevant to us now. I'm just wondering if there's a head nod by two others to ask them to proceed with that and come back with a proposal.

Clarification. Weight limits as in a certain size of truck?

That's right. Put truck size limits. And there'll be all kinds of recommended tonnage. And there'll be rules for how do we let our trash haulers in, what happens to residential one-off, things like that. And there's common language to do that. But this would also help protect residential streets plus all the infrastructure that's going on right now. And we don't have it at this point.

How does, I mean, you're not in a rush for this. How does staff feel about staff time and throwing that into the mix?

I uh here's what I'd say is that I know um Councilor Schachner gave me a heads up that he had he had done a little bit of work on this um I think it's something we can put in the hopper to take a look at and start moving towards um coming back maybe at a work session you know a couple of months out to start having a conversation around that um it's not something that we're going to be able to to you know bang out before the next meeting take a minute yeah I'm asking it

Just if there's a head nod to put it in the hopper and they'll determine the timing and the language they bring back to us. I would nod my head. Just it's interesting. Vertical head nod? I don't care. That kind of head nod doesn't. Do you have something to add?

Yeah, wait, wait, wait, wait, don't.

Don't touch. There you go. I think that's a great idea, Sumner. Every street ought to be posted and it ought to have about 30 more laws on it that we can't enforce. That's what, because that's what government does is makes laws. We've done our job.

So is that a head nod?

No. No, I need two nods. Yeah, you need two. I have two.

I don't know. You got mine. That's one.

I'm interested to understand more.

Okay. Two. All right.

Let's do it. Sure. Okay. Timeline.

Yep.

Your rules. Thank you.

Thank you, Council. Three things. Say it with me. Schachter. Schachter.

No, he's not.

He's not William Schachter. Second, Gustad. That's Gustad. Say it again then. Gustad. Isn't that what I said? Gus that. He corrected me out at Reslenda the other week. Gus that. Thank you. Matt, you may be the guy for this, but I was in the line at the Jimmy John's a couple weeks ago. They're working on Coach Miller back before they wrapped up. Bunch of bags of mulch that they had bought to sort of do something with, right? Does... PB, Harmon Zuckerman, With that mulch. Is there. Can that come from the from the landfill. Instead, is there other rules or guidance or is it just totally up to them. The contractor where they get their mulch for these projects.

I don't know where Trent is.

You're the only one here.

We don't produce mulch, basically, at the landfill. They can go to any landscaping company and get it. We do compost.

We have topsoil.

Sometimes we have mulch, depending on which we're grinding up there. I don't think we have any right now. Can they get it? They're buying it with a collar and an inhibitor in it.

I was just thinking...

i guess i was just thinking we have mulch why aren't they buying you know why aren't they using the mulch but if we don't i guess if we don't i did not see a pile up there when i was up there yesterday okay i thought there was okay and just points one and two remain there but we're going to repeat it all night please thank you um a couple of things steve boyd please how is the uh committee for the confluence thing coming along

Good. I've been working with Jillian. I think we've got somebody from every one of our boards and commissions. Probably want to invite a couple of just interested residents. I think we're going to try to have a kind of a get-together meeting at the end of the month.

Did you invite the botanical people? Okay. So it's forming? Yeah. Okay. Excellent. And the other thing is, and I know I brought this up a little while ago, and I know it's not an easy task, but We still have issues, but we did a couple of things move forward with unhoused issues. We still have issues. We have issues on our trails. Dogs run rampant, whatever, bicyclists that are not respectful. Now we have bears. We have trash issues in our alleys. Is there any way we can talk about a range of program? I know it came up in the budget today to come out of whatever budget it was for that $75,000. We do have a revenue stream. from slowing down traffic, which is first thing to do. But we do have revenue stream and I consider Probably all three of them public safety issues. And I know we can probably tap into that at some point. I don't know what this program looks like. And I think I put it on my list for the workshops. I don't know if I need support from you guys. But I would really, really love to get some sort of, at least let's think through it. What does a ranger program look like? How many two guys, bicycles, e-motorcycles? I don't know. Oh, we have speed issues on our on our on our bike paths and all that. These are all things that this I'm calling it a duo because I'm envisioning two guys or two ladies doing this. Two people. Thank you. Two individuals. Also good. In a small truck that says Glenwood Ranger Program, and that's what they're doing. They're first and foremost maybe educational, but then also if people don't listen, then there comes the tickets, right? So I really hope we can start talking about that.

I do.

Okay, I just, I want to bring it up. Thank you for doing that. And well, I said two things, but I'm going to add this to you. And the third one is public transportation. I also put that on my list. For five years, I've been almost sitting here for five years, and I've heard a lot of times that we're going to talk about public transport. We're going to figure out the bus system. Now we have the downtown, or we're going to have people driving around for it all, or we got this. We never actually sat down and say, this is what we hear from the community. This is something we need to start addressing.

Probably two weeks down the list.

There you go. This is a great night. First, I got to see a bell and I got to ring a bell. And now my wishes are coming true. What else can you ask for? This is awesome. Thank you guys for listening. City Manager, what do you got?

Details haven't come together yet, but we're going to do an appreciation event for our boards and commissions. I think we're thinking about towards the end of the month and we'll invite you guys if you'd like to come along.

Great. Thank you. Sounds good. That's it. All right. City Attorney Carl, please.

I don't think I have anything this evening.

Got nothing. Dave Townsley.

Quick question. Whatever happened to our program with the motel up there? Did we get anybody that was interested in that? Oh, the housing? The housing.

We did. The one bedroom and the two bedroom went right away. I mean, there was a lot of demand for that. And then I think we've got three others that are being utilized right now. We've got a total of 10. So, I mean, you know, the pickup rate isn't great. 50%? Yeah, not quite 50%. Yeah, about 50% somewhere in there. Yeah. Yeah.

All right, thank you, Mayor Podhamsilinski.

So on that topic, there was some talk about using them for like relief for overnight officers or other first responders or visitors. Has it been utilized for that at all?

We haven't had a lot of demand for that. And it's a little bit of, okay, who's going to clean the room? Who's going to do the sheet? Who's going to, you know, that kind of stuff. So no, we haven't, that hasn't come up yet.

Thank you. Correspondents?

None.

None tonight. Excellent social event. Mayor Pro Temselinski.

I think we're going to go back to Tapatio.

Yeah, we're approaching that hour of the day. Sounds good. And I am entertaining a motion to adjourn this meeting. Mayor Pro Temselinski. So moved. And I need a second through the microphone, not just yelling. Councilor Reimer. Second. And a second. Motion is second. Call for the question. There it is.