Finance & Services Committee - Regular Meeting

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

From this chilly spring morning. Today is April 27. I'm the chairman, chair of the budget and policy. We have a great agenda in front of us today. So before we get started, let's go around the room and do introductions, and then we can get started. I'll start on my right.

Thank you, madam president Kevin Flynn. Southwest Denver's District 2.

Jimmy Torres with Denver District 3. Chantel Lewis, District 8.

Hi, everybody. Sarahna Gonzalez Gutierrez, one of your council members at large.

Flora Alvidrez with Lucky District 7.

Sarah Perry, your other council member at large.

Darryl Watson, fine district nine.

Diana Romero, Denver district four.

Alright. And I'll pass it over to Luke.

Great. I'm sitting at the head of the table. Luke Palmisano, senior policy analyst for Denver City Council. I'll run through the couple slides real quick. We're here to talk about, council's new policy and proposals for ahead of our May work session.

Here's City Council's commitment to equity and inclusion. I wanted to go over today's, expectations and assumptions. This is for council members to briefly explain on their newly proposed budget policies and funding proposals. Each council member will have the same amount of time, eight minutes, to use however they want. Members can present on on one or two that other members might not have heard of or can try to tick off all the ones that they've submitted.

This is an opportunity to explain the new proposals. It's you're not necessarily making a pitch. We'll save that for the May 14 workshop. Just to be respectful of time, we'll ask that other council members hold up on questions until either the end or offline if we don't have enough time. And then this is not we're not talking about micro district specific policies or proposals today.

So with that, these are the twenty twenty seven. Half of the 2027 budget goals, I won't go ahead and read through those. But then with the exception of the president going last, this is just in order by my favorite. I'm just kidding. By the district by the district member. I'll be Alright. To my at large council members, but this is just to just by district.

And a little known fact, the council of Arkansas, call district twelve and they call me district thirteen. Yeah. Watching For

cares. Alright. Non lying.

People always have that

case. Alright.

And then sorry. Council president. I'll I'll be keeping the timer and I'll just kind of shout out when the eight minutes are up.

Alright. And colleagues, for a reminder, Luke sent out on Friday at 02:23 the Excel doc. So I'm a visual person. I have to, like, read along. So if you wanna pull that up, I believe the first one are the ones the first Excel doc is the ones that we wanted to keep from last year. The second Excel doc is the new ones. Alright. So council member Flynn, take it away.

Thank you, ma'am. Because I don't need eight minutes unless I do maybe a song and dance after a brief presentation on my item and that is and we we added restoring basic services because after the cuts that we had to take that are very difficult for a lot of folks in the out in the neighborhoods in the in the city at large, we need to look at restoring basic services, improving delivery of essential city services, restore trust. The taxpayer dollars are stewarded effectively. So my item is to the extent that estimated revenues will allow, restore staffing to basic services starting with such agencies as the DMV, which generates revenue, parking ticket magistrates, which mitigates revenue, if you will, because a neighborhood inspection, Department of Finance so that they can mail property tax bills on request, restore the street paving program. I don't know if all of you looked at your the neighborhoods which ones are getting which streets are getting repaved this year, but there are not many.

And there weren't many last year either. And this is a penny wise and pound foolish policy that could result in a need for more heavy reconstruction of streets if we let them go for too long. So the only thing I'll add to illustrate the need for this is the Bear Valley Denver Motor Vehicle Office has been closed. Well, it's closed now because of an unforeseen issue with construction where they found asbestos when they were doing some work at the shopping center. So it was closed for two weeks in March, not just the one rolling week, but for two weeks because of other circumstances elsewhere in the city.

And we were the ones that took the hit. So we can complain as much as we want or field complaints from constituents about unexpired tags and whatnot. But if we don't give them a place to go get their tags, we have no complaint. So we gotta find a way to keep these places open. There's tens of millions of dollars that come in from DMV, for instance, every year. So to the extent that estimated revenues will allow, I'm not asking for, you know, to take money from fund balance or anything else. Just let's take a look at the estimated revenues maybe starting tomorrow and restore those basic services. And that's that, madam president, my only item.

Thank you. Next up, we have Councilwoman Torres. Thank

you. I have seven, I think. So I'll start with the Go

ahead. Yep. Yeah.

I'll start under the goal increase community safety. And I've got two requests in here. One is to support the community led safety grant pilot, which will see its first year of grant distribution likely in 2027. If you'll remember, this was an amendment that we added to use $3,000,000 from the Broncos Fund to put toward this community proposal called the Community Led Safety Grant Program. So it's to get out that $3,000,000 into local nonprofits and really try to address some of the deepest and heavily unaddressed issues regarding particularly youth and involvement with criminal justice system.

So that will likely see the distribution of those funds in 2027. So we're looking for a commitment to find a matching $3,000,000 for 2028 to keep that going. My next one is just a star expansion request. That one's I don't think I need to share too much about that one. Why?

Under Empower Communities goal, I've got four items. One is truly build out a robust licensing and rezoning notification system by neighborhood. Cashman and I have been requesting this for year over year. And while it was opened up, it's still a little cumbersome and clunky, and you can't do it by neighborhood system. So that is just a tech services piece, I believe.

The next one is maintain funding, do not reduce funding for participatory budgeting. We need to see those things continue to follow the NPI process. Speaking of NPI, I would like the administration to think about what it would take to realign funding to complete all of our NPIs by 2030. We need to be able to get past this particular hurdle because it keeps coming up with barriers. And think Sarisha Walter said once these two upcoming are through, there's only about five more to do.

It would be great to be able to just get those completed in a short period of time. And then the other under this goal is the request to not cut immigrant legal services fund allocation in 2027. There was an interest in doing that for budget savings. They get $750,000 from the city. It's the only funding that goes into the Legal Services Fund, and it is needed now more than ever.

The last two, one is under our infrastructure goal. Councilwoman Alvidrez, you mentioned that you have a similar goal. While I don't have a particular proposal, I want to work with Dottie and Amy Ford and I have talked about this. They have interest as well. We need to create a long term funding plan for bridge repair and figure out what that is and how we actually get caught back up.

We have entirely too many bridges that are failing. And the difference between good and failing is a thin line. So that is going to take, I think, some innovation on our side. I don't know if it's like a small bond every other year or something like that just for bridges, but we really do need to be able to, queue those up and not be waiting for a citywide, geo bond opportunity. And then the last is, to begin the process in 2027, to reauthorize Healthy Food for Denver kids sales tax, and consider expanding the scope of it.

So it runs out. It stops collecting in 2028. 2029 is the last year to distribute funds. So the sunset is coming up, and I think it would be good timing for us to queue up the reauthorization process working with the coalition and with community to put that on the ballot in 2027. That's it. Awesome. All right.

One thing I forgot to mention colleagues is if you see overlapping like I have one that's overlapping with Torres. If we could work together those offices so that we could consolidate those, we decided not to do that right now because we felt like everyone's voice needed to be heard, but we really wanna do that for the fourteenth. Okay. Perfect. So next up,

we have council pro tem Romero Campbell. Thank you. I'm the first one I have

let's see. I've got six total policy budget proposals, but the first policy proposal is to increase the number

Can you say which bucket?

Yes. It's in infrastructure, and so that is to increase the number of neighborhood plans across Denver. And I my language was a little different, but very similar for the next budget cycle. We know that we've been talking about this. It comes up multiple times to strengthen our communities, our neighborhoods. There are seven areas or seven more plans that are in the queue. Two of them are in Southeast Denver, and I can list off the rest of them for you. But what we're finding is that without any sort of guidance, it's coming up. It's reoccurring. It's happening more and more for things that are coming through in Southeast Denver.

And I think when we also hear things through committee, it's been a reoccurring theme. I like the idea of by 2030, so I would love to work with you on that one. The second one is within basic city services. So this is to restore previously eliminated FTE to the DOTI safety engagement team. And the DOTI safety engagement team are the ones are the project manager engineers, the people who help us with the planning, design, construction management management for our project needs.

And currently, there's, like, two or three in there for the entire city. So these are our key contacts from the council office to know where the DOTI projects are. They respond to all of our updates and needs. And so I think with these liaisons, we should just increase the number that are responding to the 13 council offices. And then that way we can better track projects across the city and also look at our future needs.

So we're constantly just doing is in the queue. We're looking in the present, but we just don't have I don't think they have enough bandwidth to think future. And also, I think that impacts, like, future bonds that we would be looking towards. Another one within basic city services is Denver Parks and Recreation. They had a significant cut for their FTE. And

this would be for,

again, those key contacts that we have and that we hear a lot from that I hear a lot from constituents in District 4 for the senior planning in some of those senior roles. So there was about an 18% reduction in 2020 for 2026, and how that's impacted, I think, are the planners. So as it was mentioned before, we have a lot of deferred maintenance. We have a lot of, you know, parks and trails and rec centers. I sat on the bond committee with council member Lewis, and we heard multiple presentations about the deterioration that is happening and within the entire parks and rec system.

And I think that this would help us be able to plan forward. And, again, think about future bond projects, think about how we are just not just thinking in the immediate, but that we're thinking forward. The next one that I have is in basic city services. Again, I propose that we have an assessment of those city services to demonstrate the responsiveness to residents' needs and accountability for how those budget constraints affect city service quality. So as opposed to, like, the first one with an idea or the, you know, the squeaky wheel, but we're actually taking a citywide perspective as to how we are addressing what those reductions have been and how we go back and fill them.

So again, I hear often around the DMV services. We have, you know, I have multiple library closings, there's renovations that are going on, lack of right of way enforcement. So, I think this would also help us be broader how we think about our districts are interconnected as opposed to just a district specific issue. So, I'll go I don't know where

I am on time,

but this one's in infrastructure, increased funding for citywide traffic audits. So, again, when we are speaking with our DOTI teams or when people have issues, they are often referred to, well, this needs to be a traffic study. I am requesting that we increase the budget for traffic consultants to consult more or, I don't know if they're the consultants or in house, but from our traffic study citywide. So we have a very long queue. If somebody puts in for a traffic study, they will wait nine months to a year at this point for those traffic studies.

That impacts quality of life for speed racing, high entry network corridors, safe routes to school, street crossings for accessibilities to parks and other and just other amenities, libraries, whatever the case may be. And, you know, I have there are with a lot of the traffic that's happening, like we have a place that has multiple crashes through fences, and it's always referred back to a traffic study, and that traffic study hasn't happened, and it's been started with my predecessor. The last one in climate response. This one is to create educational opportunities for residents through CASR about drought related landscape conversions. Interesting how we also there was an announcement for those mini grants for the climate resilience, but that's $200,000 for citywide response for climate resilience.

And I think that it's I feel like we're we're saying what we want the it to be, but we're not doing the education piece to be able to bring people along for what those conversions could be, how they could reduce water, and being kind of more as opposed to saying, hey, come up with any idea that we actually have a better strategy and do more education for our residents in this area. So I would like to increase what that would look like from CASR for water saving practices and households, etcetera. So those are mine.

All right. Thank you. Next up, we have council member Cashman. He's not here. So let's see. Let me go to my handy dandy spreadsheet. One?

His is under climate.

His is create a task force to arrive at a complex or comprehensive value driven policy on how Denver addresses artificial intelligence in city operations. And that's the only one he had. Right?

That's right. Okay.

Next one up, we have councilman Alvidrez. Thank you, council president. I'll try to be as quick as possible. I had quite a few, and I'll start with community safety. First off, I'll start with providing proper funding to the crime lab for crime scene investigation.

There's a few items listed under here, I'll just break this one bullet down into more. The crime lab's ability to operate effectively has far reaching efforts on how law enforcement's capability to adequately respond to instances of crime, provide fast and accurate forensic evidence, and hold officers accountable or exonerate those wrongly suspected. I've continued to advocate for the crime lab, so just continue to raise up that issue. The second part of this one is about proper fleet for DPD. Ultimately, DPD would like to be in charge of their own fleet, but right now what's happening is even if DPD were fully staffed, as it's not fully staffed right now, officers are often at the station waiting for a vehicle just to start their shift.

So we're paying them to be at the station waiting for their vehicles often, and so this is a bigger issue. And then the third part of that was funding hiring for sheriffs assisting them in their hiring efforts. I know that we have extreme overtime in the department and the office of the sheriffs are the deputies are very exhausted often. And then part of this bullet point was increase invest in programs and methods that continue the city's reduction in violent crime, prioritizing crime prevention, but also oh, that's the overall arching goal. Mine was addressing the domestic violence uptick, so addressing rising domestic violent and assault cases.

And this could be a wide variety across a lot of these items, including making sure that we have housing available for people to having victim advocates and mental health clinics at the proper amount of detectives since that type of crime is going up so much. And then the last one is a policy one. This came up when we were talking about flawed cameras in particular, and I was able to have a conversation with Greg who is a constituent but was the head of the crime lab around use of this type of technology. And what he suggested is that he had been advocating for many years to get a technology division within the crime lab instead of having police do these searches. He believes that was why they were able to mislead us on how they were using our data.

And so having actual data scientists that are overseeing this data, I think, would be helpful as far as managing that data. And then that was it for safety, empower communities. I had the strength in residents' ability to play a meaningful role in their own governance. Oh, the district level arts and culture programming. We need to support local communities and fund their arts and cultural events.

We have seen some festivals and things go away, anything from Fiva Streets to the underground music showcase, which left our district. And now we're creating a new Blue Supper Festival, which has no city funding. And so thinking about how we activate places like Morrison Road, Laredo Heights, La Raza Park, and all of these places in the future. So it's not out of out of all of our council budgets all the time. And then priority, that was it for empowering communities.

Under housing needs, I had uplifted again foreclosure rates are going up. So Denver had 677 foreclosures in 2025. This is up from the previous year of five sixty in 2024. And so I am advocating for some kind of foreclosure counseling and prevention services that the city should be offering because when these families are displaced, they not only are displaced, but they lose a lot of their any wealth that they built. And then part of a separate item in that part is the brown the mile high sites having the wraparound services that they need, the all in mile high sites.

And so the La Paz tiny home village in my district is kicking people out often for arriving drunk. This happened and someone was a crashed into an in a pole. That pole fell on a home. And so we're not calling these sites sober sites, we're not offering people help. And so we're kicking them out when they're using drugs, but we're not offering them services if they wanna stop using drugs.

I know that this site in particular has the Colorado Coalition for the homeless truck that comes and brings services once a week at the most, and that's just not enough for someone that's really trying to seek met the medical treatment that they need. And so continuing to raise that up. And then lastly, and this one might be for the Department of Safety, but treatment of judges and addiction treatment for parole eligible. So treatment judges are specifically trained to understand the complex relationship between addiction and criminal behavior rather than simply imposing punitive sentences. And then the addiction treatment for parole eligible, many people who are parole eligible have underlying substance use disorders which are never properly addressed during their incarceration without access to these.

We will see continued recidivism in in a harmful cycle. So that all just goes to supporting the people that are in our shelter system. And then for priority four, support for workers and businesses, I have city staffing or improved residents response times. Hold on. Let me find it on here.

Basically, we need to make sure we're budgeting for the collective bargaining, ensure fair market wages for city workers, and that they have spaces to meet. And then the secondary part for small businesses is to have a place for people to incubate businesses citywide and a strong support of network of community organizations. And then for climate response, I have I'm concerned about there not being any funding for moratorium research, and so just wanted to raise up the fund moratorium research on data centers, water conservation, and tree watering program. We need to ensure that basically, trees are not the trees that we're planting are not dying around the city. But another part about the moratorium research when we had that presentation, I asked them how much funding for research they had or what research they were gonna do, and they said they had no funding for research, and they were gonna just depend on research that's out there.

And so that is a concern for me. Priority six was infrastructure. I brought up again the load restricted bridges and trying to get bridges in general up to where they need to be. And then for priority seven, building healthy communities is where I listed child and family homelessness. I know that some of my colleagues have listed that too.

I don't know if they put it under housing, but part of having healthy communities is that our children have a place to sleep at night. And then for Office of Children's Affairs as well supporting those efforts and the childcare needs and just support for the Office of Children Affairs overall. And then my last one for priority eight, basic city services is around 311 and 911. 911, the goal is to list acute dispatch options possible is to utilize the least acute dispatch option possible. So now that they're filtering all of these calls for behavioral health and other items, making sure they have the resources they need.

And then 311, maybe meeting the metrics of response times, but is not consistently meeting the standard of the resolution that our constituents are seeking. And my district residents regularly see cases closed without real follow-up or do not receive a meaningful response at all. And so we need additional staffing and stronger services so that people are getting those responses that are meaningful, not just a closed ticket number, which sometime it can mean a variety of things and lead to them having to call over again and again. Thank you.

Great. Thank you so much. That was really quick. Councilwoman Lewis.

Thank you. So the first one is cost savings procurement changes, which is under basic city services. And so this would be a strategy to look at how the city could save money in the procurement process by using in house labor. For example, I met with firefighters at Station 26 who let me know that there was a fairly recent change that prevented them from doing work and making improvement in their firehouses. And so the kitchen at the fire station had recently been renovated, and it cost $76,000 to do so using an outside contractor.

And they said they could have done that a lot cheaper. This work that the fire department had undertaken this is work that the fire department had undertaken in the past, and it also has the benefit of building morale in the sense of ownership at the firehouse. And I think we should look at other areas where we might be able to save some money to allow for work to be done by agency personnel. Nonuniform Department of Safety positions. This is under community safety, and this is an expansion of funding for important safety related functions that are not uniform.

So Denver fire that are not uniformed, Denver fire, Denver sheriff, Denver Police. So services like the crime lab staffing, office of the independent monitor staffing, star expansion, similar to councilwoman Alvidrez. Parity has something quite similar and has also councilwoman Torres. The evaluation of BRT, this is under infrastructure. And so funding to allow community planning and development, the department of transportation and infrastructure, and the department of economic development and opportunity to plan for the evaluation of COFAC's BRT or COFAX sorry.

COFAX bus rapid transit once it's completed. Impacts to be considered include riders ridership statistics, traffic analysis on neighborhood streets, changes to business revenues, other impacts would also allow partnership with RTD to get the metrics all in like a one stop shop. Home repair and co compliance microgrants, this is address this is under addressing housing. This would provide funding to help folks repair their homes or to come into compliance with zoning codes or would ask CPD and HRCP or other agencies to fund education programs for existing outside microgrant programs such as Habitat Metro Denver's exterior home repair program or Habitat's capable program. This focus focus could include aging populations who are long term residents without the means to keep to keep up with their upkeep.

This will replace the current ADU funding priority as unlocking housing choices continues the process. This was another priority selected by the district eight community panel as well. The next one is the expansion of notification systems. This is under Empower Residence. I originally submitted these as two separate priorities, but I'm combining them to create a two part.

So the first part would expand the timing and con content of construction noted notice specifically with a focus on advanced notice and information regarding mitigation and other impacts. The second part would be to expand engagement in existing organizations, community networks, and providing funding for education of public education to the public as as to initiatives, projects, and rules and regulations. This could be a way of aligning city budgets with the work that councilman Cashman and councilwoman Gonzales Gutierrez are doing with the RNOs. Councilwoman Torres has something similar has has a similar proposal for rezoning and licensing. The next one is to expand DOTI community facing roles.

This is under infrastructure, and so it's to expand or restore DOTI positions that are most important for community engagement and design, such as project manager positions or community designer positions. These positions are critical for disseminating and collecting information from communities to develop projects that reflect the desires of community. And right now, we have roughly one of them for every 160,000 residents, which puts a strain on them and on the process.

That one's district office. That one's in basic city services.

Oh, just kidding.

Isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Oh. Was like My bad. You're good. You're good. I got you. Thank you.

I will end with councilwoman Diana Rimmera. Calmba has something very similar as well. Okay. Develop a strategy for low cost infrastructure and interventions. This is

under infrastructure. Question by question.

There are so there are many, many infrastructure needs across the city. I'm proposing that we make it a priority for DOTI to develop a strategy to identify and implement low cost infrastructure interventions whenever possible, prioritize interventions with low complexity or tech technology unless higher interventions already exist or being funded through, like, the bond or they're already identified through the capital improvement plan for 2027. The thinking here is that we could theoretically achieve more by doing smaller interventions at the expense of higher ones unless, again, those are already funded or cleared for work in the CIP or through the bond. And then the final one is resourcing and volunteering under basic city services. I withdrew that one.

That's all. Thank you. Alright. Thank you. Next up, we have council member Hines and his is remind me Luke where?

Basic city city services the last one.

City services ensure people who have who receive parking tickets can as a first level response dispute parking citations without having to physically present somewhere. So I believe it's restore the magistrate similar to a couple other ones that we have so that might could be able to be combined. Next up, we have councilman Gonzalez Gutierrez. Alright.

Well, thankfully, some of my colleagues have done, some of the work for me. So I'll start off with the, community led safety grant program. I will just, be really short and ditto to everything councilwoman Torres has said, and we've been involved in many conversations and working on that. So, but, yeah, it's really just figuring out how we can fund future, in the future for the community led safety grant program because I think we're getting things off to a great start. The next two are with regard to the Office of Independent Monitor.

The first part, I think this is similar. I think and then councilman Lewis, you can let me know when we get to that portion if it is true that yours when you talk to about the office of independent monitor and non uniformed employees, that that one, I might just have the subset there, and this is to make sure that there is that they are providing that they have capacity to be able to perform their duties of investigating complaints that come through. We just had a recent presentation of their annual report in the community alongside with our our safety department and the chiefs and sheriff. And it's it's interesting to just learn, like, how are they able to actually get through all of the complaints that they're receiving and the fact that their budget is not proportional to Department of Safety's budget and and who they're actually supposed to be investigating and have oversight over, and so there seems to be a disparity there. So looking at the possibility of bringing that not to the same alignment, but a proportion to them.

The other one with the Office of Independent Monitor, so through the surveillance task board is task force, it has become evident that there should be some type of an independent entity to have the auditing power of surveillance technology. We've talked about this. We talked about this during the acts on contracts conversations. And I think at one point, there were some questions to our independent monitor of whether or not they felt like that this could fall would fall under their purview, and and I then it does. But they don't have the the current capacity in order to provide that oversight, but they are situated to do so.

It kinda goes along with, you know, should DPD be auditing themselves, which is currently what is happening, or should an independent agency that is already set up to do that be doing it? And so that would be for that policy and budget. And these are those all fall under community safety. Under housing needs, this would be a budget request. There could be potential policy with this, but I believe this one is similar or has some correlation with councilwoman Alvidrez's request, and then I think councilwoman Parity as well.

So this is addressing family homelessness by providing proper funding and appropriate shelter facility and programming to help families gain access to stable housing options. So I've had some meetings with host, and I understand that this is also a priority, I believe, to prioritize this population, but I wanna make sure that we do it in ways that can be actually effective. Right? It's not a Band Aid. It's how do we help folks to be able to move on to the next step.

And so just really taking a serious look at this. I know we had a similar conversation last year around family homelessness, and I know we all continue to hear about it, and it's super concerning. So wanna be able to address it. And I believe my last one is under healthy communities. With healthy communities, this is looking at creating a process and measurable outcomes to meet the needs of the Department of Public Health and Environment Community Health Assessment and the community health improvement plan.

I'm I know that councilwoman Torres brought this up last year around fully actualizing it. Right? And then I've even heard some of my colleagues talk about that should be our guideline to our budget process, to the mayor's budget making process. And so, you know, I think it's important to know, like, this information is coming to us from community. Right? This is surveys. This is feedback. This is engagement that's happening out in our community. So it's great that we have a goal, right, to try to, like, make this happen and and to actualize it, but I think we need some more some more teeth to that. Right?

We need to be able to have metrics. How is it actionable? How are we getting reports back showing that we are either meeting or we're failing to meet these goals based on how we're investing our dollars in our budget? So that's probably more of a policy. There might be some budget needed if there's a need for additional reporting or data analysis and things like that or community engagement even, wraps up all of mine.

Great. Thank you. Next up, we have council member Parady. Alright.

So I think in the realm of safety, other colleagues have covered the things that I wanted to address, which include the crime lab, which I'm I'm just very, very alarmed by what's happening there. I'm hoping we can hear about that in safety committee sometime soon, hopefully. And then in addition, I wanna emphasize the sort of staffing emergency in the jail. I know that last I've heard from the sheriff, the recruiting is getting a little better. Retention is still a problem.

And I just have it's been very difficult to understand. We can see those line items in the budget, but it's been difficult to understand, you know, what they're spent on and and what we could fund that would improve that, and I'm sure that something's there. So it's just time, I think, for that to be addressed in a more serious way. The only other item I had there was I wanted to make sure and put down a marker for continuing to respond to the overdose crisis. DDPHE does a great job of funding harm reduction and overdose prevention.

But just as a kind of a marker, last year, very luckily, we had thirty seven homicides. We had five sixty two overdose deaths, and every one of those deaths is preventable. So I won't stress those things because we've talked about all of those a lot. Under community empowerment, I have been, with others here spending a lot of time talking to colleagues in Minneapolis, Chicago, LA about what happened to their cities after these abusive federal enforcement efforts. Minneapolis has lost 300 small businesses that are probably not coming back.

They've seen a doubling or tripling of child hunger. They've seen a tripling of eviction rates after the federal government came and just terrorized their city. So I think we need to be prepared in a budgetary way to potentially support partner organizations that will have technical, operational, logistical kinds of needs if they're going to absorb huge demand for food, shelter, economic support, mental health services, all those kinds of things. The philanthropy community has met about this as well. So I think but I just when we ask these other cities, what do you wish you had done?

This is what they wish they had done. I've also mentioned the immigrant legal services fund. Our our existing sub goal talked about trying to raise money for it. I think we need to consider funding that directly because there will be just a deluge of legal needs. And then I think we should be taking a look, as we've been talking about, all of our parts of our regulatory codes that involve public health and housing and all of those important things, licensure.

All of those really are to protect the health and safety of our community, and those are unique city functions. We've been talking about the incredibly rare instances when one of those enforcement efforts leads to, like, a criminal prosecution. But the bigger problem there, all of those regulatory functions are understaffed. They don't have enough inspectors. They don't always have the right technology.

And so if we wanna make a difference in that area, you know, the dozen cases or something where there's actually been a prosecution, fine. But what we actually need to be doing is getting inspectors out in the field and and upholding those parts of our code. That would be the far more important move that we can make. I also think it's time to have a conversation about whether we want to fund capacity for community work on CBAs because we've been leaning really hard on communities around a lot of these huge developments coming into the city to kind of put in the time and negotiate them. And we've heard loud and clear back from those community groups that it was a lift for them without capacity and support of some kind.

Under housing, I also had a goal around making sure we have sufficient funding for shelter and rapid rehousing. I did not frame that in terms of families alone, but I agree that the place where we have a known crisis is for families. And so I would be happy to just fold mine into the goal that council members, Alvidrez and and Gonzales Gutierrez put in there. We've, again, talked about that quite a bit. I also think it's time for us to consider allocating, and you all will have briefings coming from council member Lewis and myself and also from an outside coalition that's been working very hard on this.

I think it's time for us to allocate startup costs for the city to have a social housing authority. This is the only one of my requests that is both a budget and a policy. So look for briefing about that, how a social housing authority would start. But just to reiterate, the idea here is that with all of the threats from the federal government to, the classic sort of vouching voucher system with the ways that the federal government is undermining DHA, we need to continue supporting DHA in the ways that we do, and we need housing that the city owns that is mixed income. So it's not just low income, and we're stuffing people there. It's self sustaining because of the mix of rents, and we we control the quality and standards of those buildings, and we have that rental income into the future. It's time for us to do that. Seattle's doing it. Atlanta's doing it. Chicago's doing it.

Then I also think we may need to consider this being the year that we put more funding into our city vouchers. We apparently have I don't wanna misspeak, but I think we may have kept those flat, and we're losing federal vouchers. And vouchers are one of the most powerful ways to keep a family house, Obviously, they're expensive, but I think we need to look really closely when we get the host budget and consider expanding the amount of vouchers that we're doing. Under workers in business, I have a note about making sure that the auditor's office continues to be sufficiently staffed to implement their portion of two u. That's mostly just a note because we put that on them.

They absorbed it for that year. I wanna make sure that they have what they need as unionization hits up across heats up across the city if they're getting complaints. This is an important one. I think we need to, as a council, be responsive to what we're hearing from small and independent restaurants, which is that they have a lot of needs for support. They need better permitting navigation.

They need funds for things like ADA compliance and shop front improvements. And so I think we need to look really carefully at that. I know DETO has different funds that sometimes are accessible to small and independent restaurants, but I don't know that there's funding specifically for those type of businesses. And I think there are many appropriate ways that we could respond to what they're going through right now within the economy, including policies and including this kind of budgetary support. I have a placeholder to make sure that we continue funding retaining our workforce programs like WorkReady and DayWorks just because sometimes we've seen those cut in the past.

So we've restored those before. We should do that again if we need to because they're proven to be very important. And then I have a couple of capital requests that under both workers' business and infrastructure that I will leave aside because I don't know if they count as micro priorities or not, and they're things we've talked about before. Sorry. My phone's never on.

Under health care, I have raised this a lot as well, but I think it's going to be incredibly important this coming summer and onward as the federal Medicaid changes come into effect that we make sure that we're funding whatever or finding funding for training and staffing all of our shelter and workforce partners to make sure that the people they serve can meet Medicaid work requirements and do not lose their Medicaid coverage because they will keep going to Never Health. We know that. So if we were the we are the as the city because we fund shelter and we fund work force programs, we are one of the main sort of points of contact through those partners for the people who will be most vulnerable and likely to lose Medicaid funding based on these new work requirements. And if we put the effort in, it's not that hard to help people meet them. It's going be a matter of people, They can meet these requirements by, for example, doing cleaning work right where they live in their shelter, but then they need someone there to make sure that they get the help they need to fill the paperwork, submit it, and keep their Medicaid.

And it would be a huge mistake for us not to do that. I have another capital note about Denver Cares, which I think is mostly being funded through the DOAC. But as the budget process wears on, we need to make sure

that we keep our eyes on And

then as with last year, we need to make sure that we're funding medication assisted treatment, mental health, and crisis response services in the jail and recognizing that that's not just about those specialized personnel, that's also about the level of deputy staffing. Because one of the biggest barriers to the jail being able to provide as much opioid treatment as people there could use has been the actual baseline staffing levels and the ability to shuttle people around to see Denver Health within the jail and that kind of thing. So that kind of relates back to the safety goal. And then finally, under city services, something that I've really learned lately, I had a really helpful briefing from Department of Finance because I just asked them a question about the seat tax for all of our city entertainment venues. It applies to Red Rocks.

It applies to all of our entertainment venues. And we it applies to the convention center when they have the right kind of event and so on. It was set in, like, the decades and decades ago, like, the sixties or seventies or something like that, and it's never been changed. It's been a 10% on every ticket. If you read the original ordinance, it's pretty clear that the thought was that that would always totally fund everything Red Rocks needed.

And as we know, that's not true. We just had to put Red Rocks in the bond, and it was probably delayed. You know, they they needed those renovations a lot sooner, I think. We also had, you know, ADA litigation about Red Rocks and had to respond to that. And so I'm really I'm thinking that we need to fund whatever kind of staffing or consulting DOF needs to actually go back and analyze fees and taxes that have not been looked at in the past five years and determine if they're set at an appropriate level. And I mean that in both directions. In some instances, it could be that, you know, AXS is making huge amounts of money on Red Rocks. Right? And we've set that fee at the same time for all those years. And so maybe there are things we could be raising in order to cover our revenue needs and cover our facilities.

And then on the other hand, maybe there are things that we're charging too much for and we're causing harm, especially to people that are facing all kinds of cost of living increases. There's something in the budget book that says that DOF does this kind of thing, and it does not seem like they've done much of it lately, probably because of their own capacity. And so I think we need to make sure that we're it's just time to take a pass at all that stuff. With this kind of a tight budget, we can't just sort of keep, like, floating. And the example of paying for Red Rock's renovations through the bond instead of through CTECs, I think, is a good example of why we need this kind of analysis. Thank you, madam president.

Thank you. Alright. Last. So mine mine is under housing needs. Mine's the same. I want to make sure in 2027 fund three separate neighborhood initiatives. They said they'd only fund two. So I think to get to '2 thousand '30 if we funded I heard five. You said seven. I heard

I just five? Looked on the website, so

I just

I think it's five because two are already in the queue right now. Okay. So that her They've redone

the mapping. Yeah. So it it looked a little different than what's online. Okay. She said maybe five.

She said maybe five, I thought. That's what I thought. So fund for in 2027, and that's under housing needs. That's mine. And then my last one is basic city services. I want the mayor's office to fund our third attorney for city council. We need our third attorney back. We have too much legislation, and we have too much going on that I really want to fund our third attorney period. I've been saying that time, blue in the face. Those are those are all the mine.

Do we have any questions since we got done so quickly? Do we have any questions from members on any of the ones that were presented? Questions from members on how you can partner with other members? Because there's some under infrastructure that I'm kind of confused on. Like, I think infrastructure would go under housing for pro temer Romero Campbell, increased number of a neighborhood plan. So I don't know if anyone is, like, stuck on where they go. I thought about it as housing needs because CPD, like, planning goes with housing. That was just my brain.

Yeah. That's I I was I put it under infrastructure just because of CPD.

Yeah. Yeah. I always think of DOTI as infrastructure. But I think it up for committees. Yeah. So

I'm willing to move it around. I think it's the it's the effort

to be able to move forward. Yeah. Council member Alvidrez?

Yeah. I think I could break some. Can we still make some changes to this? Because I feel like I have to break some apart and maybe move some around. And then I think a couple things were left off. One of the things that maybe didn't get put into the form, and that's the hard thing when we fill out these forms. Like, we don't get a confirmation of the form or, like, what was included or not included in it. Also, the form was just really frustrating. Not that you didn't do a great job, Luke. I just feel like if I can make an Excel spreadsheet and send it, that would be easier for me because I know what I'm sending. But one of mine was also about the visit Denver report in this enacting some of those recommendations for supporting businesses. So I just had that.

I was laughing at myself because I filled out the form and then I I'm like, what did I put in it?

Who knows? Maybe next time what we can do is I think Google forms or I don't know if it's ours. You can get a Dual receipt. Yeah. Yeah. A receipt of what you submitted.

That would be great.

Do that next year so you can remember what you submitted.

Yeah. Try that. Okay.

Are there any other questions, thoughts?

I would just say some of these, I would love for us to think about what do we if it's a particularly if it's a budget request, what do we wanna see when we look in that book? So I appreciate the attention on agencies and supporting this, supporting that. I think we have to be as specific as additional FTE here, program expansion here, consultant for x. Otherwise, it just feels a little too vague to send over, and they may interpret it in an entirely different way than we meant it. That's my only request.

The other one, I've already let Councilwoman Lewis know. Her request under infrastructure for low cost traffic interventions is the NTMP program, Neighborhood Transportation Management Program. I'm a huge fan of NTMP. We've gotten them done in most of my neighborhoods. It is, I think, just Dottie staffing it and queuing those projects up to be done in six months to eighteen months, which is how they organize it.

It's a great way to take care of striping on the street, quick little bulb out. It's not major infrastructure, but we're in the fifth year of something that should have been done in eighteen months. So it just it that's, I think, the piece, but it is such a good opportunity. Yeah. Five years. Yeah.

I agree with the like, council member Abideres, for your under healthy communities, support the Office of Children's Affairs. My idea of support the Office of Children's Affairs and your idea of support the Office of Children's Affairs might look different. So give any specificity because if you all remember when we go to Red Rocks on March 14, we're gonna get a certain amount of points, and we're gonna do the whole point system and allocate points to whichever one. So if before then, if you wanna give as much specific specificity as possible. I keep always thinking about the fact that we funded an a report for the work that Cashman and Gonzales Gutierrez were working on for two years before the mayor funded it.

I mean, we literally had to fight for that funding. So the more specificity you can get, the more I think that we're clear with the mayor on actually what we we want.

Don't lay off half the staff to Zach. I'm just kidding.

And then they don't they don't have to necessarily follow committees, but with whichever, I think, you know, however we wanna work with them. I think I think three of us have funded neighborhood planning initiative that goes to community planning and housing. So that's why I put it under housing. And it's I think it

is listed under our infrastructure goal.

Improve Denver's infrastructure, complete neighborhoods through safe multimodal transportation connections Yeah. And neighborhood planning. Oh, yeah. Okay. That's I thought that the so my when I say neighborhood planning initiatives, mine calls out fund 38th Avenue in my neighborhood plan. Mhmm. So that's why I put that. But yeah. Mhmm. Yeah. So it calls out funding for roads and stuff.

Yeah. Move move mine over.

It's Yeah. Whichever. I'm totally fine.

I think in

I'm sorry.

Yeah. Go

ahead. One of the other ones, like basic services, mine was more like, let's do assessment of where we have the needs across the city. I think the data came up. I hear about the data all the time. And just how, I mean, hours and hours that people are waiting.

And then there's only a certain amount of people that get seen a day. So you could be in line and never be seen, and people are going back multiple times. So that's just a specific call out for Councilman Flynn for the DMV, but I also think taking a step back and looking at what are the basic services that we do need that we'd want to prioritize that

are across council districts. Yeah,

think that would be because we can't procure an assessment unless we use our professional service fund and three council members wanna do it. So any way that you can break down, conduct a citywide assessment to understand, maybe you just call all 12 of us and ask what our assessment is and what we're hearing. You know what I mean? Because I don't know how we conduct an assessment. So those are what I think of the more specificity that we can have because I have a DMV site in Council District 1 and it closes and people sound alike. It's insane. I

can write for you all my whole experience. Yeah.

It's a lot.

Committees in.

Right? I get it from my constituents.

Yeah. I get it.

I I have Call my council member, and it's Yeah.

People are losing, like, entire days of work. Yeah.

A 100%. 100%. Some things you can't actually go online. Like, I have to renew my tags. You can go online, but if someone lost their title, you can't go and you can't do all of that if your car is stolen, and don't ever keep your title in your car, FYI, PSA. But some people do. So I think it's any any Yeah. Specific. Luke, when do you want them to have? Let's get some clarity around this so that you can you and your team can get prepared for because it's coming up soon. I am Well I that May 14 will come up soon. It's coming up two weeks from this Thursday.

Council President Wood, I guess for that, in preparation of that and are we, like, what is what should we be prepared with just as a reminder? Like, what should we come prepared with for the conversations?

Yeah. That's great. As far as a deadline, we we try to have the the spreadsheets and all the scoring sheets and stuff built out, so we need the final things by then. I would say maybe mid next week, the fifth or sixth. I had done a first pass of items that look similar and could be grouped. I can send that out to to members if that would be helpful Thank you. Just as a place to start. And I've, I'll ask folks who I a couple people pulled me aside and said they might be pulling some, so you can let me know in response to that. But I can send that out today so that you have that and then take a look at that. As far as next steps, we wanna get those grouped in the next week and a half.

We have the workshop set up on May 14, 08:30 to 04:30, and then you all should have received the survey for the micro district specific. We usually typically will send that to the mayor along with the letter that comes out of the workshop. So I think the deadline is set two weeks from yesterday, May 10, to complete that. But aside from the grouping, I think we're just kinda working on the back end to get the materials together. So that will be facilitated by Elizabeth again.

We'll go goal by goal. If we haven't figured out exactly where things should live, there might be discussion of which is the appropriate goal. But then we'll go through the ones that are listed and that, you know, about thirty to forty minutes each and then there'll be the voting.

Thank you. Sure. When do you want them to get any edits back?

I would say end of the day, Tuesday, May 5.

And

that's that's your end of the day, not my end So of the you're gonna work till midnight, that's fine with me. I just wanna look at it on the next day. So

To clarify.

Alright. Are there any questions around that? No. Alright. No. If not, I'll see you all in a hour. Thank you.