City Council - workshop

Councilmember Acunto is not going to make it tonight. He had an emergency come up at work. So we will go ahead and get going. Are there any questions about the agenda this evening? All right. Tansy, any updates from you?

You have three quick things. First, you do have a recommendation from the OZAC to appoint Jordan Coker. I think you got the letter. That would be for Ward 3. Jordan Thomas Coker is who is recommended.

Any objections from moving that forward?

Okay, so the second piece is you may have seen through previous city notes on a Friday that we recently had 14 youth that participated in a youth mural history project. So together as a team, they created four panels, public art pieces related to Thornton's history. I had collaborated with staff. We believe we could bring those panels to municipal building and recognize those students. HAB-Juliette Boone, On November 20 but before we added that to the agenda wanted to check in about interest.

HAB-Juliette Boone, So i'm good.

HAB-Juliette Boone, And then last week I did receive an email today from the county manager and they have started some outreach to cities to talk about the potential in line coalition proposal that they have so they have expressed. HAB-Masyn Moyer- Of willingness and interest to appear on one of your agenda for the end of the year will say we are happy to facilitate that it will require bumping some items you your agenda are booked through the rest of the year, but we were happy to try to re sequence some items if. HAB-Masyn Moyer- Council is interested in hearing more about that proposal.

HAB-Masyn Moyer- what's the pleasure comes up.

Are they asking us to be involved in this, especially maybe in this region of the city? Where the stop might be?

I'm not exactly sure what the proposal is. So I think there's been some conversation at the board level, but frankly, I don't even know what the, I think there has been an idea to potentially adapt something like a Highway 7 coalition or a NATO or something similar to that to support. Again, they've been working with RTV to identify some design funding for the remainder of the inline. So yeah, I don't know what specific, if there's a specific proposal at this point or if they're getting feedback.

So I wonder if it would be beneficial for you guys to have a meeting first. Well, you can only do two because otherwise it's an open meeting with some of the staff to talk about what they're looking for from support from council. And then you can let us know if it's worth coming back to council at that point of what they're looking for and how much time we need for it.

I was going to say, because the agendas are so slammed, is there an option or I'm going to get to go and buy everybody else by saying like, what about a night other than Tuesday? Or we've had Adams County health meetings on Saturdays and stuff and So I would like to avoid that.

Sorry, but let's let's avoid that. Maybe it is just like a one off, like the checkout.

And if you guys could get information and bring it back to us, and then we can see how we adjust our schedule based on what they're looking for. Because if it's still in the early stages, maybe it can wait till early next year.

Yeah. I like that better. If it's just us. Yeah.

Can we work that? Okay. That's it for me. Right. And who are you, ma'am? I'm new here. Nothing. All right. Well, welcome and thank you for being part of this. Appreciate you. The first thing is the 2027 budget summary.

Yeah. So tonight is really a dipping your toe in. So just a reminder, you'll have really detailed presentations on the 15th and the 29th. So a lot of what we'll do tonight is just sort of setting the stage, the context of the broader budget. We will share some of those key new investments that are included in the budget. And then we will spend some time talking about the personnel elements of the budget. Part of the reason that we spend some time at this point in the process on personnel as it's such a big part of the budget. So those assumptions are really significant. So if there's questions or direction that we need to try to address, those sometimes are challenging modifications to make implications of pretty slight changes from a personnel perspective can have some pretty significant impact. So that's one of the reasons we front loaded that. Because ultimately, if we get direction to pursue alternatives from council, it'll take us some period of time to try to figure out what those alternatives might look like and what those consequences might be. So with that, I'm going to give the floor to Erica Sena, our budget director. Good evening, Mayor, Mayor.

So I'm Erica, Senate Budget Director, and tonight I'm joined by Tricia Hinton Potter, our Human Resources Director, and Kim Newhart, our Finance Director. As Tansy mentioned, really the purpose of this presentation is to provide you all with a summary recommendation for the 27 budget, sort of like the key investments of what's included in the budget. Certainly not all the detail that'll come on the 15th and 29th. And then to receive initial feedback and guidance from you all. So first we're gonna focus on different touch points that have occurred throughout the process or will continue to occur. An overview of our financial structure and some of our overarching policies, our financial philosophy, our current position, and how we plan into the future. Then we'll focus on those key investments in strategic focus areas. Second to last are the investments in current employees. So what Tansy mentioned previously, and then followed by next steps. So what can you all expect moving forward? So y'all have seen this slide before. This shows what the major touch points with Council of the Community consisted of this year. So it started at the council retreat, better understanding what the priorities of council was. The strategic planning effort, so I listed the date that staff met and provided an update, but honestly, the strategic plan and the action items within that plan definitely acted as a bit of a guiding North Star for us, just in general. So it wasn't a single day, but it was sort of a culmination of efforts. We did have a survey that went out to the community, which we will share some of the results from that tonight. That closed on the 4th of July. Kim brought forward utility funds rate and fee discussion that happened August 18th. We are on that second to last bullet there. We're at the preliminary budget recommendation. And then we've got the two follow-up meetings, which goes into a lot more detail on the 15th and 29th. So what did this community outreach look like? So I have, this was our first effort where it was very budget focused. In prior years, we have looked to the community survey that's been going out every other year to help guide us in terms of like priorities or areas where the community might feel like we're lacking in some way. But in this instance, we actually picked some key questions that we wanted input from the community on. We did the survey online and then we also did an outreach booth at Thornton Fest. We had 102 responses from the online survey. I would say it's not statistically significant. These were just individuals. Anyone could participate in it. The first question we asked was, what strategic focus areas are residents most interested in? And we asked them to basically rank the four strategic focus areas. And the order in which I have them listed was the order in which they came up as priority. One thing just to note, they were all pretty close. The results that you see here were very similar to what we saw. Actually, they were identical to what we saw in person as well. We had chips that people were allowed to take, and then they could vote into these different strategic focus area buckets. They actually came out identically. The next question was, what are residents interested in funding? And the two options were, are you interested in focusing on the basics and maintaining what we have? Or are you interested in expanding services and infrastructure to line up with potentially what other jurisdictions in the region are offering? And majority, over 70% of individuals said they were looking for a focus on the basics, maintaining current infrastructures, current infrastructure and programming. And I felt like that tied in really, that tied in really well to the conversation that we had with you all about a month ago, where we were talking about the different tension points within the budget. You know, do we want to focus on current levels of service? We want to focus on expansion. And the feedback that we received from you all was like, let's focus on core levels of service. And so I felt like that was really in, that was mirrored in this survey as well. So this is just a very brief overview of our financial structure and policies. What this graphic shows are all of the different funds that we have within the city of Thornton. So these are basically funds that we have to budget for. In total, there are 20. If you consider the TDA as three separate funds, TDA South, TDA North, and TDA 144th. Each fund or type of fund has its own way of generating revenues and has limitations on how the money can be spent. And so when you see the budget come forward on the 15th and then on the 29th, the way that you'll see it is actually separated out by fund, which is not something we do in this presentation. This presentation is really just about key investments, doesn't matter what the fund is.

So this slide provides just a real high level financial overview. And what it helps to do is build some context around the scope of our budgeting efforts. So the city as a whole, including all of our funds that Erica just talked about, carry a $1.9 billion fund balance. So this is the difference between what the city owns assets and what the city owes liabilities. So you're going to hear us talk throughout the presentation about available fund balance. And this is the amount left over in the funds after all of our restrictions and commitments. And it basically represents the amount that you can use for purposes as long as they fall within the guidelines of the fund. The city holds $7.3 billion in assets. Of those assets, 70% of them are capital assets. And the reason I tell you this is because there are significant resources that we manage throughout the year. So as we walk through the budget, you're going to see that we're putting investments into constructing or purchasing new assets, maintaining our existing assets, which is a large majority of the budget. Council has a fund balance policy, which is based on best practices. This policy includes having a general fund reserve of 17% of the general fund budget. Our sewer and sanitation funds, we have a 90-day of the current operating budget. And then Water Fund has 180 days of current year operations and maintenance. Council also has a debt policy. Key items in our debt policy include that borrowing is for... capital projects or capital improvements that can't be financed with our existing revenues. Also, bonds need to be paid back over a period that's equal to or less than the projected useful life of whatever we're financing. Debt obligations, debt and contractual obligations are always paid first when we work through our budget. And then there's for the city debt, there's a limit of 10% of the assessed taxable property valuation of the city.

Before you move on, Justin.

So can you tell me which of these reserve debt management policies are by ordinance and which ones are from the charter? Just what's the source of each one of those?

I believe they're by resolution. I don't think it's an ordinance.

I guess my question was, could you follow up and send the... You know the name of the ordinance or where it is in the charter or what resolution is for those policies.

All right, so moving into our philosophy current position and planning. This is also a slide previously shown, but I think it's an important one. So that first main bullet to balance our philosophy is to balance available financial resources within these different priority areas. So there are sort of these four major priority areas and there's tension between them because you kind of can't do all of them. So the first one is maintaining levels of service. Again, this was one that, you know, Council had expressed an opinion of like, we're interested in maintaining those core levels of service. You can see that was reflected also in that community survey. The next one was enhancing current or creating new levels of service. remaining competitive in the labor market. So this is about, you know, raises and benefits mostly. And then the last one there is financial sustainability. And again, there's tension between those because the top three all have a tendency to cost money. And the bottom one is trying to slow the spending of money or bringing in new money. Second bullet, It is our goal to always prepare a balanced budget. We will always prepare a balanced budget, meaning ongoing revenues meet or exceed ongoing expenditures. I think that's important to note, ongoing, because sometimes if we have a large capital project or, well, it's mostly either a large capital project or a large software project, we may recommend utilizing some level of fund balance and spending down that fund balance to cover that one-time cost. generally preparing a balanced budget ongoing. And then lastly, to meet or exceed our financial sustainability goals now and in the future, which I will talk more on when we get to the general government model graph.

As we've worked through this process starting in January, we're looking at the latest economic forecast. So we use a combination of the Colorado Legislative Council's forecast as well as National forecast. And then we, we analyze deeper into our own performance. So inflation continued. This is the latest numbers we have. Inflation continues to remain above the federal reserves, 2% target. Nationally CPI is at 3.4%. This is just slightly down from June of 2025. So year over year. The Denver Aurora Lakewood CPI is 3.9% for July. So slightly above national. Retail and food services, we like to compare. That's decreased just this past month, but there's a 5% overall increase from July of last year. Unemployment's at 4.1%. Colorado's a bit lower than that at 3.9%. We haven't had any interest rate cuts in 2026 through the month of August yet. And then... As I mentioned earlier, we look to the state's forecast. They're anticipating sales tax growth of 3.3% in their fiscal year 25-26. So they have a different calendar year than us. And then 4.6% in fiscal year 26-27.

So considering that economic update and what we've shared previously, I think there are some major key considerations as we go into this budget recommendation. Ultimately, the goal of this recommendation is to advance the city towards those four strategic focus areas, along with building towards long-term financial sustainability. So we have some challenges. As Kim just mentioned or has mentioned in the past, we have sort of this continued slow revenue growth. It's not just us. That's happening at the state level and at the national level as well. We are seeing it specifically in a slowdown in development activity and then sort of a flattening in our sales tax revenue. We are also seeing large increases in resource requests. This started off just what was being requested as part of the budget, but now it's also what is being incorporated into the budget just based on maintaining what we already have. We saw some large increases, as mentioned previously, in overtime, in software, and specifically in some of our utility budgets. So what is our response to these challenges? We're really in a limited growth environment. We can't control necessarily the revenue of these large revenue streams coming in short term. I do think there's the ability for us to impact them long term, but short term there isn't. We are looking to limit expenditure growth. We're striving to maintain those core levels of service. We are looking for creative cost-saving measures, and that's not going to stop when the 2027 budget recommendation comes forward. We'll be continuing on throughout the remainder of the year and past that even. We really carefully consider all new requests. Any new positions, any new programs, Those were all carefully considered. And then we wanted to make sure that we integrated the strategic focus areas and master plans into that recommendation wherever we could.

There's a few of the next slides we've shared with council several times. So I'll try to move through these quickly. But stop me if you have questions. This one is just a picture. It helps illustrate our level of confidence. So as we move closer, we do, you know, 15-year models. As we move closer, things get a little bit clearer. There's always going to be some uncertainties, whether it comes to the economy or the development community. But we're able to dial those in, like I said, as we get closer to the year. The annual budget, as Erica mentioned, it's one step in a broader process. So as we're dialing this in, we're looking at actuals and we're still focusing on outer years. So the more we learn, every time we learn something new, we're plugging that in. And we want to make sure that the city stays on that sustainable path. so we have um again 10 to 15 year models for each fund and we use basically the same framework for all of our models each model includes the core components that are listed so we've got ongoing and one-time revenues debt financing and related payment requirements we've got known expenditures so both ongoing and one-time projected fund balance levels um we're making sure that we maintain our reserve requirements. And then what's important here is that all of these, as we dial in all of these expenditures and revenues, they're going to help us understand how any decision that we make today impacts our future years. So even though we're working in 2027, we're always paying attention to what the impact is in the out years. And then how we build these forecasts. So we're looking at historical trends. We also then dig into them deeper. Are those trends meaningful? Is there something that's driving those trends that will continue or won't continue or is sustainable or not sustainable over time? We're going to incorporate forward-looking economic drivers. So we're looking at national, state, local forecasts. We're paying attention to inflation, interest rates. We also rely heavily on the department and their expertise to understand what their needs are in the future to help us build out our models. We consider legislative policy. So everything from the federal state down to the local level, that can influence revenues and expenditures. We think about rates and fees, both internally, so rates and fees that we set, and then externally, so you think about utilities. So we're trying to get ahead of that and make sure that we understand what the changes are there. And then grants we model once they're awarded to the city. We also distinguish between one-time revenues and expenditures and reoccurring revenues and expenditures. We want to make sure, again, that we are sustainable throughout the out years. And then finally, I think what's important to note here is that we're conservative. We're conservative on the revenue side, and we're going to be conservative on the expenditure side to help protect that future.

Yes. Sorry, I didn't push my button.

Gotcha. I wrote your name down. Thank you.

When you say conservative on the expenditures, do you mean like you're over... You're overestimating what you might be. I can see that being conservative on revenues. Could they be conservative on expenditures? Could be... the wrong direction. So do you see what I'm saying? It's being conservative on expenditures like saying you're 1.5% or 1.5 times what you might actually use. I wouldn't say that.

I don't know if you want to help it. Yeah. So I think when Kim is saying conservative on the revenue side, she may be, you know, instead of projecting three and a half percent on sales tax she might she might uh project three percent um she's not gonna round up on her projections and in that way we are mitigating some level of risk by not being overly optimistic um on the expenditure side we tend to If you think about it in terms of like, how does the general fund end up every year? We normally see 0.5% to 1.5% in savings every year. If you think about what that means in terms of dollars, that's about a million dollars to two to $3 million in savings every year. Now, that savings sort of moves around every year, and we can't necessarily predict it, but I think there is some level of conservatism in that we are budgeting more than we're actually spending in any given year. And so I think that there's just a little bit of cushion there. And that is built into our model.

Let me clarify. We're not taking expenses and putting a multiplier or something on them. It might be that we assume a contract is going to be for the full year because somebody has requested a contract. And it's possible that that contract doesn't actually in the real world get in place until three months in the year. So we might have some savings. And just a reminder, we do actually offset some of that conservatism. Like we, um, you know, we already have a vacancy rate that we include in, so we don't fully budget, for example, personnel, because we know we are going to have some vacancies in there. So I think generally, you know, we're assuming full expenditure of the things that departments say they're going to spend. Sometimes they don't actually do that. So I think Is that fair to say? That's where the conservatism is.

Conservative in expenditures is overestimating what you're going to expend.

I don't think that we are not intentionally overestimating. I think that we have seen a pattern over the years where, as Tansy mentioned, we might anticipate or the department may anticipate a contract going into effect January. What is the full cost of that contract? We wind up only needing nine months of it, so we find savings that way. we do not have like a built-in savings into expenditures. And the way that we tend to model expenditures into the out years is relatively consistent with historical averages of what we've actually seen, or occasionally on the lower side. So for example, we're a growing city, we model five FTE, five FTE growth per year, which is relatively low considering we're growing. And so in that way, I think of our expenditures as we're trying to project at like realistic levels. Evan?

How does that incorporate into like the reserve funding? Do we have a set amount that we try to put into the reserves each year as well on top of that?

We do not have an amount that we are looking to add to reserves every year. And there is no amount over the reserve that we are necessarily looking for. Like we're not always consistently looking for, we need to be $10 million over the reserve. But what we are looking for is we have two major financial goals related to our general government model. The first one is, and they're all about timing. And the first one is what we call our inflection point. The inflection point refers to when our budget is modeled to become unbalanced, where ongoing expenditures overtake revenues. We want to make sure that that is occurring five years or later in the model from the year we're budgeting for. So if we're budgeting for 2027, we wanna make sure that inflection point is in 2031 or later. The secondary goal, and frankly, the goal that's easier to hit is what we think of as like our available fund balance zeroing out point. And that is when, once we hit the inflection point in the model, and expenditures overtake revenues, we sort of slowly eat into the fund balance. And at some point, we eat into the fund balance so much that we get to zero available fund balance. Now, there are reserves that are still underneath that threshold but we are always looking to maintain available fund balance above that reserve amount. And in fact, we are looking for that to be that zeroing out point to be 10 years in the future. And the goal there isn't for us to actually hit the inflection point in five years or the zeroing out point. It is for that to be, it's for it to be a tool and just a way for us to observe the inflection point and the zeroing out point to sort of understand where we are in terms of how are we spending our money and are we, financially sustainable.

Yeah, I kind of jumped ahead because I know you're two slides ahead on that one for answering that. But do we see any specific trends that are causing a depletion as far as reserves? Are we having to dip into reserves for any specific kind of funding or utility often?

I don't think that there's any one thing that is causing us to dip into it. We haven't dipped into true reserves, at least in the time that I've been in budget, which at this point has been eight years. We have not gone into our reserves at all. Now, what we have done is done one time spending out of available fund balance above and beyond revenues for any given year. And as part of the more detailed presentation on September 15th, we are planning on sort of walking through what that looks like. Here are all revenues. Here are all expenses. Back out one-time revenues. Back out one-time expenses. You'll see the detail of all of those things to sort of give you what is that actual dollar number of the inflection point, really, the ongoing.

Yeah, because I'm looking at the slide for the one that's coming up, and that inflection point, it seems like the reserve list kind of just plummets quick, so that's very concerning.

Justin? Yeah, just following up on the questions that Devin's asking, the floor that you mentioned, is that the 17% that we have by law?

So the floor that we're talking about is the 17%, which is a council policy. And then on top of that, the 3% TABOR reserve.

All right. So I know we're both here to get, everybody's here to see the very cool graph. But so that means like when we spin it all, we burn it all down. The floor of that, that's the 17%. There's still a 17%. TAB, Mark McIntyre, or your general fund budget plus 3% taper that's right. TAB, Mark McIntyre, So it doesn't mean we're out of money, it just means we're out of response.

TAB, Mark McIntyre, Thank you.

TAB, we've gone over the slide before these are key drivers that we look at so we've got some key growth drivers. We have sales tax growth. Inflation is a key growth driver. And these are both on the revenue and the expenditure side. Population growth will impact our out years development rate and fee increases. One of the things that I've mentioned in the past is, and when you look at that graph, one thing to keep in mind is we are conservative. So if you look at expenditures, for example, and let's just think about, we'll just think about ambulance. Those costs are gonna go up every single year. What we're not putting in these models is that council is going to approve an increase to those fees every single year, right? And so there'll always be a structural imbalance at some point in the model. It can't not happen. And so we'll only project revenues that we know council's already approved or that they're going to happen. So personnel increases are another one. personnel growth, levels of service. We also have some external factors that we're trying to dial in as we work through each budget year. So right now, we think a lot about the economic slowdown and what risk that we have there. So when we go to... uh, forecast our sales tax revenue, we're going to keep that pretty minimal. We might've experienced a 10% growth one year and a 5% the next, but what everybody's saying is it's going to be two and a half. And so we're going to, we're going to be conservative and go with the two and a half. Um, we also think about inflationary pressures on our residents, right? If everything they're in their world's going up, then we need to be careful that, you know, what, what we're doing, um, impacts them. We also have interest earnings. Um, Grant timing and then we also look at policy impacts the legislative impacts like I talked about before that we don't have control over. We will get into like more detail on all those drivers as we work through each one of those funds because every fund has a different a different makeup. These pie charts you've seen before, this represents there's revenues are on the left and expenditures on the right. And so what you'll see here is that taxes, so you've got your sales tax, use tax, property tax, that's making up a large part of that graph. And then on the other side, expenditures, personnel makes up over 75%. of the expenditure side. And so it's just a good visual of, you know, there's some things we can control and some things we can't, and where's that money coming from? So if you look at intergovernmental revenues or even grant revenues, those are smaller pieces of the pie. So all that revenue, you know, matters, it adds up. However, it's, it's a lot smaller piece of the pie than sales tax, which we don't really have. we don't really have the ability to influence. And then again, on the expenditure side, personnel eats up so much of that graph that we need to be careful what's building in the out years. We've talked about this table before. We have various tools. I won't go into detail on all of them, but again, Under our current assumptions, expenditures, again, increase naturally over time. Revenue is more dependent on economic conditions, growth, policy decisions. And so we will have that structural imbalance, but council does have some tools and levers to make some of those adjustments. Let's talk about the bottom. Okay.

Yeah, the only thing I would add to this is, or one thing that I'd like to highlight really, is that first one on the expenditures side. So that is change growth to wages or benefit plans. So there is a certain amount of wage growth and personnel growth that is built into the model. And as Kim mentioned on the previous slide, over 75% of our costs in the general fund is made up of personnel costs. Now that's anything from health insurance, salaries, overtime training. It's kind of all of those things added together. Um, but it's definitely an area where if we are able to sort of bend the curve on what, um, What we're actually doing as opposed to what we were anticipating for wage growth or personnel growth that certainly that acts as like a lever for additional financial sustainability. It sort of bends the curve that you're going to see on that next graph. And we have a number of spots that are working on a variety of these. As I mentioned earlier, the revenues, sure, we might not have the ability to impact these short-term, but we do have the ability to potentially impact them long-term and really multiple different revenue streams. So that's something we are working on long-term, but certainly as part of the budget, we are focused more on the levers on the right side of this slide, more focused on the expenditures. So this is a graph of the general government financial model. Just to orient you all to the model, so the dark blue columns are the available fund balance. This is the fund balance above and beyond those reserves that we were just mentioning. And then the light blue line are expenditures or modeled expenditures. These aren't written in stone. They are likely, in fact, they will for certain change. But this is at least what we're modeling right now. And then the orange line are those revenues. So as I mentioned previously, we are looking for two separate things. That's why we have these two graphs overlaid against each other. So the first goal we're looking for and what is more challenging to attain is having the inflection point out five years. If we hit our goal, that would be in 2031. Right now, based on this budget recommendation, we are actually modeling the inflection point to hit in 2032. The available fund balance goal would suggest that we would hit zero or under zero in 2036. We are actually surpassing that goal also by a year. Right now, if we were to extend this graph by one year and bring it out to 2037, you would see available fund balance going negative. What that means is that we would be eating into reserves. You might look at this graph. If you're comparing the orange and blue line and you're comparing those to the dark blue columns and going, OK, well, if we're hitting if we're not hitting the inflection point until 2032, why is available fund balance not going up every year? You would think it would be going up. And the reason for that are those one time spent the one time spending that is going on every year. And so you might see in 2027, for example, we have South Washington Corridor improvements going on. Mitigation happening at Thornton Shopping Center. We have the 10 year replacement cycle of PD radios. These are large costs that we are not anticipating to recur every single year. But what it's doing is it's eating into fund balance in that year. So that's why you see sort of this movement in the graph that doesn't align exactly with those inflection point lines. Any questions on this? Devin?

Specifically with the 2027, based on that ideology, we're already in our inflection point because our expenditures are already going to be higher. What are we, and I know we're going to go into a deeper dive into that, what are we looking at for those big expenditures this year, this looking like a roughly $2 million difference?

So it's actually, it's interesting. This is actually a mixture of revenues and expenditures causing this to occur in 2027. So there was sort of this, I don't know how you would, it's like inflection point 1.0. And we looked at it as a one-time spending related to the health insurance increases this year. We are working to bring that health insurance back down out of the atmosphere in 2028. But between that and just revenue sort of flattening in 2027, we're sort of seeing this initial inflection point. In 2028, you see revenues jump up. The reason for that is TDA North is going to be ending as a fund. When that happens, the sales tax from TDA North is going to flow into the general fund. It brings up those revenues and helps sustain a balanced budget through that 2032.

Are we seeing any concerns with that as well? I know that the agreement we have going on with Westminster is going to be ending semi-soon as well. Is that going to hit us pretty hard as well as far as growth?

You're talking about the Westminster Revenue Sharing Agreement. That's in the model. We are modeling for that revenue to end. In fact, I believe it ended this year. We are not anticipating it and it's no longer baked in, but it certainly did have an impact on 27.

To be more clear, we've already absorbed that loss.

I have a broader than Justin.

I have a few questions. Specifically around healthcare benefits, you said out of the atmosphere. So is that like you're trying to adjust for making it closer to market or something like that?

It's not necessarily. So we saw pretty substantial when we first went out to market this year to see what those increases were going to look like. They were really substantial. They were over 20% increases. And so we were able to bring those down to an average of about a 15% increase in 2027. And then how it was working in the model was in the past, at least in like the last five, 10 years, we've seen the increases of about 5% annually. And so what's happening in the model is we saw this really big spike and then we're building off of that spike 5% annually, year over year. So when I say we're trying to bring it back down out of the atmosphere, what we're really looking to do is do some plan design next year for the 2028 budget, start basically right now at looking at what those things could be to potentially have no increases in health insurance or very limited increases in health insurance in 2028 to sort of help us offset this large increase this year.

Okay. So there's a few things I want to make sure of before, like, cause I know it's going to take some time to look into this stuff, but I'm getting word on the street from folks knocking doors, talking to residents who are also city employees. I've heard it from a few different channels. So I want to make sure that we're doing what's right for our employees here at the city of Thornton, whether they're union or non-union. I think it's easier for admin folks that are working in this building to to absorb some of that cost. But what I'm hearing is there's going to be a limited increase in wages, and then there's going to be an increase in the different design elements of the healthcare package. So it may not come across in premiums, but it comes across in other things. So I have a few different things I'd like for folks to look into. Number one, some future slides that might address some of those questions now. If I could just put it out there because I think it's going to probably need to be addressed. I'd like to make sure that we're looking at, because this is the concern of the people that I'm hearing from, that were knocking on doors and different folks that are running for office and stuff like that. I'd like to know, we have had an increase in admin staff here as far as folks that are in these bigger positions. I would like to know the total costing of that. I'd like to know the total cost of what's being saved in health care. And I'd like to know the total cost of the increase in salaries for the city employees. And I think I'll start there, but I think we need to start to look at that because I do believe that the city employees feel that they're going to have a limited increase in their wages and their health care benefits are going to Their out-of-pocket costs in healthcare is going to increase, which will then make it either a net zero or actually they'll be in a situation where they're paying more. Now, when you work in an admin position and you're making over $100,000 or $150,000, $200,000 a year, that seems like a minimal thing, but I'm talking about parks workers, folks in our... parks and recs departments and other parts of the city where folks are living paycheck to paycheck and this is going to be a significant cost increase for them or it's going to end up being a net zero increase in their wage for this year and that's just, you know, for me personally, as somebody who stands up for working class people, rank and file workers, it's not acceptable. So I just want to make sure that we're looking into that. Now, when we start this conversation, instead of when we're in this meeting, you know, on the third last meeting, and it's like, we're trying to wrap it up. Like, I'd like to make sure this is addressed. Cause I, for one, I'm not going to be okay with a budget that doesn't take care of our employees in the city of Thornton. So that's all I want to say.

You're happy to bring that back as part of, and we can certainly start the conversation on the 15th with this information.

Thank you. Thank you for that.

Yeah, you mentioned the TDA North ending next year. Can you, off the top of your head, do you know the scale of, I can't remember how much TDA North is collecting. If you can't remember, that's okay. Just follow up with an email. Again, I can't remember how much we're talking here.

I'm not sure, but Kim might. Yeah, I don't remember. We can follow up.

Oh, it's in an email, in a document that you shared with us. All right, it's just some of the fun stuff.

So key investments and initiatives. So we broke this down into the four strategic focus areas and sort of what elements of the budget fit within there. And then we do call out if there's something specific that came out of an action item or one of the spots that y'all heard from a few weeks back. So first we'll focus on vibrant and purposeful development. So this budget does include a recommendation to revitalize priority areas of the city. This includes improvements along the South Washington corridor. So there's 2.9 million in the budget in 2027. The full project cost is 13.8 million. This project has been going on since 2025. So there was appropriation in 25, 26, 27, and then a little bit more in the future. Currently, staff is working on design of this project, and there will be some construction later this year. The first full year of construction will be in 2027. I mentioned this one earlier. Remediation of the Sort and Shopping Center, or Market at 88th, continues, ultimately with the goal of redevelopment. 819,000 is programmed in 2027, and that is related to vapor testing and mitigation, along with monitoring. We have $100,000. This was proposed by a spot. This is for TDA North branding and placemaking. It's just sort of the general area. We wouldn't actually be branding things as TDA North. But the idea here is for placemaking and branding for that area. This ties into three separate spot teams, but was proposed by one. So it focuses on the identity of different districts around the city, art and capital branding, and then ultimately, again, placemaking. And then lastly, a new grant called the Launch Local Grant Program. So this is a pilot, $25,000 in 2027 to just see if there's efficacy in bringing on new locally owned businesses to the area. Before you move on, Devin.

Remediation to the Thornton Shopping Center. The full project cost is $17,700. Is that included in the $819,000?

Yes.

And then what is our expected expenditure after that point? Do we have an idea?

So the $17,700 encompasses everything.

And then do you know what the year to date so far is? Have we actually spent up to that $69,000 point at this point?

No, we haven't. I think we've spent, and I can follow up with an exact number. I believe we've spent about $12 million so far. Thank you. I'll follow up with an exact number.

So on that subject, could you also clarify how much of that $17.7 million is from the TDA South first general fund? Yes. Percentages? Yep, for sure. A lot of it was from TDA South by McConnell.

That's right.

One thing I don't see on here is anything related to like the East Lake grain elevator or that area. How does that become a priority on this list?

There is nothing in the recommendation currently for the East Lake grain elevator. I think that You know, it's something that if it comes up as a particular interest of council or if it shows up in a strategic focus area, those are sort of the different pathways to having it in the introduced into the budget.

And it is addressed by a spot that is working on plans, next steps and recommendations for city-owned sites. And it was also addressed by the update that we're planning to do the stationary master plan. But if they're specific.

So those spot recommendations, are we anticipating that there will be things that will be included in the 2027 budget as a result of that? Or is that being pushed to 2028?

We don't have any recommendations. Those teams have just begun their work. So we didn't have any requests or recommendations for the 2027 budget.

Okay. Can we talk more about the branding and placemaking of TDA North? Unless that's going to be like a more detailed presentation later on.

Yes, we are happy to bring forward more detail on it as part of the September 15th presentation.

I guess what I'm confused about is the TDA North is going away. What is branding and placemaking in its place?

I think it's more about branding and placemaking for the idea was there was an interest in developing districts or sort of having an identity for different parts of the city. So even though this is called TVA North branding and placemaking, it's really about the geographic location and the businesses that are within that businesses and other assets within that area of the city.

I think the goal is to pilot some strategies in TDA North. One of the things here that you'll see in a different presentation is, again, I think the reason to start that pilot in TDA North is that we do have the TDA there that's got some flexible funds to support a pilot that we could learn from and potentially expand to other areas of the city. Is that helpful?

That is helpful. And then as far as the local grant program, is that you briefly touched on it, but is that like an entrepreneurship startup grant or is that truly to pull people from outside the city in? Because either way, 25K is small potatoes for either direction. So I'm just curious. I'll have to follow up with you on that.

about the specifics.

I mean, I like the idea if it's what I'm thinking in my head, but it'd be great to get more details.

So on the 15th and the 29th, we'll actually have departments present in detail the recommendations and enhancements in their budget. So this is really, again, just to give you a taste and then we'll get in greater detail. It is really helpful to have the questions tonight and then we can make sure that the department directors are prepared with additional explanation when they present on the 15th or 20th.

Yeah. And then back on the East Lake point, you know, a couple of years ago, I know we spent a pretty significant amount of money to bring in consultants to help out with, you know, East Lake Street Fair launch and getting that feedback from the community, spending money on an East Lake streetscape plan. And so, you know, I guess that's why I'm asking HAB-Masyn Moyer- revitalizing and priorities how that's not even on this list yeah so maybe that needs to be counsel direction at some point, but that'd be something I thought I would see from like the spot teams as a analyze across the city because. I don't know. I feel like we're missing an opportunity, but I do appreciate, again, what you have.

And this is just a one-year budget that we're talking about, too. So some of those could be future years. So maybe that's the conversation.

Well, I think part of my question is that it's always been, the answer has always been future years. And so it's like, all right, when is that year? Is it this year? So anyways.

Yeah, just to give some context. And we did have some requests from spot teams that the city's strategic plan didn't get adopted until October. And so then strategic plan teams, I think, started working in the January, February time. Our budget kicks off. So budget requests. So to some degree, I think next year we'll see a lot more requests coming from spot teams. just because many spot teams didn't even have, you know, they were just really getting action plans in place by the time that budget requests were available. Certainly if the council, you'll see a list of sort of the capital needs and requests that came in, and we by far were not able to recommend funding for all of the capital requests. I do think the Washington project is an example of where there was some direction from the council to staff. And I don't think that happened immediately. I think, again, it was direction to incorporate funding for that project in future years. So certainly, I think we are open to direction from the council in terms of priorities that you'd like to see in future years. Thank you.

This next slide focuses on purposeful development. So there is $2 million for potential improvements or investments around the 144th and York plan station. The comprehensive plan is scheduled to kick off in 2028 for currently that's a million dollars and planned in 2028. So that is not necessarily a part of the appropriation happening in 2027, but it is a part of the five-year capital plan. And then one item that we wanted to highlight here, this was a grant-funded effort to assess Weld County and open space land use. So that grant was awarded in 2026, but work will continue into 2027. The next strategic focus area is connected communities. So first, we wanted to focus on reducing traffic congestion and enhancing safety. The first project is the widening of the Washington Street Bridge over E-470. This is funded out of the TDA North Fund, and this construction is at $19.4 million. There is continued investment in traffic safety and ADA improvements across the city, 712,000 in 2027, and then 600,000 planned annually thereafter. We have four new traffic signal installations recommended as part of this budget throughout the city for about $2.4 million. And then reflective signal backplates as part of the 2027 budget for about $500,000. This is a grant funded project and it relates to safety. It also ties into the picture on the slide. So that yellow around the edges, that's reflective. And so at night it makes it easier for drivers to see and recognize those stoplights. So connected communities is not just the roadway, it's also trails. And so as part of this budget, there is the focus on expanding our trail system. So construction of the Big Drag Creek Trail from 136th to 144th. is programmed in 2027. This project in 2027 is 2.3 million, but the total project cost is 6 million and is grant funded. We also have the Big Droid Creek Trailhead up at York and 152nd, 1.9 million. And then there's a missing sidewalk trail link on York Street from the Northern Lights Ball Field to Rocky Top Middle School for 850,000. True.

I'm really excited about this. I love seeing that. When we get the parks and open space master plan brief, are they going to talk about, well, I guess maybe you're not the right person to ask. I'm talking to you like you know. Are they going to talk about that big tri-creep kind of connection, continuity, completion?

To some degree. So you will actually get an update on the parks and open space master plan at your next meeting. And I would say it is much more kind of a policy largely document rather than really specific kinds of prioritize projects. One of the things that we have recommended in next year's in next year's budget is some money to draw from that. It's a, It's a really long document with lots of ideas and they're pretty general. So we have recommended that sort of an add on to lift out of that a more specific implementation. You know, those kinds of really specific priorities going forward so that you will see some, I don't know that it's in this presentation, but we do have some money allocated in next year's budget to build on that. So I think you will see frameworks that suggest HAB-Masyn Moyer- The kinds of priorities that the city should be exploring, but it doesn't get down and most with a couple of exceptions. It's got some brat bought broad sort of categorical recommendations, but it doesn't get down to like a specific capitalist because as far as I can.

HAB-Masyn Moyer- So then moving into the focus area of safe, supported and livable community. First, we wanted to focus on neighborhood services and engaging community programs. We think of this both in terms of programming and then also what is sort of passive programming. So you can think of that as like trails or playgrounds, but something that people can use just whenever they'd like. So first up is the completion of the housing and homelessness assessment. So this was funded in 2026 or continues on it. And we should have that complete in 27. There is a recommendation for the addition of an associate judge in courts. Then, as I mentioned, we think of this as sort of passive programming. The improvements at community park ponds. So these are sort of aesthetic improvements to sort of make the pond a place people might want to relax near or engage with. And then also improvements to the pump and aeration system at the pond. This was a grant funded project. It was actually an earmark project. And then Margaret Carpenter playground. So this funds improvements and replacements of the playground and the splash pad at Margaret Carpenter. And also a grant funded project totaling $2.7 million.

What percent of the playground was grant funded? Was it a match that we did 50-50 or what was that split?

So we normally do 70-30 on Adams County grants. I believe that we requested funding for that initial 1.35 million that was appropriated in prior year. And I know staff is going back out to request another grant for the additional funding in 2027. But I can follow up with exact figures for you.

I was just curious.

Okay.

Okay. Then focus on public safety services. So I mentioned this one earlier. This includes the replacement of the current public safety radio equipment. This includes the portable radios along with equipment that supports them. of $8 million. This includes about 400 radios. And again, the equipment to support them. The addition of one emergency communication specialist or dispatcher. So I haven't noted here, this is cost neutral. We took a position within the police department. It was an SRO position from a, it was a vacant position from a school that had gone a different path, no longer wanted an SRO. So we repurposed this vacant position for a dispatcher. There's also a recommendation to increase training within the fire department to ultimately increase the number of paramedics on staff within the fire department. $200,000 for an evaluation of public safety facilities. So this is understanding not only what do we have, but what do we not have, and potentially what improvements are necessary to keep our current facilities functional And then lastly, the addition of three firefighters. This is part of an effort that's spanned multiple years at this point to bring all engines to four-person staffing. So 2027 has this recommendation, and then we are currently modeling an additional three firefighters in 2028. HAB-Masyn Moyer- Right also as part of safe, supported livable hang on one second.

HAB-Jacques Juilland- Sorry, you may not know this, but I guess more directly towards you um the three additional firefighters is that going to bring us back up to a four man crew again.

HAB-Masyn Moyer- So this is the city traditionally didn't have for. HAB-Masyn Moyer- Personnel assigned to engines. So the plan since that goal has been added to the fire contract each year, we've covered a new station to put that station in place. And so this just does that at another station. So this continues the process.

All right.

So also as part of SSLC, we have exceptional utilities. So this budget continues the Thornton Water Project. Over the five year, there's an additional about $38 million dedicated to the Thornton Water Project as it's sort of, can't believe that $38 million is the project winding down, but it is. We also have about $500,000 of ongoing funding budget to fund a number of positions. I believe there's three new positions in the conversion of a contract position. These positions will help to maintain new assets, including the Thornton Water Project and the PFAS treatment infrastructure. So as we bring online this new infrastructure, we need folks to help maintain it. We have had and we continue to have a robust water conservation program for residents. This also extends somewhat to HOAs and commercial properties as well. That program has a budget of over $500,000. And if folks want to learn more, there's information available at thorntonwater.com. Also part of this recommendation is $750,000 for a new vacuum truck that will help maintain stormwater and water lines throughout the city.

David? Question regarding the conservation program. Looking at the numbers that are there, it looks like we're spending more money on our conservation program than we do on actually maintaining and building out new assets. really consist of the 545,000 for the conservation for spending more than it actually takes to build out new assets as a whole.

Yeah. So I, this might, that second bullet maybe is a bit misleading. We are not only spending 500,000, we are spending millions annually in terms of maintaining what we already have, both in terms of capital maintenance and also just like ongoing operating costs. The 500,000 is related to new costs and, It's really related to there's three new positions. So there's two maintenance specialists, a SCADA tech, and then the conversion of a process specialist. Those positions really make up that $500,000. And the focus of those positions is to maintain that new infrastructure. But there are significantly more than that $500,000. And as far as what is exactly in the conservation program, I am happy to provide that information.

We can try to estimate the total cost of maintenance of the system to get a better comparison.

I mean, that makes more sense. Just looking at the numbers are there, but I'm still very curious on the 545,000 for the conservation program.

Okay, last but not least, I have to say that because in organizational excellence, we have, so first off, a big focus of OE is how do we leverage technology to help us run smarter, more efficiently. And there were a number of things that we were able to highlight as part of this budget. So first up, we have virtual building and landscape inspection enhancements. So we have been doing this, but the way in which we were doing it wasn't exactly streamlined. So now by integrating into CityView, we basically have one program, one way for folks to get in. It's just a smoother interface for folks and very low cost. There is a recommendation to add strategic plan and performance measurement software. This is to make sure that we are tracking the information. Not only are we tracking it, but we are also providing it public facing to make sure that if it's in the strategic plan, we want to make sure people know where we're at with things. I will say this is one thing that staff is currently exploring alternatives to an additional $50,000 software, but as right now, that is in the recommendation. There's financial reporting software. This is to help make the act for and compiling all of that information, which we have to do annually significantly more efficient. This was funded in 2026, but we are currently working towards implementation of the new RMS and CAD system, which we believe will allow for significant efficiencies in those two systems. And then we are planning the new sales tax software in 2028, and it's part of the five-year capital plan. Also as part of OE, we were looking to review revenue streams. This is actually, I mean, it's its own action item within this focus area. So you'll notice the first one up there, there's a fees and charges study, which is being proposed as part of the budget, $200,000. This was proposed as part of a spot actually proposed this. And it's really looking at what is the philosophy of our fees and charges. Is there something that we could, you know, are we looking for a certain subsidy rate? Does it depend on what type of fee and charge? And then how do we create a sustainable program long-term to bring those forward to you all in a regular programmed way? The utility rate study is being recommended. This is for all utilities. And it's really to help focus on lining up the development code with that with the utility rates, as well as addressing small lot sizes. The next two are no-cost items, but I did want to bring them up. We are actively reviewing unfunded projects to strategically link them to grant opportunities in 2027 and out years. So we're actually already working with our federal lobbyists to see what of the projects that are currently not in the budget might be good candidates for grant funding. And then lastly, this is just, if we have additional payment options, easier way for folks to pay, it just helps us more consistently bring in revenues related to our fees and charges. And so the little snippet on the screen there, the new payment option is really related to utility billing and just finding more convenient ways for customers to pay their bill. And now I'll turn it over to Tricia Hinton Potter to talk investments in foreign employees.

Can I get to talk about the move on? Okay.

Sorry. Can we go back to the revenue slide? Sure. Is that 500,000? That's the direction I want to go. That's already what is being proposed to spend for this budget. Is that right? So the fees and charges study. in the utility rate study. And how does that sync up with the recommendation for the utility rate increases that's already been kind of brought to us?

It relates just in the fact that the utility rate study is split between the different utilities and then it is picked up as part of new rates.

Does that answer your question?

Well, I guess I'm just trying to understand the need. for a utility rate study when we've already been given a recommendation that we need to increase utility rates? And also, is there any expectation that any of these reports are going to say that we reduce utility rates?

Yeah, the utility rate study, I think, is most responsive to some of the direction that the council has given to look at alternatives to things like the connection fee or how we're allocating costs across small lots and large lots. So to reconfigure the rate structure itself around some of the policy goals that you've identified.

So again, there's less about utility fees like water, trash, sewer.

Right. This is really the configuration of how the rate should work. And I think the council has identified some objectives to study in that. So again, um, There's, I think it's been explained previously. We basically have to demonstrate through the rate that no customer class is subsidizing another customer class. So I think this is some more detailed analysis to look at opportunities to fine tune the rates or some of those broader policy objectives that the council has identified.

So that's different from fees and charges study.

Fees and charges is really swim lessons, court costs, golf rates. So again, inventorying, there's a strategic plan operating team about inventorying all of the city's fees, establishing a sort of a fee philosophy, like how do we want to update those over time? So that's more of a general, I would say generally the fees and charges is more general fund revenue. The utility rate study is more about the utilities.

Okay. I guess I'm, I guess I'm wondering the, maybe, and I'd love to hear from other folks, just like the urgency of this spend in this budget cycle, but I recognize it was a part of the spot action item. But I mean, it is a significant amount of money. So I'm just curious what, if there's a way to not include that in this round, but I'm also open to suggest fees and charges study. Well, yeah, I mean, if we're looking for places to save, it seems like an immediate way to save money in the budget, because I guess, are you telling us that the fees that we're currently charging aren't working? Right.

And so we can, we can certainly defer it if that's the will of the council. If you look, if you think back to the beginning of the presentation, we talked about the leavers and in terms of diversifying our revenues. So right now we don't have a proactive approach to index or update our fees and charges on an annual rate. And so kind of episodically over time, somebody, I think this came, this sort of approaching this from a more philosophical perspective, for example, came up when you looked at court rates. So I think the city has more done increases in sort of fits and starts of, fees you know a fee here a fee there again the goal here was to be more comprehensive and thoughtful about the way what are what do we believe the cost recovery should be for certain sorts of services and set up a proactive process that each part each year is a part of the budget you're setting fees and charges appropriately so i think a little bit the goal here is to potentially um

make sure that we're up getting the appropriate level of revenue for services that we offer more from a revenue diversification perspective i also want to make sure as a council and i have devon and justin but our role is not to go line by line through the budget and say cut 200 here cut 100 here our role is to look at philosophy so if we're directing staff to do employee compensation they bring back how they can do that for us. And if we think that that's the wrong direction and it's not meeting the outcome of what we expect, we can redirect. But we can't say, cut this line item from the budget.

Well, I'm sharing a philosophy on, do we need to do a study for something that we don't need to do.

But the direction we gave was to look at opportunities to do this, and that's how they're coming back to us telling us they're going to do it. So I don't want to cut the questions because that's absolutely the case, but there may be some additional conversation to have with staff between now and the next budget conversation to dig into the why a little bit more so that we can talk philosophy when we get into the next discussion.

Yeah. I mean, that totally makes sense. I, again, I'm just, I'm going back to, maybe I'm thinking about it too simply, but spending almost 600 K on something that might tell us, yeah, we need to increase utility rates, which we already know, or we need to increase fees or it's hard for, and I understand the development side of that, where we're like trying to readjust, um, you know, how we're, how we're allocating it appropriately or charging appropriately for the size of lots and size of project or whatnot. Um, So it's just a large number to me that's alarming for what we might get out of it. And I'll just leave it at that. And if nobody else agrees with me, that's cool. But I'm just giving you feedback.

So I'm going to piggyback on that. I have similar concerns around a couple of things. One is that we just had a meeting regarding the need to increase utility rates. And we went over each individual utility in the last planning session. And we were basing that off of a study that we've just gotten. So in my eyes, it kind of looks like we're just continuously paying for studies every year to come back and tell us, hey, yeah, you need to raise your rates. And it seems kind of counterproductive in that sense. I would also be curious around some of the timing aspects of when we start adding these things into things, we've already been given recommendations around, well, this is what we think our fee structure should be. And now we're going to pay for a $200,000 fee structure study to kind of come back and redo again on another study that was already kind of in place. So from the philosophy of things, I think that the studies can benefit in a lot of sense to kind of give us the idea of what's going on around us from the other areas. I think that maybe the timing of what's we are supposed to be agreeing on when it comes to those increases and things are kind of misaligned with where we're at with kind of how we're agreeing to rate increases that are projecting three years out, but we're asking for studies every year. And it seems very kind of counterproductive in the way that we're actually doing that.

I can add a little context to that. So what we try to do is utility rate studies every five to six years. And those studies help us kind of They look at the big financial plan, 15-year plan. They're looking to make sure that rates and fees are by class. They're doing a deeper dive, that connection fees are defensible, that we're in market. They give us suggestions. And so then what we do in the between years is we come back to you and say, well, we've had to tweak this a little bit. So like, for example, our last rate study said if if you do X, Y, and Z and all these things become true, you're going to need a three and a half percent rate increase from now until 15 years. And so then what we do every year, we dial that in and we bring that back to you and we say, okay, we've tweaked that. And now that three percent became two and a half or that three percent became three and a half. What we don't want to do is wait every five-ish years to raise rates because we'd be doing huge rate increases is what we did with connection fees for a while. So now we're on this kind of annual, let's raise it based on like connection fees, for example, we raise on construction cost index. And so we're coming back to you and saying, this is what the construction cost index is telling us. We're going to raise like last year was 0%. This year, I think it was three and a half. We're going to raise three and a half. And then what happens when they come do the utility rate study is they'll say, okay, this is what the new number is. And we hopefully are pretty close to that number. So we're not doing a big 20% jump. Does that help a little bit?

When we did the study this year, what was the cost of the study that came back and told us to do that increase?

The last study we did was in 2024. And then we did like a little add-on study in 2025. And we looked at multifamily just connection fees. So the last true rate study completed in 24 was based on 23 data. And so what we put in the model is a 27 study that would base on 26 data for implementation of 2028.

So let me see if I can clarify. So we have a rate model that we work with a consultant that, again, creates different rates for different customer classes. And that has to be based in information that fairly distributes the cost of delivering services. That's what we're talking about here. Once that is established, then staff updates those assumptions year by year in terms of changes in the model or cost drivers or those kinds of things. So the updates, the recommendations that you got in terms of increases were using the existing rate structure and rate model. It was just updating in terms of What are new costs that we're absorbing that we've got great capacity for? This study is to step back from that rate structure altogether and potentially alter the way those rates to study some of those policy objectives that the council has asked. Is that clear about the distinction?

That's clearly a distinction, but that still didn't answer like what did we spend on the other two studies that we spent in 24 and 25 if we're going to be turning on doing another one because If we spent $200,000 on this last study that comes back and says, hey, you should cut the multifamily housing in half, which is what the recommendation was. Well, that study costs something. So what did that study cost us on top of whatever this is being added to? Because if we do this new utility rate study and this new fees and charge study, then that could come back and be like, hey, when you cut all that, that actually was disproportionate. Now you have to go back and redo everything again.

That last study was about $200,000 and it was split between water, not split evenly, but it was funded by water and sewer. And then the add-on piece, they didn't charge us extra for it. We went back and talked to them and they did. It's our data, so it was easy for them to do the calculation. So that was, like I said, it was about right around $200,000 in 2024.

You can provide the scope if that's helpful.

Yeah, I mean, if we're going to do the study again, which, I mean, there's no point in crying over spilled milk now. The money was already spent for the last one. But to consistently be doing our fees and change the study kind of year over year just seems like not necessary.

Yes, ma'am.

And actually, you know, I really, I agree with Devin and Drew on these concerns. And generally, I think all the conversations I've had with people all across the city, when we talk about having studies to do things, people don't really understand, you know, what, it's a bit frustrating to hear that the city is spending $600,000 on studies that we have frequently. Um, so I do share that concern. I think that a big disconnect on my end is I don't know what is in house and what we export or, um, you know, use consultants to help us. And so we, you know, we have a very large staff and, um, it's just a big mystery to me is how it's organized and how the labor is divided up and obviously if you're asking for the recommended budget recommendation for these studies that either there's a missing capacity or missing expertise, this would be helpful to understand I were outsourcing these things because, you know, when we, when I hear about previous rate studies, I, I just assume incorrectly that our staff is handling the most of the work on that. And so just, I think the context of knowing what the consultants are providing the whether we don't have the capacity to do it or we don't have the expertise, knowing that helps. And I think it helps me have those conversations with people out there who, you know, there's a lot of people out there who are watching the budget and they really care about what their taxpayer money is doing as they should. And so giving them some kind of context as to why we are doing this, it helps those conversations and it helps us make those decisions. And then the other thing is actually Mayor Coleman made a comment that brought some curiosity about i think she said you know we can't take items out of the budget and stuff and so um but i'm interested in because as far as i understand our role the council has the uh authority over the budget in the by the charter and so we are the ones signing off on the budget um the council does have the authority as far as i understand to remove items or add items So, am I wrong on this?

I think it's a both and. It's the philosophy. We set policy. It's a both and.

That was my next point because I think the way that it should be said is, yes, we can do this, but should we do this? And since I've been on council, I think the council's philosophy is, no, we shouldn't do this. We've taken a different approach. for everybody on council that we actually do have the authority, the final authority over the entire budget and what we do with that and what approach we take, which philosophy we take is up to us and that can change over time. So I thought that was interesting and I just wanted to make sure that I understood the authority of the council over the budget by the charter and it sounds like that's correct.

Yes.

John? Thank you, Madam Mayor. A great presentation so far. Learning experience. Thank you for clarifying these studies for us, but I do agree with Deb and Drew and Justin on this. I really think we shouldn't really be doing this every single year, especially when we already know what our utility rates and our court fees, we already had this discussion recently. So I would like to see refine this a little bit, not do this every single year. We've already done it long term. And this is an opportunity, guys. You're doing a great job, but still, you know, we do need to, you know, keep the fiscal health of our city in mind. So, yeah, I agree with my colleagues on that. So, thank you.

We can follow up on that. To be clear, I don't think a fee and charges study has ever been done for the city. So, I think inventorying all of the city's fees and creating a fee philosophy for those. I don't believe that has ever been done for the city. Again, we can certainly defer that effort or see what it would take to support something like that with internal resources. Again, part of that is we've got lots of different departments that collect fees. And so it's a pretty intensive process. exercise to go through all of those. That could be deferred. On the utility rate fee, again, a rate study, we can again share a little bit more of the legal risk about not having sufficient support for how we have outlined our rates. I think if there was a reluctance to have a consultant really study the distribution of rates and redistribute some of the allocation for some of these things like connection fees and other things, we may actually recommend that you defer that policy discussion until we have the resources to support that analysis. So again, I think in part those goals is what was driving a refresh of the rate structure and We can follow up some more about what is technical about that exercise to Council Member Martinez's point. Devin?

Yeah, to clarify, I think that the city staff is doing everything that you guys can in order to make sure everything's going through and the best kind of way method, but from a philosophy of How many different studies are we going to keep pushing through and kind of running through? Cause you're like, you're coming there. It was, we did that. We don't think that fees and charges studies ever been done. Well, we just paid $200,000 that told us to change some fees and charges. So I. I'm concerned to the same point that council Martinez mentioned about how often are we bringing in consultants to, to do these. Because I mean, a $200,000 study, that's an FTE pay. So you could just have a person who does studies for the city at that point and And it would be probably even less at that point. So I would be curious to see how often these kind of offset studies are taking place. Because at this rate, that means between 2025s and then these, we're already at $788,000 in studies. And then we're telling people we have to increase our fees and stuff for our utilities. But if we look at a 3% difference there, we're talking about a $2 million difference in the current actual utility fee structure that brings money in. And we're spending a million dollars in studies. So from a resident perspective, they're like, well, half of that money that you're telling us you have to increase is going to studies.

We'll try to better differentiate these two, the scope of these two fees. So again, the fees and charges study doesn't have anything to do with utilities. So. We'll try to clarify that in the follow-up.

Thank you. I think we can go next.

So I get the fun part of talking about employees, which is kind of my jam because I think I'm in a jar. So before we get too far into some of the detail, there are four things that drive the discussions that happen, the analysis that happens. And starting at that highest level, you've got our city charter. that actually says that we must establish a pay plan, including fringe benefits, that shall be equal to general prevailing wages. And so that right there, for decades, our job in HR is we do a lot of survey work, both on the pay side, but also benefit side. Next layer down is our city code, which gets a little bit more detail and just says that staff must conduct an annual wage survey for employees on at least an annual basis. This is unique to Thornton. Not every jurisdiction out there does a wage survey every single year for as many employees or as many positions as we do. Some cities actually just say, This year, we're going to do labor. Next year, we're going to do administration. The following year, we're going to do management and then we'll rotate it. We do as many what we call benchmark positions and that kind of analysis as we can every single year. The third thing that we always keep in mind is this idea of employer of choice that came about, that term came about a few years back, and really wanting to be that place that people come to, that people hear about. Hey, my neighbor works for the city of Thornton. It sounds really cool. It sounds like he's really happy, got good pay, got good benefits. I want to work there too. It's also on kind of the flip side of once employees are here, we've got a really good robust package that keeps people here for long term. And then that last thing that's on there, and you've heard Erica and Kim talk about this, is it's that balancing of, you know, you can have a really good real benefit package, pay plan, but it needs to be financially stable. And again, as we've heard today or tonight, about 75% of the total budget is these personnel increases and personnel costs. Justin?

Yeah. Just a real quick question. You mentioned decades. So how long is... this career service section seven of the charter been a part of the charter, the language that's been in place? Is it part of the original charter or you said decades, so it sounds like it's been there for a while.

I can tell you I have been here, I'm going on 29 years and it's been there that whole time.

I was curious if it was the original part of the charter or if it came...

Before I was born, I see our interim city attorney is currently looking that up for me as I saw.

It might have been online version. Yeah, I don't know where the. All right.

You just follow up with me on that.

It's just that.

I will tell you that part of this philosophy on both bullets one, two, and in fact, even three, it is what's kept me here. As far as just, I think the city has done a really good job of taking care of its employees. So let's get into pay a little bit. And before we get too much into the slide, as far as the detail, I will share with you, we met with our EAC, which is our Employee Advisory Committee last Thursday, and we shared several of these slides with that group. We also met with our Police Pay Plan Committee on Monday afternoon, so yesterday, and we shared, again, many of these slides with that group. Overall, from those groups, I think some comments were they actually expected the COLA or the increases to be lower, given some of our information about our current financial situation. But they were fairly receptive to what we presented to them.

Jessica? The $1,500 one-time lump sum, are you getting to that? I promise I will. OK. Yes. Sorry. No, don't be. Don't be.

So I've broken these down into kind of our biggest populations within our regular staff. General employees make up about 800 employees. And what we're recommending for 2027 is a 1% COLA, or cost of living adjustment. Some people also call that an economic adjustment. And that would be base building. So the nice part of that from an employee perspective is that does go towards any calculations for overtime. It does go towards any kind of percent-based benefits. So a 401 contribution, a 457 contribution, that base building helps kind of a longer-term benefit. increase for employees. The $1,500 one-time lump sum merit, it will be employees that receive a successful PA or higher, they will be eligible for that $1,500 lump sum merit. Our goal is to give that, both of these would be in place at the beginning of the year as the recommendation, and they would see that on their second check. And I'm going to pause there to make sure I answered a question.

Yeah, I guess my question was just about how that the process to land on the $1,500 one-time lump sum, and I guess it was probably made in tandem with the 1.1% cost of living. From a high level, can you explain what the process was to get to that level, like deciding on a lump sum versus cost of living adjustments? Just a little bit more of the story.

Lots of discussion. One thing I will point out is last year when we sat in front of you, that lump sum merit was based on a percent. And so I think it was a 0.5% last year. And there was lots of discussion of whether or not in that particular example, if it should be a percent again. And the discussion was that regardless of how much you make, what your pay scale is, we felt that we felt that there was more value this year to offer a flat lump sum to everybody, regardless of your pay range, regardless of what you actually get paid. In terms of the actual number, I think it was part of the modeling of what was actually affordable given all the other competing priorities that you guys have seen and we'll see on the 15th.

Just one more question. Is that pretty common where we have one time Lump sum merit. I know we talked about it in percentage last year, but I've only been here for barely three years. And we've done it twice. So, you know, you've been here, you've got a lot more experience. Is this a common thing or is this a new trend?

It is not a common thing. It is not. We've had, again, the historical perspective we've had in years past, we've had a percent per COLA and a percent per merit. But what we're looking at in our current situation financially is not able to afford that and have that be base building. And merit's been a common thing. Yes. Thank you. Roberta?

Can you walk me through what it looks like when somebody gets a $1,500 one-time lump sum merit increase? What does it look like for the employee receiving that on a yearly basis or for the next year?

So this is for 2027. They would receive it on the second paycheck in January, and it would truly be that lump sum, that $1,500 in January.

How do you determine whether or not they've met that merit? Like it's a merit increase. So that means they have to meet some sort of qualifications to get the 1500. Is that correct.

Right. So we are actually kicking off it kicked off today, our annual performance appraisal process or our PA process. And so between September 1 and around mid November, you have employees that are filling out their self-appraisals, which are a required piece of that now. You're having supervisors actually complete the performance appraisal, rating those employees, establishing goals. And then by mid-November, we know the ratings for everybody. And so the folks that are eligible for that 1,500 have received at least a successful rating for 2026. What would disqualify somebody from getting the merit raise? So if somebody gets rated either unsuccessful or improvement needed. OK, what does the total scale look like? So you've got five ratings. We used to have four, but we met with a PA committee the last couple of years. They recommended five. And so you've got unsuccessful, improvement needed, successful, and then you've got exceeds expectations and superior.

OK, so the only one that would not get it would be the two bottom? Correct. OK.

So that last bullet on there under general employees is the market increases. As I said from the previous slide, we do an annual analysis every single year on what others are paying. Our survey jurisdictions, I do not have them listed on the slide, I apologize, but they do include Adams County, Arvada, Aurora, Broomfield, Fort Collins, Lakewood, and Loveland. I can only do them in alphabetical order and you watched me do my fingers, I know. I can't help it. But we actually use market data from those seven survey jurisdictions for general employees. And we identified about a dozen positions that do need to be increased in range. When the position increases in range, the incumbents or the employees also receive an increase. The next big category of employees are our police union employees, about 237 of them. They also, we are recommending a 1% COLA for them. This is really in line with their collective bargaining agreement. They are also, we are recommending a $1,500 one-time lump sum merit. This is very similar. You're asking the question of how this works. This is very similar to general employees. with an exception. Only those folks that are at top step, so they're at the maximum of that pay range, will receive this one-time lump sum merit. This was something that in a previous negotiation with the police union that they actually identified as wanting because they felt like the folks that have not reached that top step, they're not at the maximum of the range, that those folks are already getting step increases when they progress from step one to step two to step three. And so This was kind of their idea. We talked through it, and we said, yeah, that's something we can do, that only those folks at Top Step would actually receive that $1,500. Markets for the police union, those are also included within the budget recommendation. For police officer, it is approximately a 10% increase in wages. For sergeant, it's approximately 0.9%. And for police officer recruit, it's approximately 2.9%. And so anytime I talk about these markets for both police union as well as general employees, those are in addition to those other two bullets of a 1% colon, a $1,500 merit. Police Union, as I mentioned, they also have step increases just built within their structure. It's very, very important that those folks move through their range. In their, they call it a universe, in their comparative jurisdictions and departments, all the Adams County has a step program. And so we went to that and those step increases are what really guarantee them moving through the range and getting to that top step. For fire union, our last group there, about 167 FTEs, contractually in their collective bargaining agreement or their CBA, it is built in, and this was part of negotiations a couple years ago, that this would be a 4% increase for 2027. In addition to that, their CBA dictates that they maintain the rank of third. And so in addition to the 4%, we are estimating an additional 0.9% based on the information we have today that would be added to that. The reason I have a little bit of a caveat there, if you heard it, there are a couple of districts that have not completed their negotiations in their comparative jurisdictions. And so Should those jurisdictions and districts come back with a higher amount that affects their ranking, we would have to come back to council for that. But currently, with some assumptions built in, it looks like we have to do an additional 0.9. Also, lastly, on fire and that last bullet on the slide, we did build into the budget fire rank adjustments. These are also considered what we call flexibly staffed positions. So when somebody starts out at an entry level firefighter, they're considered a firefighter four. A year later, if they're performing and they're doing well, they get promoted to a firefighter three, then a two, then a one. And so that $440,000 that is budgeted there is just that movement through those ranks. It's somewhat similar to a STEP program. Any questions? I'm going to keep stuffing it because my slides build on each other. So the big discussion probably for tonight, I would say, is this slide and the following slides. For insurance on health insurance, we have two carriers, Cigna and Kaiser. Both of those carriers, we have two plans. So for both of them, we have some level of an HMO or a PPO, and we have a high deductible plan or an HDHP, which is you're going to see on a future slide. And so in total, employees have the choice of four different plans, two Cigna, two Kaiser, depending on what their preference is. The initial increases that we received from the carriers were higher than what is on the slide. Believe it or not, we've actually negotiated and done some plan design changes to get it to this point. That 18.3% amount for Cigna is considered a kind of a weighted average between the two plans. 10.7 on Kaiser, again, is considered kind of a weighted average between those two plans. The detail of what the PPO for Cigna is going up is a little bit different than the actual increase for the high deductible plan is what I'm trying to get at. You will see on both of those, we have put language in there of not to exceed because we are still working on this. And you may remember last year we came to you, we had not this high of numbers, but we had some higher numbers. And even after the budget was approved formally by council, we were still working with the carriers to see what we could do. And we did get it down, which is why Erica every once in a while mentions that we've got some savings. because we were able to continue to work with the carriers and get that amount lowered. Okay, Roberta and then Devin. Yeah.

This is the next slide show, the plan design changes. Okay. Devin.

What is the current rate that an employee for a family plan would be paying out for the current Cigna plan?

I can look that up and get that back to you.

The reason I ask is, I mean, 18% increase across costs is going to be massive for a family side of things, depending on how much the city's actually kind of absorbing in that as well.

Absolutely.

And That's going to be a huge hit with only a 1% increase to salary pay as well. Essentially, the increase in salary pay may not even be enough to pay for the difference in insurance. So we're looking at employees essentially losing money

So I will tell you, we have done an analysis on specifically what employees' annual rates currently are. We've added in that 1%. And then we've actually looked at actual enrollment. And so for one person, it was Cigna family. Another person was Cigna high deductible single. We looked at actual enrollments. And then we went through and analyzed who was coming out kind of under that 1%. Does that 1% cover it? And what we looked at is the 1% covers 94% of our regular employees. Now, those other 6% in that equation, the $1,500 one-time lump sum covers them. I'm not telling you that's great news, but I can tell you that even in those worst case scenarios, the increases that we're recommending to pay are covering these health insurance. The other piece I'm going to add, because there's a slide later on, is we're going to do a ton of education with employees on the health plans to see... Maybe they're in the wrong plan. Maybe they need, you know, is there some movement that maybe they could do for a best choice for themselves and their family? Okay.

Yeah, I mean, I'm just very curious about that because, I mean, looking at the different plan changes on the slides that are about to come up, it looks like we're paying a considerable amount more for a really terrible plan.

Yeah.

And I got my duo to work. So the increase to the employee, and this is worst case scenario, the Cigna family, the increase to that employee is approximately $1,500. The city's increase for that employee, single family, is about $6,300.

It looks like it's just a massive increase for a very Like the plan looks like it doubles and all the costs for deductibles and out of pockets double. And so it just kind of sucks.

And I'm going to date myself again. But I haven't seen these kind of increases before. They actually started somewhere around 24% per Cigna. And so believe it or not, the plan design changes got us down to these. We've also talked to our benefits consultant and just, you know, general information. You know, we're hearing that some municipalities are getting 40 and 45% increases there. We also heard that a local nearby municipality, their initial increase was 29%. And they've been able to kind of mitigate it down with some plan design and some additional negotiations. So I'm crossing my fingers that maybe we can have that magic that we had last year, but no, this is what we have today.

Jessica? We can calculate for you. Again, we don't have to do plan design changes. That's going to result in higher increases to both the city and employees. And we can calculate what that actual impact would be both to the city and and to employees. Unfortunately, we did look at alternatives. We did have our broker reach out to get quotes from other insurance providers. There was minimal savings, again, without adjusting our plans and a lot of disruption to employees. So again, one of the things that I think you heard from Erica We have modeled in for next year, very limited. Our goal is to really limit insurance growth next year and to take the next year to sort of work with employees on design changes or look at different providers, I know we've talked a lot.

Yeah, I mean, I don't think that's all at all. Just that's terrible. It isn't. Basically, it says, hey, we're going to give you this one-time bonus. We're going to give you this raise. Oh, by the way, all of your insurance premiums, we're going to take all that away from you anyway. So.

Jessica? I just wanted to go back to Council Member Martinez's question. The career service system was actually in the original charter back in 1967. OK.

All right, I have Justin, then Roberta, then John. Justin.

Thanks for the quick turn. Yeah, my question is related to insurance, but the family and medical leave insurance that the state provides. Do we, the history behind that is I remember that there was a, provision in that law that allowed municipalities to opt out of it. Did we do that? We did opt out of it.

We did opt out of that. And that was covering not health insurance, but that was covering more along the lines of short-term disability.

I understand that, yes. Well, we do provide it, but it's all optional. The employees can enroll in it and pay the full cost.

No, we can provide a... summary of the city's family program. They don't pay for that.

Okay, so we have our own program that's equivalent. Yeah, if you could just give us a little info on that because not all cities have that.

The state program employs both the city and employees would have had to pay into that, but because we developed our own program, employees do not contribute to that.

Okay, I just wanted to confirm that. So if you could short-term disability.

And we can also provide some detail on long-term disability as well, which is also paid for by the city. Okay. The silver lining on this slide is there's no anticipated increases for dental and vision insurance, nor are there any plan design changes.

So.

The following two slides. We still have two more. Yeah, go for it.

Roberta.

Okay, so. There's a couple data points we need to figure out exactly how this is going to affect the paychecks of the workers. The first one is, what percentage of the employee's actual salary on average is going towards this increase? If we can get that figured out by the time we have another discussion about the budget. And then why are we waiting until 2028 to look at other healthcare options? That's the other question.

In terms of other carriers? Yeah. So we looked at them for 2027, as Tansy mentioned. We actually went out to market. We had two other vendors that did bid. Okay. Their renewals weren't any better, and there was going to be disruption with our current employees. And so we're going to do that again for 2028.

Yeah, because this is kind of what I was talking about earlier. It looks like this 1% is going to cover the 1% increase. And basically, any raise that folks have is going to be absorbed with the increase in health care. So if you guys can calculate exactly how those plan design changes are going to affect folks, that would be really helpful.

And I will add, you know, the $1,500 number that I gave is kind of that worst case scenario for somebody that's in that single family. For somebody that is on kind of that other end, they're in the Kaiser high deductible plan, but they're still family, it's an annual increase of $323. And so, again, I'm not saying that's, you know, the perfect number, but there is some fluctuation there.

Okay, I do have another question. Was the lump sum, was there an actual savings to the city by giving the lump sum an increase or were we getting a percentage?

There's not really a savings in this year. The difference is if that was added to base, it changes the long-term model because those numbers get compounded. Over the life of those numbers. So in terms of this year, there's not a savings, but in terms of future impact is where the Where there was more of a challenge saving like compression. Yeah, those numbers would compound as they would get added into the base that percentages was kind of compound on them in future years.

Has the city concerted considered being self insured. We're actually self-insured on Cigna. On Cigna, we're self-insured. Have you considered doing it for other options or just staying with the self-insured option? Would that make a difference?

So we are self-insured for dental, both our dental plans for vision. We are fully insured on Kaiser. We did consider that probably four or five years back. Kaiser's model doesn't really lend itself to being self-insured because it's just the way they operate. And so we only went with the Cigna self-insured at the time. I don't know if that answers your question or not.

What percentage of our employees use Cigna as opposed to Kaiser?

It's about a 50-50 split. Okay.

All right, thank you.

I guess I have more of an ask instead of a question. Is there a way that we could have staff look at things that we could eliminate as far as out of general fund budgets that would actually offset this cost to the actual employee staff. There's so many events, galas, festivals, things that we do all the time as a city whole that I think would bring more benefit if we said, hey, we're not going to have these kind of events. We're actually going to put this money towards the actual staff that's working here instead so that we can offset that cost. So I would be curious if staff could look into that and see if there's anything we could do in that sense.

We certainly can look at any number of reductions in service levels. And we will, when we get into details, we do have reductions that we are, and I understand the concern about impacts to employees and want you to know that is shared by the budget team, by the manager's office team. And so we did not balance the budget simply through these changes to compensation and benefits. So we are going to be recommending other reductions to you that we will go through that. We can certainly revisit if, again, what we heard from the council in terms of direction and preparing the budget was as best as we could to preserve current service levels and to really focus on trying to avoid layoffs, eliminating positions. And so Those two things were foundational to the budget to the degree that we are willing to reconsider either of those factors. Certainly there may be additional reductions that we could bring forward that as you can see for every percent increase for compensation is about a million dollars. So if we wanted to increase the percentage increase, we basically have to find offsetting savings of that amount.

My request is more of a, we hold lots and lots of events that We could easily cut back and it doesn't change the service quality of the city as a whole, but it could help add that budget a little bit. Is it in there? But we can dive into that a little bit more once we get into more general funding.

We can provide what is budgeted for events and festivals.

Probably should include our budgets as well for the events that we go to. I mean, if we're looking at cutting events for the community.

Let me get to that one on the last slide.

Because there's a balance, right? The community needs the festivals because that's a way to bring the community together. Which ones are sacred cows versus which ones could be let go and then balancing that with the expectation that happens.

There's a weight ratio to look at. Obviously, something like July 4th is massive because we have so many people to show up to those events, so that's a big thing for the city. But there's several festivals and different events, galas, things that we put on all the time that maybe 50 people show up to. It's like, how much money do we spend on staff and like all the marketing and everything that was in that place for that, where it could have been just been, hey, we don't need this event and we can move on to something else and put that money back towards our employees.

I think we can go to the next slide.

So as we move through these next two slides, they are somewhat similar. Just to orient you with all the data that's on here, you've got on that far left-hand side, those are the different lines of plan design that we are recommending changes to. The next two columns just show you what the current design or the current benefit is for the high deductible health plan, that HGHP, as well as the HMO. And then those last two columns just show you in that light blue what is being recommended to change. We actually spent, in addition to going out to market and getting those two other carriers to give us some renewal information, we also went through about 10 different scenarios trying to balance what... what we could do that maybe affected employees the least while also still having it be generally affordable to the employee and the city. Again, these are more significant changes than what we've made in recent years, but they are necessary in order to get to that lower amount of the increases you saw earlier. I can go back up those questions. Kaiser's are very similar. The two carriers do require some level of what they call parity between the plans because they do not want any kind of adverse selection just because of plan design. There are certain things under Kaiser because we are fully funded with them that they just don't have that option. And so that's where some things don't match exact between these two slides. Here's an exciting piece. I'm going to bring a little light here. So if you are part of or an employee is part of the high deductible health plan, either Cigna or Kaiser, they also have today, and they have had this for years, they've had an HRA. They've had a health reimbursement account, which is a nice way to save some money and put that towards expenses like co-pays, that MRI deductible, whatever the case may be. For a few years now, this idea of transitioning it to an HSA health savings account has been talked about. Heck, we talked about it years ago when we even introduced high deductible plans, but we dipped our toe in the water with the HRA and wanted to figure it out. EAC, I will tell you, and I will give them credit. They have talked about this over the last couple of years of, hey, can we try this out? Can we learn more? We think this would be some benefit. And this year is the year for 2027 that we are recommending that transition. So employees, in order to take advantage of the HSA, would need to be enrolled in those high deductible health plans. So if you're in the HMO, this is not connected to the HMO, just to be really clear. What this table shows you is just some of the benefits of having an HSA over an HRA. The very first one is that it is not employer-owned, it's employee-owned. And so what that means is today, if somebody builds up a balance and they were to separate from the city, that money in that account forfeits back to the city. We apply it back to insurances and everything else, but the employee doesn't leave with that. That is actually not a city rule. That is the way HRAs are set up under the IRS guidelines. HSAs are employee-owned from day one. Day one. And so if somebody leaves the city, it actually a couple of lines down that portability, it actually moves with the employee. And so they continue to use those funds in there. Now, obviously, they're not an active employee, and so they're not getting continual contributions to the HSA, but they can still use that money for medical expenses, which is great. And second line down is. Both the employer and the employee can invest or put money into the HSA, where today it's only employer-funded. I have one member of EAC who's super excited about this, and he actually has an HSA from a previous employer that he still maintains, and he just plans on using it as kind of a retirement tool. We're going to talk a little bit about our PEP accounts, post-employment health plans, in a bit. But the HSAs, because they're so portable, they do become another vehicle for people to save some money for medical expenses in retirement. Investment options, that third row down, we are learning a little bit more about this, but it does appear that we're going to have some investment options. So not only can you put money aside, but you can actually grow this money. And then I've already talked about portability. Again, questions?

OK.

So next steps on the health insurance front. I should have just labeled this entire slide, we're not done. And we know it. First bullet there, we are planning some education and some employee outreach during the open enrollment period in 2026 for 2027. If you've been here during open enrollment, it usually occurs weirdly from Halloween to Veterans Day. I don't know why that is, but it usually happens Halloween to Veterans Day. What we are recommending, and we've already started talking to our broker about it, is we want to do probably at least two weeks, if not more, we want to start the education part. We want to start, the second bullet under there, is we want to activate some planning tools on the carrier websites where employees can actually go in to, say, MyCigna, and they can start typing in, here's what I've paid in co-pays, here's what I've paid for an MRI, here's what I've paid in premiums, and it'll actually analyze, yeah, you would have been better off in the high deductible plan. And so employees, again, I think I said it earlier, employees can get a little bit of education and really make some good choices for their families. Second bullet down, exploring alternative plans. To your earlier question, yes, we did that in 2027. We're going to do an even deeper dive in 2028 to just see what else is out there. And I think Erica said it earlier, we're probably going to start tomorrow if we had anything to do with it because we need to get out there. We need to get more data because we just can't continue to absorb these type of increases, the employee or the employer. We are going to evaluate other stop loss carrier options. This is associated with self-funding. And so my most easy way to describe stop loss is the fact that we are self-funded on Cigna, it means all of the risk is on the employer. And so when we have a high claim year, we're paying those dollars. When we have a low claim year, we got to save some dollars. This stop loss insurance is kind of that upper level umbrella that anything above a certain dollar amount, they cover under their insurance. And so there are some options that we learned about that we're going to go out and evaluate some other stop loss carriers in 2027 to see what we can do, or I'm sorry, in 2026 for 2027. And then we're going to do it again in 2027 for 2028 because I think there's some movement we can get there. That explore other options, it sounds like a catch-all because it is. we're just gonna continue to brainstorm like what other cost-saving measures are out there that we can do, maybe on health insurance, maybe on something else, because again, we just can't sustain these kind of increases. And then I'm not sure, the compensation and benefit study is also another option that's out there. We are in the early stages of that where we are actually looking at consultants to come in and actually look at our compensation practices. look at the way we establish benefits. That is something that we haven't done since I think it was 2010. And so I think it's time to come in and look and just see, do they, from their expertise, do they have other ideas for how we establish economic adjustments or COLAs? Do they have other ideas on what the pay increase should be when somebody gets promoted, things like that?

I have Devin, then Jonathan.

So as far as other options, one of my previous employees, we actually had a program that was set up where there was a doctor that actually came on site. He had his own office to speak for whatever. That was preventative care. If you signed up for their system, it's through Carex Health. The pay was like $100 a month for a person, and then it's $100 per family member that you want to add on to it. But it was great for preventative care in the sense that even now I still keep it just because I can call my doctor up and be like, hey, I got a cold, and she calls in something without having to go through all the headache of the insurance things. So it might be a good kind of option to look into for other routes. for ideas that are there. I know that it was super beneficial in my sense because up until I had a child I never got sick but now having a kindergartner first grader but for I think for the vast majority to your point that you were pointing out is that most people are probably would be fine with a high deductible account but then this kind of helps with that bridge between the two To be like, hey, you can pay an extra $100 a month if you wanted to have a doctor you can call on immediately for things that are going on without having to go to the ER for everything that comes up or something that's going on.

I love that because some other cost savings measures that actually combine that bullet with the education bullet up above is I also think we need to do a better job of educating our employees on like when to go to urgent care versus when to go to the emergency room. We've actually received some data this year about the number of what they call steerable ER visits that could have been handled in the urgent care. And so Like there's some cost savings, especially with the plan design changes we're proposing. There's also things, especially on the high deductible plan, you really need to be a better consumer. My prescription is going to, you know, may cost something different at Target than it costs at Walgreens. And so we need to teach employees to be consumers.

This isn't an insurance plan so much to speak as it's more of a preventative care kind of action. But it's nice in the sense that, like, there's an app where I can text my doctor and be like, hey, I have a sinus infection. She'll be like, great, I'll call you on a prescription.

That's great.

Jessen?

Can you explain a little bit the difference between this other options, compensation and benefits study versus the wage and pay study that we have to do over here by the charter?

So the wage and benefit study that we do by charter is really getting into specific pay for specific positions. And it really gets into that detail of all of our different benefits comparing our vacation accruals comparative to our survey jurisdictions. This compensation and benefit study is at a higher level and is more along the lines of philosophy. What do we want our philosophy to be? Obviously it still has to be in line with the charter language. And so I don't see this changing that we're still gonna do an annual pay plan, but it could be talking about like, how do we establish that COLA? There are some survey jurisdictions that when they provide COLA, they only adjust the structure. They don't give the increase to the employee. I'm not advocating for that, but I just think this compensation study is going to give us some other information, some other tools of what else is out there. We've been doing it this way for a very long time. What other options are out there that maybe we haven't thought of?

Roberta?

Just really quick. I've had Kaiser for a long time off and on. I've been a school teacher, have a child. He's grown up now, but went through the whole pink eye sinus infection crowd that happens every school year. If you like, just with the, I like what Devin was saying about the program he was talking about, but I've noticed over the years that Kaiser works very similar. Like if you call and say, I have sinus infection, pink eyes going around the school, we have pink eye. They'll usually take care of that stuff without. So like maybe digging into like Kaiser's prop program. And I think Kaiser's probably the better kind of case study for this because it's the same network of doctors and the same kind of philosophy rather than Cigna where there's all these different doctors and they want to get you to come in for every little thing, go through the whole rigmarole. So if you can maybe check with Kaiser and kind of see what types of things that the employees that use Kaiser, and I know you guys don't push one over the other, but it really is like for people that don't have to go to the doctor that often, it really does work a little bit better for just calling in sinus infection type, you know, eye infection type stuff. So just something to put out there.

No, that's great. And I'll actually add, I'm a Cigna person. And they kind of have these subgroups. And I think they recently changed their name. I think it's My Common Spirit. within yeah I used that with them too yeah that that they also do that and so there's there's always an app for that yeah um and so you can also go to the app and you can just text your doctor and say hey this is what I need um and especially if you're a long-standing um you know patient of theirs yeah you know but my ear hurts it's the third time they'll they'll they'll renew a prescription a little bit easier with Kaiser I agree because they just like

they want to stay cause they're an HMO like that. And they're all, you know, they want to save their own money. So they're not trying to have you come in and go through the whole process every single time. But, um, I just loved it. Cause even like, when you think about it, even as like a worker, instead of going, taking a day off, going to the doctor, I had a sinus infection once and I stopped in on the way to work, got the prescription and went to work because I knew what it was. It was allergy sinus stuff. So I appreciate the suggestion. I think it is aligned with what we'd like to do. Yeah, I think that kind of stuff will really help because a lot of workers, they just don't know and they go through these whole things and it's just, it's just the, it's a, you know, a free market healthcare system looking to make money too. And so the consumer piece is important, but it's just really hard to understand. And there's a whole Seinfeld episode about it, but not a Seinfeld South Park, the whole South Park episode about this whole shenanigan.

So we can definitely try to identify what are those low cost care options for employees and make sure that we include that in some of the work, too.

You know, that's the thing.

And very quickly, so I have Kaiser through FEHB. So I've had them since I moved here eight years ago. And, yeah, their telehealth is absolutely amazing. If you're waiting, you're waiting at home, which is fine. If you're working, you can work. But otherwise, you're at home, you're not in a doctor's office, more uncomfortable. And then they take care of it over the phone. They get your prescription. You have to go get your prescription, but that's it. So that's all I have on that.

So just moving in, because we've talked a lot about, we talked a lot about health insurance specifically, but I just wanted on this next couple of slides to provide kind of some reminders and just some education for council. There's some other benefits that we do provide to employees. This particular side is just geared towards those employer contributions towards retirement benefits. Again, I've broken out the three major categories of the type of employees. General employees are eligible for Social Security and Medicare, so that is an employer contribution. Police union and fire union are not eligible for Social Security. We did opt out of that years ago. So that's why you don't see that bullet on those next two groupings. Sticking back up to general, the 401 defined contribution plan, there is a 7.6% employer contribution to the 401. There is an employee contribution. It's a mandatory contribution of 6.5. Okay. And so the 401, that 7.6 and that 6.5, that's basically the minimum and the maximum. That is your contribution. Okay. Okay. In addition, you've got a 457 deferred compensation plan, which is really just another tool that employees can, on a pre-tax basis, set money aside and invest it for their retirement. On the general employees, the city matches one for one up to a maximum of 1%. And so we always are trying to get employees just do the 1%. It's free money. But if somebody does 5%, 10%, they're still going to get that 1% from the city. That last bullet, post-employment health plan, you heard me refer to it earlier as a PEP. This is also just another vehicle, another tool that employees can save money, and then they can actually save money for medical expenses in retirement. The PEP plans are employer-only. contributions. That is just a plan design IRS rule. So there's nothing we can change with that. General employees get an annual contribution. The recommendation for this year, it's $350, which is what it's been for the last many years. Plus they can forfeit up to about 48 hours of leave. And certain people I've talked to recently, they look at their balances and they go, gosh, that really added up. You know, I forfeited a floating holiday and it really adds up. Next category of employees, the police union. They are part of, after 2017, we moved, they moved and voted to go over to FPPA, which is the Fire, Police, and Pension Association. And anybody after 2017 is in this program, there were employees that elected to go voluntarily to it, and there were also employees that elected to just stay with Nationwide in that defined contribution. But anybody hired after 2017 is in this defined benefit program. They have an 11% required employer contribution and an 11% employee contribution. So those are equal pre-tax. 457, identical to general employees. It's that city match one for one up to a maximum of one. PEP, identical because of their collective bargaining agreement, identical to the general employees. What is unique with police union as well as fire union is they do have a retiree health benefit. That is, I think, I think is commonly referred to as Medigap. If they reach certain age and years of service when they retire, they are eligible to stay on the city's medical plan at a reduced rate. And we have a number of employees in police sworn and fire sworn that do elect to do that. Fire union. Again, they're in that same FPPA benefit of 11% and 11%. Their deferred compensation match is slightly different. It's just something that they negotiated a few years back that they are one for one, but they have a maximum of two. HEP is also slightly different calculation. It's a quarterly contribution. It's equivalent to 1% of firefighter one multiplied by the union membership and then divided out equally. And like I said, they have the same Medigap benefit, very similar to what police union has. Questions?

Okay.

We're getting near my end. These are just some other benefits. There are more. This is an all-inclusive list, but these are some of the ones that come to mind when I think of how I think about our benefit package. Lots of different types of leave for employees and so that they can maintain some type of work-life balance. Vacation employees, depending on your service, you can accrue anywhere from 10 to 22 hours per month. Sick leave employees accrue eight hours per month. holidays. There are 13 holidays. Those include the two floaters, which you get to take a little bit more flexibility when you want to use those. We have a really good military leave program. We have on-the-job salary continuation, and so that's above and beyond what the state provides under workers comp. So it keeps somebody whole at 100% of pay for a longer period of time. And then we also have just other benefits like bereavement, emergency leave, severe weather leave, fitness release leave, there's there's all kinds of other leaves that are out there. Speaking of wellness, we've also got a wellness program that's very good. You can employees depending on what your participation rate can get an additional 75 to $300 per year. The city also pays 1.5%, well, they pay the premium for the benefit of 1.5% times your annual salary for life insurance for all employees. And then we also pay the employer contribution for police, fire, and sworn towards FPPA and their death and disability. And then just a couple of those last two bullets, if you're not familiar, we have a multilingual pay program depending on your proficiency. Are you able to speak or are you able to read and write? And so those are those two levels of proficiency. And then we've got a really good tuition reimbursement program depending on whether or not you are a general employee police or fire is what drives what your maximum per year is. I'm just switching gears completely. This slide is talking about city council pay. I know there's a lot of data and it's kind of the raw data, but each year HR staff does analyze what the comparative jurisdictions are paying for these three positions, mayor, mayor pro tem and council member. So that first column is just our survey jurisdictions. The following three columns just show you what they are paying. We did some slight analysis here where you can actually see what the median for each one of those positions is, as well as what the average is for those positions. Just for informational purposes, when we do analysis for general input, we can use average. You can use that information as you weigh. Options here that we will need council direction on tonight is whether or not those three options there or if there's a fourth, whether or not you'd like to go with no adjustments, if you'd like to adjust to the median, or if you'd like to adjust to the average. And I'm going to come back to this slide. But I want to talk about based on the charter section 4.6, if you were to recommend an increase to one or all of those positions, they would not take effect until 2028 because you actually can't recommend and approve an increase for yourselves. And so the increases wouldn't take effect until a newly elected council member was seated or somebody was reelected.

And those that were not reelected or not elected that are continuing to serve would not get the increase either until the next election. Because we've done one increase in my time here.

Yeah. When this has happened, we end up with what I call wonkiness for a period of time where you might have two council members making different rates because the newer council member maybe has been newly elected or reelected. And then I'm going to jump back to the previous slide and let you ask questions.

Let me just clarify partially why we are suggesting you consider taking action now, even though it won't be effective in 2028. As filing happens, then the rates would be clear to individuals that are considering running next year.

Devin? My opinion is that we go with no adjustments. I think that based on the fact we're giving the staff 1% and then having to increase their cost of everything else that's going on, I think the last thing we should do is give ourselves a 20% raise. So my opinion is go with option one and don't do any adjustments at all. Justin?

I agree with Devin. Does anyone disagree with that? I'm pretty sure we're all going to say no adjustments at this point. No adjustments.

We do this annually. So we'll come back next year as well to have a decision point.

We'll hold my answer for the same for next year.

We're back to next steps. We're back to Ms. Sena. Yeah, that's right.

All right. I think this is the last slide, guys. So what are the next steps in terms of budget as a whole? So we have two budget review meetings scheduled, September 15th and 29th. I actually don't know why that reads 545 to 7 p.m. That is not accurate. 7 a.m. That's right. We're going to pull up. Please, no.

Sorry, ma'am.

No, I mean, I think the plan is to go until, you know, if there's a logical cutoff or, you know, until council wishes, you know, we'll go until that time on those nights. What to expect, I've listed out here, we'll have detailed revenue and expenditure information, analysis of those departmental budgets. We'll have, you know, it's not a line by line review in terms of every single thing included in the budget. We would not be able to get through everything in, in, those two nights, if that's what we were working on. But it's sort of budgetary highlights and analysis of year over year, what the major drivers of those changes are at a divisional level. A full capital plan with detail on highlighted projects, which is similar to what we did last year and years prior. Overall financial outlook and analysis for all major funds. So we'll show a five-year sort of preview or projection of fund balance for all major funds, and then a debt summary by fund. Assuming all goes well, we'll have public hearing and first reading on October 27th, followed by second reading on November 10th. And we will plan to incorporate answers to the questions asked at that September 15th meeting. We'll likely start there.

I will also add and encourage if you have other areas you want to dig into specifically before the meeting on the 15th of the 29th to reach out to staff because they can sit down and walk through the specifics so that one of those questions you can bring forward with answers if you have further concerns.

Don't encourage me with a good time.

I know you're going to do it. All right. Any additional questions? We're going to take a quick break before the next item. Next topic is a real light one that's not going to take very long, right? So we're going to talk about data center moratorium. Jessica, can you give us an overview of where we were last week so that we can kind of catch up and make sure that we don't rehash more than we have to this week?

So back on, we started this discussion on July 21st. And at that time, council gave the direction for staff to put together a 12 month moratorium on data center applications. And so then we came back just last week to kind of go over what, basically the specifics for that moratorium, what are we looking for? And we talked about, you know, the end of the legislative session, weighing whether or not, you know, because we wanted to see if the state was going to regulate if they declared it a statewide concern and mixed state local, because that'll have impacts on what we can and can't regulate. And so I believe council reached consensus that that is one of the things that we are waiting for is for the end of the legislative session. We also looked at the different types of data centers that would be impacted. And can you switch to the other, the second slide? Yes. Other way. Sorry, I said second, I meant fourth. Looking at the different types of data centers, and Council was focused mainly on the regional co-location data centers and the hyperscale data centers. We were looking at the moratorium applying to those two types of data centers. I don't know if the full consensus was reached on that, but I think that may have been where we ended the discussion was kind of going it looked like that's where we were headed. There was consensus to allow the existing data centers, and this would only apply to new data centers, and so I think. Maybe a little. clarity of the types of data center, just to make sure that my notes were correct there. And then also we're looking at the extent and timing of public engagement that staff will be engaging in during that sort of timeframe that we are looking at our eventual permanent regulations on data centers. It's a good summary. Any questions? Thank you, I appreciate that. Yes. Um, so if we maybe want to start back with that second, what type of data center would be. Uh, like I said, I believe that there was consensus, but my notes are admittedly not incredibly clear, um, that this, uh, the potential moratorium would apply to hyperscale and the regional co-location types. So we're looking at the building size of between 50,000. or I'm sorry, the building size of 50,000 square feet up to the largest types of data centers. Two million square feet. And so I guess, you know, from council's perspective, is that the direction that council would like to take?

So are we saying anything greater than 50,000 square feet?

I think that's... I'll put a damper on stuff because a 50,000 square feet is not that big.

That's my personal opinion on that. Chris, you kind of had your hand up. Did you want to say something? Or were you just moving your pen around?

I was just moving, but 250 is like the facilities on the north side of the city. I remember it was like a million square feet that was being built with the first That helps you visualize it. I drive it 40 times a week. The large facilities that you see on the north side of the Oregon, that's about 250 warehouse structures that are employment center.

Is that your recommendation? And then to look at the 250 based on what we currently have?

You're not in real estate. How do you visualize 250,000 square feet? You have a lot of examples on the north side, each of those structures. That's how you can target some facility. That's the 250,000 square feet type footprint.

The target you said?

Yeah, the Yeah, but compared to 50,000 square foot, you're talking about fifth of the size. So that's why I'm saying that that's right. I was just giving you a massive range is what I'm trying to say in that in that area.

Yeah, I wherever, you know, direction you want to go with that. I'm just giving a visual for those that don't usually look at buildings and know what square footage size. Okay.

Not on the square footage. You want to hold it then for, okay. So then there's two different things. Do we want to look at 250,000 square feet? Do we want to look at less than 250,000 square feet? Justin.

I'll just, you know, I said a week ago, I think that we should include the regional co-location facilities, new ones only. I'm still okay with the consensus that we got last week. same. Yeah.

I so kind of give me a show of hands 50,000 square feet or greater. All right, Josh, what's your question?

Well, I was, I would like to see a complete ban on the evaporative cooling to sell our water.

That's

I think that might come up as part of the regulation discussions, not because I don't, the moratorium itself is to hold things while we do regulations, but you want that included in the discussions for regulations.

Okay. There's a slide at the end where we can talk about the different types of, basically where you can give staff direction on what particular types of regulations that you would like us to look at during the time period of moratorium.

Okay.

Roberta?

I was just curious if, If we have an expansive like definition of what a data center is so that way it's not some sort of loophole that it comes in and do some other way.

Yes, that'll be something we can, we can, we'll, we'll look at sort of, you know, what the standard wording is across the country and then we'll pull it from there. And that will be one of the things that council can look at when we present you with the draft. Okay. Thank you. Okay, so we're going with 50,000 square feet or larger for the moratorium. Okay, and then forward, we said you want to apply to all new construction. Do we want to prevent expansion of the existing data centers? So that would be the Avaya building and Google. Yes.

So by expansion, you mean square footage expansion because there's nothing in the Avaya building. Correct.

I'd be pretty amusing to see them expand that building.

So by expansion, you mean, so the Avaya building doesn't have anything in it right now, but it could be a data center. It is designed to be served as a data center, but it is currently vacant. Okay. So would we be agreeing that one could be in there because already designed for it? Yes. But we would not be adding anything extra to it. Is that what we're saying? Yes. Okay.

Hold on a minute. To clarify that, we're not going to be adding anything square footage-wise.

Correct. Because if they do infrastructure changes on their own, then... As long as they don't increase the square footage, then it's grandfathered.

It's not going to say they don't change their cooling systems or power consumption.

Yes.

The Ohio one's like 290,000 square feet.

Okay.

And so I believe that leads us to our fourth bullet point, which is the extent and timing of public engagement. And I will turn that over to Mr. Barrett.

Good evening. So we talked a little bit about this last week is the type of engagement with the public. And of course, this would be part of the moratorium, the outreach that would occur as part of this to help us draft ordinances moving forward. We did talk about what using existing staff capacities, what could be done and what would require a third party consultant likely to support it within the 12, I think we're talking 12 months still within the moratorium. We can utilize, like I think I said before last week, utilizing the existing ward meetings. We do have, for example, we have one of these this week. We could have topics like that at those meetings. I call that kind of a light engagement, but it could be an element. It could build on each other, of course, as well. We can have a dedicated website where people FAQs are available, surveys, maybe some interactional activities where folks can actually ask questions and responded to by staff. Virtual town halls can be done, monitored, kind of another way to engage people who can't meet in person. and leaves us resources it's less resource driven too to have these virtual they're inverse actually having a facility for it beyond that you start getting consultants or i'll call it staff intensive a little heavier multi-station informational open houses those would be obviously usually they're facilitated by a consultant but staff could do some of those at some level um We do envision, and my research has really spoken for a community our size, three to five of those are usually needed to effectively reach the community. Small group workshops, my research on that, those are being done in a lot of communities. Those are usually done and broken in sections in the community, so you reach certain areas with those small groups. Again, those are in the three to five workshops that are done depending on size, based on our size of our community. And then the bigger one that is more intensive is generally a council directed stakeholder advisory committee that would actually advise council on their research, you know, working with staff and the stakeholders and the citizens and obviously the data center providers as well. Did some, there was questions last time from cost. I think I gave a range of 50 to a hundred thousand. That is pretty close to be inaccurate. Actually the low end is about $45,000 to do and low rent. There's not, you basically get maybe a couple of those open houses and they'll host a website out of that kind of money. Going to the, biggest option I saw out there in some communities are spending over $200,000. And what they're doing is they're doing a very intensive, all those categories we're talking about, they're basically doing a lot of those things, but they're doing them in the scales of five or six or seven outreaches. Some communities are going as far as having ballot initiatives about these, which is different costs than themselves. Some communities are having consultants draft codes. We learn a lot through other people doing a lot of code writing. So some of it will benefit from others doing work. We always present ideas we hear from the larger community as part of those processes. But it is kind of... IT'S KIND OF OPEN HOW COUNCIL WOULD LIKE TO MOVE FORWARD WITH THIS WHEN IT IS PUBLIC PARTICIPATION. WE ALWAYS ENCOURAGE THAT. WE TRY TO GET AS MUCH PARTICIPATION AS WE CAN. FOCUSED PARTICIPATION. ONE ELEMENT THAT I DIDN'T MENTION IS USING THE TARGETED TECHNOLOGY. THESE ARE APP DRIVENS THAT SOME COMMUNITIES ARE USING WHERE THEY CAN ACTUALLY Have apps on people's phones and they could even target those individuals in those areas. Not sure if that some of the Council interest. We don't even have the technology here to do such a thing, but that is some things that are some of the facilitators are doing in some of the communities as well. So like I said, a large range. You know, outreaches are key on this. How much will be a question about how much the Council wants to do focused on this? This exact outreach? Questions on the outreach?

Justin and then Roberta.

Yeah, so the objective of, for me at least, for getting these public engagement, listening to the community, to help guide staff on how they're going to, you are going to make a recommendation for policy that we can decide on. So my question is, what is the most effective way if information is valuable to you from the community. That I think would be helpful. I appreciate getting all the different options, but just some input from your experience, what works, what doesn't, when the objective is trying to get information from the community and inform and guide policy recommendations.

Great question. So out of these listing here, effectively for our staff, what we is our engagement with the individual publics, our engagement being the staff's engagement and often with facilitators. So the small groups, the open houses are always great ways of engaging folks. But we also understand people can't always be at those events. So technology is really what we're trying to get to a little bit with the service, utilizing the tools, the resources we have. For example, with the development code update we had and with the housing choice code, we had a dedicated website for those channels for people to interact with. Those are kind of things we'd be kind of looking at as well, things where we're able to reach people where they're at. I'M NOT SURE ABOUT THE MONITORED VIRTUAL HOUSES AS MUCH ON THEIR PARTICIPATION LEVEL. I KNOW COUNCIL DOES ONE OF THOSE A YEAR. THAT WOULD BE ONE THAT WOULD BE INTERESTING, TOO, TO SEE HOW WE CAN GET PARTICIPATION THERE. STAKEHOLDER ADVISORY COMMITTEES, I'VE BEEN AROUND SOME OF THOSE. THEY HAVE TENDENCY TO TAKE LONGER THAN A YEAR TO COMPLETE THEIR WORK DEPENDING ON THE GUIDANCE THEY GET AND HOW CLOSE THEY WORK WITH STAFF. The question usually comes down to how many of these events do we want to host? I mean, obviously we usually try to take care of, take advantage of the Thornton Fest and the Winter Fest and other types of things where we can engage with folks, but it is those other amount of time that would, that really would generate the additional cost to this, to do in a process like that, especially if we get an outside consultant to help us.

So, yeah.

like i said we we the more information is always the better um it always is um but but there's a limit to some level that where you're no longer getting much of the way of participation you know it usually we usually see that through our any process we do we have maybe have strong interest initially and not after a while we unless we have new information to provide you there's not a lot of value with keep going with those those meetings way beyond their their

their usefulness so we don't we don't know what that looks like yet without going into this in more detail yeah um just one just follow-up statement is you know I I'm not personally opposed to investing some a reasonable amount of funds for this given how much desire there is you know for providing this feedback but I just want to make sure that we get the value you know value that we're looking for, which is to help guide policy. And so that's hard to answer that question without really good understanding of what's been effective in the past. I guess I don't really know, but I will say that I'm looking for guidance from the staff. You tell us what works and then we can you know decide if there's additional funds how much that's worth this endeavor so i don't know that's probably not very helpful on making a decision but that's all i get to see right now all right i have roberta then cherish then drew okay so we are we don't even have a moratorium yet because we're drafting that correct

and we have to vote on that. I feel like this part of the conversation is important, but talking about putting funding towards a consultant at this point, when we already know that most of the community doesn't like these, and we already know that we still have to go through a legislative session to even get to this point. So in my personal opinion, I feel like We should go through utilizing word meetings and maybe and definitely have like a dedicated online engagement portal with faqs and some surveys and definitely have our monitor town halls and have questions and answers and things. for folks. But I feel like putting money towards a third party consultant should probably come more towards when we already know what the legislative session has put forward and then we can move forward with considering how we're going to move forward with the regulations. Because it doesn't make sense to start spending money on that. We already had a discussion about how folks aren't super pumped about spending tons of money on consultants anyway. So I feel like we can do some of this low-hanging uh, the low hanging fruit work without putting extra money into consultants. Um, and do that more after we know kind of what's going on with the legislative session. That's kind of my idea.

Josh, did you give me a breakdown again on with 45 covered?

45,000. So essentially, it would cover the items, too, on the existing staff side. A lot of them will offer a dedicated website. They'll provide the city's or we can host our own, but that was included in the cost I looked at. And they usually will do one of the open houses and maybe a small facility group. But it's really a strong partnership with staff to get those dollar amounts to just $45,000. Just for reference, the housing choice code we just completed was about $100,000. So these consultants run about $350 an hour for their work. So it does that pretty quickly when...

I would say I agree with Roberta. No need to hire a consultant at this time. Let's use internal resources. And we have plenty of great outreach opportunities for the public to engage. You guys do a great job with that already. And then do you have an example of where we've used a stakeholder advisory committee for other ordinance? And really the point is, is there something that we can, do we have lessons learned? Did it actually work? Was it the best route to take? Or is this the first time we're doing?

I jump in. Probably the best example of late was the sustainability master, environmental sustainability master plan. So that group sort of helped to think through policy objectives. They did a lot of research. They sort of helped to prioritize the issues and then curated a report back to the council. Um, so that was sort of an ad hoc group that got, um, and we did, we had a third party consultant. And in that case, I think that was a much bigger project because they were doing a lot of the research and the drafting and that kind of stuff that I think in this case, the staff would do. But I think they, um, we, we could follow up some more, but they did a lot of the meeting design. They did the data analysis of like, um, about, you know, synthesizing the feedback from the, both the community engagement stuff and the board engagement part of it. I think that's probably the best example in my short time here.

Got it. Okay. So more of a master plan setting, kind of a bigger project.

That was in that case.

Yeah.

But I think they did kind of have to learn about the issues and sort of And then I sort of the public policy trade offs, I think, in that way, probably similar in our objective with the moratorium is to create an ordinance.

Around land use development code right the moratorium gives breathing room for staff to come forward with the regulations that would eventually be incorporated into an amendment to the development code that would regulate data centers develop.

In our previous development code update, did we have an advisory committee of stakeholders?

We had not an advisory committee. We had stakeholder groups. From folks at the council, we're a development community, citizens, but it wasn't a council-driven advisory committee.

Was that an effective way to go about the development code update?

I believe it was.

So we can do something similar here?

That's what our internal staff would, maybe not the same scale, the complexity is a little different. The stakeholders are a little different than the development code since we've had so many different stakeholders. Here we're looking at obviously the business industry and then the citizens of Thornton that would be concerned about this. So it's more of a narrow topic versus... 800 pages of code.

But it's still a change in the development code.

Correct.

Right. Okay. But yeah, so I'll go back to my first point. I think our internal resources, existing staff capacities are sufficient and kind of towards the objective of saving money where we can and still accomplishing an objective.

Evan?

I love my opinion on this.

Internal resources, I think, is the best way to go with this. However, I will also state that I think that options two and three are counterproductive to the point that we're trying to make across everything, considering that the Thornton website is on an AWS server hosted by CISA and It's controlled by Cloudflare, which is another data center system. If we wanted to do a virtual meeting for town halls, that's controlled by a software company that runs data centers. So the irony in this is just overwhelming. But I'm in a losing battle with this one. I would just say that the very least that we can do is to cut back on any of that. If your concern is actual data centers, then stop utilizing them for the purpose of a moratorium.

Write that in the code. Yeah, that'd be great. Let's just collect the cell phones.

So everybody can get on their phones and do the surveys on data centers.

So I think what I'm hearing is that we need a little bit more on the recommendation. There seems to be a little focus on the internal, but I think the cost related to external is still something to be addressed at this point. No true consensus yet on which direction, but engagement is important. Yes. Yeah.

All right. Are we ready for next slide? All right. So now when we start going into the moratorium era and looking at drafting code, First one that we have to look at is, besides defining the bill, I mentioned earlier the definition of data centers. Yeah, we need to define that. That's not defined currently in the code. It will need to be defined and maybe defined different types of centers, which is what my research has led me to. Where it's allowed, I write. Where it's allowed as a special use permit, especially require planning commission approval. So then we're a public hearing on those items. So that would be one area. If there's concerns, interface concerns or spatial concerns, that might be consideration in certain areas that would be allowed or not allowed. The design. Design of data centers. We We work hard on those when they do have those kind of inquiries. Other communities spend a lot of time on data centers. A lot of them are, I think, you know, some of them are up to a million square feet in size. That's a lot of building. And how do you deal with that form? And as planners, we look to the future. If the data center went away, what would be there? How could it be reused? We do kind of think through those things because it is a lot of building. Setbacks buffering. Again, JUST LIKE WE WOULD ANY OTHER TYPE OF LAND USE, TRYING TO KEEP SEPARATIONS BETWEEN THOSE USES AND OTHER USES. PROPER BUFFERING, WHICH EVERYTHING IN THIS CASE COULD BE PROPERLY BUFFERED. YOU'RE PROBABLY LOOKING AT SPATIAL DIFFERENCES. LANDSCAPING TREES, OF COURSE. MAYBE EVEN SOFTING ON THE FACADES, ESPECIALLY IF IT'S NEAR RESIDENTIAL. SO IT KIND OF BLENDS IN THE BACKGROUND, NOT A STARK BUILDING. A lot of communities are looking at community benefit agreements. These, we can go into more detail on, but these are things that are normally outside of our development code, but communities are, because these do have a significant impact in some level of the communities, is often these data centers are providing some type of benefit back to the communities, and there are all gamuts of stuff that I've run across. I can just give a couple examples, and we can talk further, I guess, but everything from providing extra to schools, that's upgrading infrastructure, all different types of infrastructure, public art I've seen, things to nonprofits I've seen as well. So there are a whole gamut of things that come up in those community benefits. It's very peculiar type of agreements, not typical to most development, but this is one that's really popped up in this type of use. noise impacts um a lot of the centers the noise is uh from the fans the coolant cooling fans that's my experience uh the one that we were directed to by a previous inquiry it was up in cheyenne um it's right i interstate 80. You have to get really close because it is off the freeway, but you can hear the fans running. That one happens to be near an industrial area, but that is, they have so many, to keep it cool enough, they have to run fans pretty much constantly, especially this time of year. I was up there when it was hot, so it was clearly going on. Water usage. I heard some comments earlier about some concerns in the water usage, everything from using a contained system, regular flow of water, and then low water use, which they use for coolers if they don't use the cooling water environment. Utilities. So there's everything from adequate services to the data centers and directly from, you know, everything from electric, which is the biggest concern is power generation use on these and needs. The slides that Jessica showed earlier had typically use on these larger centers and how you match that with the existing network. I've heard a lot from the industry, actually it was a conference, energy conference they were talking about talking with excel and excel's trying to plan for their next generation a lot of these data centers are going in more rural environments where they have 1950s type of infrastructure and to get those up in the current infrastructure how does that happen does the does this pay for it or the rate payers pay for it or is a combination thereof and then of course there's the we're hearing more environmental concerns that are coming up on some of these um So all this stuff will be evaluated as part of this, the code right, and others. We try to keep ourselves engaged. If you as counsel hear things, we'd like to hear those as well so we can research. This is a very fast moving topic. So a lot of things are added really quickly to this list here as we move along the next few months on this journey on trying to create regulations on these data centers. Questions on regulations?

Roberta?

I have a lot of lists of regulations I think would be important to include, but one of the more important ones is the ban of the use of the NDAs and data center development fields, and then specifying minimum transparency requirements as part of the application process. So that's like looking at value of tax abatements, names of all the companies who are involved, like developers, shell companies, financers, end users. It goes on and on. There's quite a few things that we can do to make sure that like our community is protected. But some of the things that I found a little bit more interesting were ensuring mechanisms for community reporting of issues and violations to the local government and ensuring that there's meaningful enforcement and power and transparency and other requirements if they're violated. So like, if they're violating some of these regulations that we set forth, are we going to have actual teeth to hold them accountable? Or is it just like, because now, I mean, like, for example, we had meaty here in the city of Thornton, they were going buck wild with our water, what were the teeth that we had to hold them accountable to using tons of water? I know when that happened, we were in an overflow of water because we had rainy times and it was great and it wasn't as much of a concern. But right now we're in the opposite of that situation. I'd love to say that we should do this for any industry that comes to the city of Thornton. I know right now the hot topic is data centers, but that's something that we need to look into is like if they're utilizing, you know, over utilizing our power grid and our water, what are we doing to actually enforce that they're not going to do that and continue to do that? And then also giving the community the ability to report those issues. And then along with the noise, I have a list of different ways that we can enforce noise mitigation, water again, and then regulating and limiting energy use. And if you'd like, I can send this all to Jessica so she can, and y'all can look at it because it's a pretty extensive list of different things we can do to make sure that we're regulating these data centers in a way that is going to be meaningful to the community.

I have Chris. Go ahead. We do have code in place to handle commercial water use now. That was pretty much a result of me. So we do have that in place.

But the other things. What are the teeth with that, though? Like if somebody goes crazy with their water? A lot.

There are essentially all the way up to shutting their water. Everything from charging more for the water to shutting their water off at the extreme level. That would be an option.

I have Chris and then John and then Justin.

I have a few things here, but the first ask would be, we're currently doing the Weld County study, correct, for the annexation?

Correct.

Is there a way to, I guess this is kind of two-part, they lean on each other. If we were to create a specific zoning type, instead of a little bit broader of a stroke than what we have now, and where it can go in various areas based on like employment center, if we were to key in and say, hey, we're going to make Is that doable? And are we able to then speak with the consultants that are doing the Weld County study and say, as you guys do your study right now, this would be a great time to incorporate some specific locations through that annexation of land to place those data centers. So when we get that Weld County study, which I think should be by year end, right? Then we can take their consulting information and say, you know, like, this is what we're envisioning with this land, where would you recommend it? And maybe, you know, in my mind, that's always been the right place to place one of these. If we were gonna put one in the city, very Northern edge of the city, next to the Northland plant, we can't only do one dwelling unit per acre there anyway. So more commercial up there, that's out of sight, out of mind, and not between York and Washington. where we're seeing a lot of these similar structures go up right now. So that'd be my two parts. We can create a specific zoning for data centers only, and then we share that information with the consultants that are currently doing the work on the Welk County annexation so that they know this is our intention and they can incorporate that with the study when we get the information back by year end.

Can I ask just a clarifying question on that? When you say create a zone district just for data centers, do you mean create an entirely new zone district? Like, you know, we've got commercial, we've got residential, we've got that is just data center, or do you mean where sort of within our existing zone district?

That's a category under, to me, it's still commercial. So I don't know if we need to go broad, new umbrella overall, but something that would be specific that would that you know this zoning is pointing to exactly where we'd like to see those facilities and then when we create the rest of the policy we put limitations around like employment centers you know right now that's a big swath of ward 4 on the north side but that's still much different like the target facility is vastly different than a data center but it's the same application of zoning right now correct or

What you're describing sounds a little bit like a special use permit, an SUP, where what we would do is say, you know, I'll use commercial as an example. Data centers would be permitted in a commercial zone district with an SUP, with that specific use permit. And that adds an additional layer of analysis and control of is this really the right location within this zone district for a data center? So that's what that sounds like you're describing is an SUP.

Yeah, maybe I can just try to clarify, because I do think these two processes are going to be happening in parallel. I think when I hear you saying through the community outreach and the other collection that we're doing in Weld County just to provide feedback through that study what might be suitable locations that that that might be an appropriate use I think we would still want to use the broader code development then to apply that code potentially but if the question is could we use the data collection and some of the site evaluation and outreach that is happening as part of the Weld County to see if there are sites out there that might facilitate this or similar kinds of manufacturing or commercial uses. I think probably we could do that.

Absolutely. The first stage of the Weld County is actually the fiscal impact analysis that we're doing with All Thornton, but also the Weld County aspect. So that'd be part of it. If we are to look at a potential up there, they could part of their modeling. Modeling that makes it more feasible, shall we say, from an economics. But when it comes to pure zoning, it's either special use or, I mean, we obsolete it. We legacy zoned our industrial zone district. It always could be brought back, but the only concern I'd have, I think if we created a zone district, it'd be eligible anywhere in the city to apply for that. It would just have to be consistent with the comprehensive plan. What we don't have in Weld County right now is we don't have a comprehensive plan for Weld County yet. It's all development reserve. So that'd be part of our processing of Weld County is actually looking at the comprehensive, developing a comprehensive plan if we go the next step of Weld County. so that may help a little bit of that discussion we start looking at okay yes we may want to go up there and yes now this is how we want to vision this whole weld county and that's how you kind of then we then we start having areas where you could have those type of uses um without it being a spot zone or just creating that new zone district shall we say i think then yes that's more or less what i'm shooting for and i think you also brought the feasibility of it

someone else had mentioned earlier that you know those would be some of the requirements for the days that are coming to help with infrastructure and development so you know if we were to grow that far north that would be something that we would have to take into consideration but if it was designed that way then we can bring in the partner behind that data center to help with our infrastructure build up um that's what i'm trying to envision or at least get my point across is going with them, knowing that that is a possibility in the future. And some of that lift can be brought in or carried through the development. That's, I guess, the ideology and where I was going through some of the conversation.

And I know I have John and Justin, but I want to pull in that a little bit because I think you're onto something with almost like a site selection type thing. Like with economic development, we would have pre-selected sites that potentially could be good opportunities for a data center location. And that could help with some of these regulations where a special use permit versus actually saying, nope, this is the only place across the city that we would allow for that use. And Louisville, Kentucky did that with their regulations. I will send you all the link. But it went through that specifically based on what they could control in the city, but they identified where they would accept that use. So it's an interesting way to look at it, like flipping it, right? Instead of saying, just go where you want. It's like, no, we want you here.

Right. And then we have a lot of infrastructure built out to go. If we grow into that northern part, great. Now we have a great partner with... the financial means to help carry some of that and we have a lot of policy to craft around it but that would be like the intent how do i streamline how do we bring these things together maybe kill two birds with one stone and get what we want in a specific area that's not you know by housing or between housing and where we have a lot of commuting traffic so that's where i'm going with it um but I think are you fully grasping what I was asking? Okay. Then moving on, one of the other things that Aurora did like a 35 or 60 day where they kind of pushed off and just said, staff go to work, come back to us. And my question is, is that something before we get into going full moratorium, is there the plausibility of staff working diligently for 45 to 60 days, soaking up some of this policy. I think Aurora's even releasing their policy information this week or next week, and where we can start just to copy or put together a list of what we think are policy options from surrounding areas, or maybe it's nationally, maybe there's better examples, because you just brought up Louisville, potentially there's some really good policy and to meet some of the requests that Mayor Pro Tem had made as well if like requiring renewable energy we want to see solar panels across your roof I know it's nowhere near enough energy to support one of those but it is something So can we do a collaborative policy of what we're seeing around the country? And as we, you know, in the background, you're going to be drafting moratorium, but maybe come back to us in 45 to 60 days, kind of paint a picture before we go down the moratorium route. Maybe we, because we already are having this discussion about land use. And in previous meetings, we said that we could use these discussions to pause or delay the approval

Yes, it is. As of right now, the moratorium is pretty much drafted, and I believe it is set to come next week, right, if council changes the direction that was previously given to staff. So we, council obviously could change that direction if that is the choice, and we could use that pending ordinance doctrine that we've talked about. The advantage of the moratorium is as we've kind of gone through tonight and last week, you can really hone in on those details of it only applies to certain sizes. It only applies to new, it's more focused. The pending ordinance doctrine just sort of is a broad brush application to anything and again would require a change in council direction.

I'm willing to start the pot and make it more complicated because that's usually what I do is try to bring up a third option. A lot of conversations are being had before we go down the moratorium route, should that be the case 30, 60 days from now, I think there's an opportunity to maybe bring forth some of that policy and start interjecting these things. That's what I was trying to achieve. So I'm not saying no to a moratorium, I'm not saying yes to a moratorium, but is there a way to get more of this policy through Aurora and some of these others to where we can really take a look at something and then make a better decision. Is it six months? Is it 12 months? Is it 18 months on that moratorium? Maybe we do have enough resources around because everybody is crafting policy around this right now. And that's our shortcut. And they teach you not to cheat, copy, steal in school, but as an adult in business and professions, that is absolutely what you should do. and help fast track things and to where we can then really look at it to make a decision of how long on that moratorium. Is it needed? Is this something we could, you know, get done? But that's where I'm going with all my rambling here. And again, I apologize, I wasn't here last week. So maybe some of this has been, you know, touched on or addressed. But anybody have any thoughts, counter thoughts, or I'll just...

I think the direction given was to move forward with the moratoriums that require change in direction for that to change.

And yeah, I don't know any of the things I'm suggesting are making it even reasonable to have that discussion. Everybody's dead set then.

Well, it was four against and five for a moratorium. So.

Well, now we have eight. So complications.

So as of now, unless there's five to say, change the direction, it goes forward for a vote next week. That doesn't mean it passes next week. That also means that it could be postponed next week. So something to think on as we move through some of these other conversations. John?

Yeah. Well, thank you, Mike and Jessica. I'm for the moratorium. You know, nothing else because, you know, Jessica, you know, you and Tammy gave us the advice on the municipal end. Not to mention everything else. You know, there is a lot of overwhelming opposition to data centers in the country. It's like 70 percent at least. And this is bipartisan. It doesn't matter what side aisle you're on. There's just this speed, like Mike, you mentioned the speed that these have been going the last couple of years. And this is something I've been thinking about even before I decided on council. I've been following data centers. And keeping an eye out, because in Ohio, where I used to live, they've been going like crazy there. I'm more of a person than ALPRs, and I'm getting up to speed on that, obviously. But, yeah, the biggest thing, getting to the point real quick, is the utilities is the concern that – one of the many concerns I have is, you know, they're coming in with these NDAs, and then they're just, you know, these companies, whether it's Amazon – Let's just use them as an example.

Let's not use names.

My apologies. I strike that from the record. My apologies.

Just data centers.

Just data centers, yes. Once again, I'm in the learning process. So I won't name utility companies either. But the thing is, though, these companies that come in and run these data centers, they need to pay their share of the utility costs, including the upgrade of the infrastructure, and not on our backs, right? That's plain and simple for me on that end. I can foot the bill, but many of our neighbors can't. We talked about health care. We talked about everything else. And we're going to add, oh, we're going to raise your utility rates because of this data center coming in because they don't want to pay their share. So we need to ensure that if someone comes in with an application, they go in, they go operational, they're footing the bill. They're not going to pass it on to anybody, any of our Thornton neighbors. So I'm dead set on that. There's no one's going to change my mind on that part. It's that simple. I don't care who I upset. So going back real quick to what I've been thinking about the last two years, I'm a union guy. I am a male planner. I know that the trade unions have reached out to us. They agree to everything else. They agree about it. We need more guardrails. They are fully in agreement on that. It's just, you know, Chris, to your point now, it's how we do it, how we implement. And I disagree with them. I think we need the moratorium to ensure that we get, municipally, get these ordinances in place to cover our you-know-whats. Let the state ledge give them the opportunity to craft legislation. We're going to have a new state ledge. We're going to have a new governor, a new attorney general. So I'm going down testifying next year. I said that update last week. I want to reiterate, though, that any legislation that comes up has to support local control. And, you know, I haven't decided if I'm going to be testifying as a member of council or as a private citizen. But in regards to that, folks know I'm a council member. So local control must be protected by the state and when we move forward on legislation. so and i have concerns with noise as well obviously i'm told if i want some some folks oh yeah these generators they're oh they don't run at all they're just only the power goes out but then i'm hearing no they run 24 7. so that's a pollution that's an air pollution not to mention noise pollution so we need these guidelines in place to ensure that our neighbors are protected and obviously and i'll agree with chris on this point is we need to have them not near residential areas they need to be you know elsewhere whether it's you know if we go through with whatever happens with well county i mean you know it's open area you know if they have to come but i'm going to fight as long as i can to make sure the guidelines are in place um and i'm rambling too long and it's past nine o'clock so i'll stop there thank you

Justin.

Just to reframe around the question of scope of regulatory research, all of the above there, I think, Mike, you covered it really well. I also like to, I just think that Roberta made some really good points about the, just investigating the enforcement penalties, teeth. So I guess that's, that would be other, so.

Devin?

I just want to point out a couple of inaccuracies that came up during the conversation that was here. The distribution center that's at the top of the city that's recent without naming the name is actually 529,000 square feet. So it's over half a million square feet. So it's massive. That would be a hyperscale kind of area. It's also important to point out that it's a giant refrigerator that uses just as much energy as a data center would. We also don't control the utilities as far as when it comes to energy. If Dakota wants to build a data center right at the edge of where we're looking at, there's nothing we can do about it. It's still the same power grid. So I think that there needs to be a lot more consideration around some of those areas. And again, I'm for blocking hyperscale data centers. I think there extremely annoying. But I think that the moratorium that everything's trying to be put in place is way too broad. And I think it's going to affect things that majority of the people aren't aware of this effect. And you can have a data center that is quiet and running without people knowing and we've done it for years, we've had things that are there. And Nobody was aware until it became a giant political game to figure out.

I agree with the scope here. Another variable would be heat output from the building itself based on the massive energy use that might come from that. And then is there a way to look at just fiscal impact benefits of having these things in our city? We really have that fully understood.

It certainly could be, I mean, it'd be a legislative thing to add to the code that they provide such a thing with their submittal. It's not. it's somewhat uncommon, but not uncommon at the same time. I mean, if it's a use that is going to be a potential negative impact, it kind of gets back to the community benefits agreements. You're probably going to have to know that to be able to understand what their cause and effect is going to be anyways.

Right. Yeah. I mean, I don't, yeah, maybe it doesn't fit into like regulatory code element, but I mean, I think as far as like the exploratory part of this, I mean, it makes sense to understand the benefits. Because we can't, we can't all be a bad, bad, bad, you know, boogeyman. So understanding that would be helpful. So you know, for like, truly objective decision making, at least I would appreciate that. And then I actually agree with Chris, actually, It kind of mirrors what I talked about last week, which was, you know, there is a sense of urgency around these things and the sense of urgency or need to respond to public's concern. You know, and also a need for us as a city to, you know, set an example, set a precedent, be a regional leader in terms of like, HAB-Jacques Juilland, Showing what can be done in a quick amount of time in terms of crafting policy around this this use inner city yeah you know 360 days that is what it takes to kind of go down that road and then reevaluate. HAB-Jacques Juilland, You know what additional time is needed, where. We're accomplishing a couple of things, but one of those is we're still, you know, enacting a pending ordinance doctrine when that's needed, if that's needed, because again, there are no applications in right now. So I, for me, a little control, you know, aspect, I really hate being told what to do. So like waiting around for the state to tell us what to do is just not something that I ever will agree with. And I know maybe that, so let's be leaders there and then maybe help shape how the state, you know, crafts things. So that's where I'm at.

Dawson? Okay.

So from the consensus, from what I can hear is that all of these are something that we're interested in finding out more about. I would add that we did a lot of work around oil and gas regulations that hit a lot of these already that we could probably take some learnings from as well, specifically around noise impacts, water usage, setbacks, community engagement, even the marijuana regulations we did included a community benefits plan. So there might be some regulations we already have that we could take advantage of too. But I think you're hearing that we're interested in learning from others what we can do and moving quickly on what those regulations look like. Any additional questions?

All right. I think we just had the one.

Oh, yeah.

It was the one slide that said that moratorium ordinance will be brought forward for first reading on September 8th. Again, this will be a vote on the actual moratorium. You could approve or delay.

I don't think that there was consensus to change that plan at this point. Who knows what will happen next week. So it will be on the agenda. All right. Thank you. All right. Any board or committee reports?

Yes, thank you, Madam Mayor. So Justin and I had the NATO August meeting last week, and South Pace general manager of the Front Range Pasture Rail District, also known as Colorado Connector, spoke to us. It was great seeing him once again. And, of course, since we had the meeting, they had the vote that is going to be on the ballot in November. We, as a city, will not be voting on that, just to let you know, because we are not in the district. So... I can say that, you know, now, you know, with the end line, with the RTD, you know, fully funding the design portion of the end line, and that, of course, is our priority as a council. I can be a little more vocal about the Colorado Connector and supporting that. But, of course, obviously, you know, as long as the end line continues its progress, which is then I'm good with Colorado Connector, I will ensure that, you know, rtd that they're going to do what they're supposed to do finish the design we're doing our end with the stamps obviously for our two remaining stations so um and that's basically i think that's all i have on that one and i know there's a grand opening i'll be just you want to mention that the i-25 colorado 7 i won't be here for that that's next uh thursday i'll i'll be in grand junction for the um for the Justin Delacruz, City of Boulder, civic results September cohort meeting, so I know it's going to be a great day for our city, having that connector open, so I do want to mention that.

Justin Delacruz, City of Boulder, Any other border committee reports Justin. Justin Delacruz, City of Boulder, The long version or the short.

There's really only one thing that I'm just going to say because I think it's we're saying again is that there's a call for projects for Dr. Coggs innovative mobility set aside. It opens on October 1st. The program funds technical assistance projects such as mobility hub planning, all kinds of cool things and I'm just encouraging our team to look and see what we can do. We did great with the last Power Ahead Colorado grant, adding over a million dollars. And I think we can get more. So thank you. That's it.

Any other border committee reports? I gave my update last week. All right. Any discussion items? Roberta?

Just a quick one. I was wondering if we can do Hispanic Heritage Month on the 22nd. of September, if we can do a resolution for that. And I was wondering if I could do a short presentation on Chicano history.

You personally? Yeah. As part of the presentation? Yeah. I mean, it can be part of your comments when you... Yeah, I just want to do like a little video.

It won't be very long.

Okay.

I just want to make it a big thing like we had before. I know it takes a lot of time. And I just want to give a little bit of Chicano history. We haven't talked about that. We've had a lot of other little things. I was thinking it would be a little fun, but I won't make it pretty long, so it doesn't take up any objection.

I bet you're a teacher without saying you're a teacher.

Anything else, Roberta? There's a few for October, and I thought I could put them out there, and then that way people, you know, folks can prepare, and we can figure out how we want to do them later, but I can list them off here that way. don't have i just like to prepare you guys that's why i did this spreadsheet so one day when miss roberta's gone somebody can uh take it over hopefully and we can keep their tradition going but we have adhd awareness month in october aids awareness rosh hashanah yom kippur indigenous people's day on October 14th, Diwali on October 31st, and Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October. So I just want to put those out there so that we're prepared. And I know those are a lot of work, so I just wanted to make sure we have them ready for folks.

I don't want to steal your thunder and your spreadsheeting. When we bring your meeting calendar to you, we're actually going to bring you a list of the resolutions you've done this year. and just try to get direction if you want to repeat those next year. Thank you. And you can continue to add to that with additional spreadsheeting, but hopefully we can potentially preload some of the things that you have done historically.

I think what we should probably do is Hispanic Heritage Month in September, but just keep indigenous Let's just, I would think, strike Indigenous Peoples Day and do Native American History Month in November. That way it's not too much. Yom Kippur, maybe it's different this year. So it could be this month. I just put it on there.

Is that it?

Yeah, that's all I have.

John? Thank you, ma'am, Erica. Yeah, so we have a couple of our Thornton neighbors in the audience with us tonight, planning session. I want to thank them for being here. So I want to talk about the acoustics in the room. Obviously, I want to thank the city for the headphones, but I know in my past experience when I was just a neighbor before I became a council member, When I would come to planning sessions, I know sometimes, and I have tinnitus, but I can hear everything fine here, but I know in the back it'd be super hard to hear. So is there any way we can improve the acoustics in the room, maybe microphones, so neighbors that want to come to planning sessions can hear us without hearing aids? Is that possible or no?

We have previously, I understand, have evaluated adding microphones and speakers and those kinds of things in this room, we can bring them. We don't have anything in the capital program to make those investments at this point. We can certainly share. I think those cost estimates would be a bit out of date. I think that was several years ago when those investments were looked at. But we could certainly reconsider that. It is my understanding that it was somewhat costly to make those changes to the room.

So it would be possible to move the planning session to the chambers. That's another question to have.

The Planning Commission uses it when we're in here.

Never mind. I wanted to ask that question, though.

We'll provide the cost estimates that were prepared previously for Council's information. And again, if it was a capital priority, it's certainly something that we could advance to.

All right, thank you.

Can I add something?

I have Justin, then Roberta, then you.

I always want to respond to John. It's related to John's, I believe. Hello. Justin.

Hi there, John.

Yeah, you know, I think it was like on day one when I got here, I was making the same suggestion that we do this in the council chambers. I agree with you, John. I think that that's a great idea. work i think that's a great idea and i don't see why the planning commission can switch places with us so suck or no um yeah i'm fine but if that's the proposal i support it roberta i just remember this was a topic of conversation when i started too and it was about people being able to hear and we had purchased i think

Well, we got the cameras because that wasn't even in here.

We improved the ceiling.

Yeah, we improved that. And then we also bought, I remember because I had helped Rosanna, Joanna up with the... some equipment too for meetings. It wasn't for this room, but we had purchased additional speakers and microphones and things like that for meetings specifically in here, but it was for different meetings because there were issues with the audio and hearing and things like that. So we did like when we first got on council, put a significant amount of money into cameras and all that audio stuff. So just something to remember that it wasn't too long ago that we had figured out that as well.

True. To the point, kind of balancing the funding restrictions or . Can we, if we were looking at new ways to handle this situation, is reconfigure the table so we're, like, close together and closer to the audience? I don't want to be closer.

Part of it was also security.

Okay.

Oh, that's . So maybe bringing back the costs associated with all of the ideas would be useful.

Happy to do that.

Okay. Any other items for discussion? I just have one update for you all. I got asked to be on the nominating committee for the National League of Cities Board of Directors. And so it's fully paid for a trip, but I will be going out to DC in October to go evaluate the applications for the board of directors to make recommendations. Just giving you a heads up per policy that I will be traveling, not at city expense.

So you're saying there's going to be a lot of people from Thornton on the boards?

Applications are due now. I just refuted myself if any of you applied for it for that position. All right. Thank you all very much.