Remarks by Claire Carmelia
112 remarks on the record, newest first · Page 2 of 5
Yes. Yes. And yes. Thank you all so much. The time is now 7.30 on the dot, which is really nice. We will now conclude our open study session and hold our executive session here momentarily. Thank you.
Thank you so, so much. And I just want to say I deeply appreciate those words, and I think they belong to all of us here at council. I'll do a quick introduction of our councillors in attendance. We have Councillor Haught sitting right here in the center. We have Councillor Ireland right here as well. We have Councillor Izadi over on our far left. And I know we have Councillor Brajas. Aha, there we are. Councilor Brajas as well. So thank you all for joining us. And thank you to our school board members. Thank you, Mary Beth, for hosting us. We're so grateful to you. Really, we're trying to…
I can click for folks if you want. All right, Councilor Zadeh, you want to click?
Thank you, thank you. So thank you, counselors. And our school board folks, do we want to stand up? I have not had a chance to recognize you all. So would you please stand? I just want to say thank you to our community members. I know how to pronounce everyone's name, but I feel like I should let you do it. Christine, would you start us off?
Not quoted here: it may name a member of the public. Hear it at the meeting.
Not quoted here: it may name a member of the public. Hear it at the meeting.
Get more ready. to the October 5th, 2026 Westminster City Council study session. Thank you for joining us this evening. Please remember that our meetings are governed by the rules of decorum posted inside the chamber doors. We ask all attendees to maintain a respectful environment, no disruptions, threats or audible expressions of support or opposition are permitted. Signs and placards are prohibited and all attendees must remain seated in designated areas. We will begin with City Council reports. Councilor Izadi, anything?
Thank you. Thank you, council and staff for your patience last week as I had a cold and it wiped me out worse than I thought it would. Every single day I thought, oh, I'll make tomorrow's event and did not so. A few that I want to call out that I missed. I missed the Simchat Torah, which was interesting. It was a Jewish community event that was held here this weekend. So that was interesting. And I really hope that I can attend next year. So sorry to not be there to celebrate with them. I did stop by because it was outside and I was mostly better this weekend. The Westminster Fire Department…
Thank you so much. Any questions on the City Manager's report? Okay. Any items that we want to bring up for a future agenda session? Okay, and then I have a natural flow from our reports onto the city manager's report, and I tend to do that second. Does council see any reason not to reverse the order of that on the agenda for study session? Okay, Abby, do you mind in the future? I tend to do it most nights anyway. Thank you. Okay, well, that brings us to our first presentation of the evening. which is a review of revised recommendation for the event center ordinance.
Thank you. Council questions and comments? Councilor Haag?
And just for some clarification, I wanna make sure we stay on the topic of future event centers, because that's what we're discussing. However, some of these questions are pertinent to the future event centers that we're discussing. So let's make sure we keep our questions aimed at that, but we'll allow it. Go ahead.
Okay, thank you. Thank you. Councilor Brahas?
Thank you. I was just waiting to see if there was any feedback on that or clarification.
Okay, thank you. Thank you for your work on this. I really appreciate the stakeholding that you did and bringing in the chamber and our other local businesses to help understand what the best course of action might be going forward. So appreciate that. I'll say I disagree, Councilor Johnson, with the point you made on the special use permit because that's why we're here today. And that's what got us here is this bypassing council review. And we discussed this at length last week time we had this topic and our event centers, I forget what the number was, but it was single digits. I think it…
Not quoted here: it may name a member of the public. Hear it at the meeting.
Thank you. All right, is there a slide asking the questions that I should pull? I don't think there is, which is fine. I believe that the question is, are we in support with the recommendation or would we like to extend the moratorium? That's correct. Okay, so I'll go around real quick. Councillor Zaddi, excellent. Councillor Haag, okay. Yes, okay, excellent.
option but otherwise I'd move forward with it. And I'm a yes. I guess that brings up one last clarifying question for me which is I made an assumption that it would go through Planning Commission first regardless and then to Council. Is that correct?
Okay, one more quick ring around, I think, Councilor Zotty.
Thank you. Oh, excellent. Okay, I agree with both because I'd prefer this to see the experts on the planning board. That's why we have them. And so I'd prefer to get their evaluation before it comes to us. Thank you. Okay. With that, I think that wraps us up. Anything further we need?
Thank you so much for your work. Much appreciated. All right. City Manager, would you please introduce the next presentation?
Thank you so much. Before we lead into questions and comments and thoughts, I just wanna acknowledge the elephant in the room, which is that in our strategic plan, there's a very direct, and I think also as a poll question that we've asked for it to come back to council comments, just, I wanna get ahead of this conversation that council has asked to discuss fire sprinklers. in terms of affordability to our housing solutions. And so I will let council guide the conversation that follows, you know, and perhaps council doesn't about face on that ask, but I wanna get ahead of that in terms of…
Councillor Ireland, did you have a thought? I think she was first.
Mayor Partem, before you move on, could we expand on that point? Because that was something I was going to touch on. Could you reiterate, you said you do know that each line on the TAPs could staff or yourself expand?
Thank you. Well, following off that, you know, a picture says a thousand words. So I too agree that I've learned a lot from this presentation. So thank you for that. I do have a few questions to make sure I'm doing my due diligence because, you know, I have promised, you know, residents and stakeholders that, you know, we would work to reduce, you know, so that we could make housing more attainable. And so just, you know, I'll go through each of these. How many garages have we had on fire? How many incidents have we had over the last year or whatever metric you have that's available?
Thank you. How many of our neighboring municipalities have adopted those requirements?