City Council - workshop

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Welcome everybody to our study session for August 10th, 2026. We've got a pretty heavy agenda today. We're going to start off with a a presentation on better public meetings, followed by diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, five-year update. Then we'll be talking about the Chateau Theater operations and investment strategy, seasonal parking restriction update, and then we do have an executive session later after that. So, There's some times on the agenda, but I will be flexible as to the discussion items. So we're going to start off with our Better Public Meetings update. And I see we have Nick Vlahos from the National Civic League on the screen. And Nick, I'm just going to turn it over to you. Thanks so much for having me again. Can you all hear me well? Yes, we can.

Yeah. Just a logistical thing. Are you managing the slides on your end so that if I can just ask you to change the slide? Yes, we are. Yes. Okay, great. So thanks again for having me give a presentation on Nick Vlaus with the Civic League. I've been working very closely with the city, a bunch of folks from the staff side and from the city council side on this project for several months now. With the packet, I believe you would have received a research report, a sort of, shortlisted set of recommendations that stem directly from the broader research report, and then I have a presentation to give a high level of that, and then talk a little bit about a couple ideas on what we're thinking about moving forward. So, here's a bit of an update on that. Next slide. So, we developed the report over a course of, different types of research. So we held qualitative interviews with folks within the government, from council, from boards and commissions, from the staff side, and then in the community, residents, nonprofit leaders for a variety of different spaces. And then we hosted a civic scorecard where at your city council meetings, there was some evaluation from the public on their sort of thoughts on, you know, how did they tend, what worked, what are the things that you can work on? Then we had a community survey go out, which was a little bit more expansive. We packaged that all up and came in December and several of you had joined that. I think we were attended by at least five council members, several of the staff members on hand. 40 people came to turn out and then that all led and helped inform how we're thinking a little bit about doing civic engagement in the community. And then we put together these documents. So next slide. So there are nine components of that. And this is like, hopefully you've had a chance to review it or, you know, as it happens, you may have just gotten it or just haven't had a chance to review it. But there are nine components. So everything I'm talking about here, you can review it yourselves in these attached PDFs. Next slide. So just to run through some of these quickly, one of the themes that we came across was the idea of, one of the themes we came across was the desire of specifically elected officials to have a specific type of personal, or even the city as well, but specifically on the official side to have personal outreach and community presence. And part of this is thinking really about how you, the type of presence that you can have in the community. So how do we support and maintain regular contact with residents outside of formal meeting spaces? So how do we think about digital or traditional contact methods? What are the types of tools to enable you to feel like you can build sustained relationships and touch points you know, on a limited budget or limited staff and to be, you know, predictable and the ability to connect more easily and build that user base. So that's one thing. Next slide. In a related way, how do we interact and overlay with what the city does in terms of community-based engagements through more informal pop-ups and events? We're thinking really about how you meet people where they are. Of course, a lot of what I'm going to be presenting here happens already. We're just elevating and highlighting some of the things that we might want to think about And you might want to just sort of systematize, you know, how we start doing that. How does city staff support elected officials by leveraging their engagement and having them attend, you know, type of pop-up events and things like that. And to my knowledge, I think that, you know, and to your credit, I think you've done a lot of this already. From my understanding, the city has gone ahead and the staff has gone ahead and plugged in some officials at different points. So I think you're checking several of these boxes off already, which is great to see. Well, how do you think about, you know, a variety of community ends to build that sort of base of connection and leverage that at some point to bring back to your meeting spaces? How are you getting people to feel, you know, that those relationships and to trust you? Next slide. So here's, you know, this came up a few times of thinking about how do we leverage digital engagement, you know, and of course, you know, there's a variety of means to do this, your regular communications channels and things like that. But what we were thinking of more is along these lines towards the big challenge of, How does an elected official share updates to the community? How do they gather input or communicate outcomes? And how do you invite people? And of course, the classic organizing on the ground, boots on the ground, meeting people where they are, or maybe you're able to afford to pay for your own newsletter. But how can we think about digital opportunities? And a few ideas were floated, right? You know, we've thought about, you know, different tools. And of course, there's so many different ways to think about this. One is IndieGov. You might have, I believe there's another tool that you already leverage. So whatever the case is, how can we sort of gather the folks that are interested in participating and build that, you know, almost like a snowball effect where you can continuously do outreach to the community to build that awareness and plug people in. Next slide. So this one's on town halls and public design standards, you know, specifically about this was probably more on a reflection post COVID, you know, some things obviously changed everywhere and in the community. And, you know, as we move back more towards the comfortability of doing these things in person, There's obviously a different dynamic that has happened. We had heard that some elected officials face hostility and so enabling and feeling that level of comfortability to be able to host these town halls, but how do we do it in a way that can avoid traditional pitfalls of public meetings? um i could have put up on here a picture of just a very easy set of pictures and i think this is part of the update that i gave in december that you can just find headlines from traditional town halls where you host it and people are not happy because it's a very it's it's almost like you're speaking at residence you don't give them opportunity to feel heard there's no two-way dialogue so how can we think about you know a more conversational type of town hall and i think we modeled that very well i think or at least I'm optimistic about how everyone felt at the session there. And my understanding is that that sort of maybe has kick-started or enabled some to feel emboldened to host a town hall, but have a variety of different features where you're sitting there and conversing at tables. And I think that's part of the key element. So thinking about how we design for active public input to get people feel heard, so we can avoid the sort of alienation that some people feel and then trust the political process and elected officials at the same time. And so that might be happening in your own constituency, Several of you might want to host this together. And there's a parallel one to this, which is on the next slide. So, in a related way and thinking about town halls, you know, how do we consider this was really, you know, if we think about the nuts and bolts of what the project was, we came in as a better public meetings project. What is that? That's essentially thinking about how we can support civic engagement in public meetings. Largely because these meetings are important, it's where decisions are made, but a lot of the people that come to this are, you know, there's the same similar people, you might not have a lot of people, you might not have a lot of diversity in these rooms, there might be a lot of similar contention and the same types of voices that are active. How do we think about designing public meeting spaces? What are we allowed to design and how can we think about what's what's leverageable within open meetings laws. And so the study session is a great opportunity. To my knowledge, I think you've already reformatted how you do your study sessions. But this is starting to think about what if we take this a step further? What if we include the public instead of a fishbowl activity? What if we involve them in the conversations early on? Because this is the very first opportunity to think about a policy or an issue to learn about it collaboratively. So how are we thinking about how we include the public In a more formal setting, not in the town hall. So this is one part of the thing that we've been thinking about as well. Next slide. And so of course, it's all well and good to think about a whole engagement before and during, but what do we do after with information? So we heard pretty frequently that, at least from the scorecard responses, what happens with our input? We just don't know where it goes. And I think this is part of a communication cycle of what do we do with the public's input after the fact? And that might just simply be a matter of communicating we've taken your consideration or we're going to answer your questions or this is X, Y, Z of how we're factoring in your decisions. It's just a way of closing the loop and the cycle and letting people stay informed of how, you know, how they're, you know, how we're factoring in their time because, you know, and we're taking into consideration the time that they're investing into coming out and providing thoughts. Next slide. We heard some interesting thoughts about creating an on-ramp between different sort of political bodies between the boards and commissions and between city council. How do we think about creating a different type of alignment and segue between them? How do we have presentations given at, you know, from, from boards at city council or vice versa? How, you know, and partially is just creating more synergy between your own political bodies because Boards and commissions are also their own engagement and outreach mechanisms, and they engage the community in different ways. So that might be another way that you want to think about what types of alignment you want to create. And I think maybe you've even done some of this, if I recall, notifications of different types of trainings that you're providing to the boards and commissioners. So even building that type of awareness, I think, is just creating a better relationship between the different parts of the system that you have. Next slide. So that you obviously have a very interesting model of co-design, which is a very, you know, it's about depth and breadth and getting, you know, good information, through resident co-design leaders and thinking about the way and role that equity is involved in these processes. And that was praised a lot. There was also a desire, a lot from an official standpoint, how do we scale this and leverage it? How can we use it? Can we use them as facilitators? Is there a shorter version that we can deploy fast? What are the different ways that we think that you can think about you know, the co-design model in applying it, you know, whether it goes back to this idea of at these town halls or if you ever need facilitators or whatever it is, you know, that there's an opportunity there to take your really excellent model and think about how you can insert that, including also, you know, you have your community connectors and the way that and how they're involved. Next slide. And then there was this idea, we heard this a few times of, okay, well, what do we do with all this information that's incoming and as we're applying it and practicing it, right? So I know a few of you run several town halls. What are the lessons that you've learned and can you share them? How do you share them? What are all the other various things that other officials are, you know, are bringing you know into their community or taking out of various conversations so what are the types of ways that you can create some sort of peer learning and obviously a study session is one of them you know you're clearly learning about it um maybe there's other avenues and ways you want to think about the way you network amongst each other to share the challenges and best practices or how to how to collectively solve or plug each other in into different ways to support each other And so we've heard, you know, some of that. So those are the nine peer learning, those are the nine sort of things. I have a few more slides here. But I just want to just highlight here, like, all these are really are just, you know, a set of recommendations for you to consider. These aren't prescriptions. These aren't things that you have to do. I think you're doing a lot of them. But we came in with the intention of pinpointing some of the pain points, right? And there are some, you know, and we outline these, I think, a little bit more thoroughly in the civic infrastructure report. You can hear people's own words on the quotes that they bring forward, the things that are challenging. So, you know, what we're trying to do is just help support ways that you might want to support your civic engagement process. You know, some of this is going to happen before meetings, some of it's during, some of it's after. So here's a few different opportunities to think through. Next slide. So the three, we have a few strategic opportunities here. Really this idea of encouraging collaboration and relationship building, this I think is an opportunity for the city to think about the connections between the various parts, city staff and elected officials and the various boards and commissions, how you all integrate and align. It's a great opportunity and moment to take stock of what's working and what are the challenges and how you might want to move forward in the way that you do civic engagement obviously works, but maybe there are opportunities for you to think about, you know, how can we build a better, a better team of mobilizing around, you know, the common cause of civic engagement across, you know, all the various parts. The next one is building officials capacities. I heard this time. And again, this really is, And I think to a testament, the fact that so many of you really want to get out there in your community says a lot about, you know, and that's a huge thing, especially in an era of mistrust of elected officials. You wanted to go out there and build that base and to do that. So I think we need to take stock and opportunity of how to best support those practices. And then we have a couple ideas on that. And then, of course, designing meetings around public participation. I think we've proven at least, you know, through, you know, through that one meeting that we hosted with five elected officials and 30 some odd residents that the design of the meeting itself and the way that it facilitates around a learning component around, you know, solving a problem. builds, in my opinion, a little bit more of a collaborative atmosphere, a little bit more optimism, and it gets people working and sharing all the various types of experiences they have on subjects, which might lead to better decisions, might lead to less contention. So those are the three strategic opportunities. And then we have two thoughts here, I believe, on the next slide. or a few thoughts. So potential pilots. So as we had mentioned here, this idea of enabling and supporting elected officials, we thought that a good idea here is to think about an outreach sort of toolkit. And Everything in this toolkit really is like, what are different types of practices that other places or that do or that you might want to deploy? There's nothing in here that you have to do, but they might just be useful in, you know, to have a set of tools in your toolbox to be able to support the way you engage in your community. And so you might have some thoughts or you might want to provide some things into that and we'll have a draft. of that to share. And maybe there might be other considerations, you know, more legal things as well that you might want to provide on the way, you know, that city staff and elected officials engage in outreach. But that doesn't have to be. As it stands, it's just literally examples and possibilities of how you might want to just do engagement yourself in the community. I do think that we should think about hosting a special civic engagement city council meeting. We can call this whatever we want in other communities and we've called this Community Council Forum. It can be called a deliberative study session, a deliberative town hall. Really what it is, is thinking about a specific subject in the community that's important. And I know there's, I think there might be I would have to defer to some of the staff to see if it was part of the packet, but I think that there are some ideas and maybe this is more of the question of what you would want it to be, but we should think about hosting one of these sessions along these principles of how to get a really good, nice, diverse set of participants to have a conversation. with you all at a specific time and think about the importance of how their input's gonna inform some future course of action or at least start the conversation, how you might follow back with them and continuously engage with them. And let's test and evaluate to see how we all feel about that. I would love to hear what elected officials, staff and the public think about this post event. So think about towards hosting that. And then if you ever want to support any sort of collaboration and test something, we should do that. I'll note one example of this. In the December meeting, to my knowledge, and I put this out to practitioner community, we pilot tested the translation tech glasses as just a way for, and so one of the residents spent a full hour conversing and allowing people to speak to them. And it was translating them. They could speak English, but it translated to them in Spanish. So it allowed them to experience a conversation differently. Just testing things that might help civic engagement and inclusion differently and see what works and what doesn't is something we're interested in doing. So we're happy to go with that. And of course, you know, Whatever you want to do with this set of recommendations, you can run with it and decide what's most important to you. Maybe there are other things that really speak to you in that set. But these are some of the things that I think that we might want to converse. So I'll be curious to hear your thoughts on, you know, if you're interested in these things. And I think that's it for me.

Thank you, Nick. Thanks for the presentation. And just to kind of level set, so we had our last meeting on this in, I think, February. And we've initiated some of the recommendations from the previous Better Public Meetings session. And the fact that we are here at a more informal setting for our study sessions is part of that and also visibility for our elected decision makers in the community with a great program put together by our communications department on really connecting us to constituents. Now I think it's time to look to what's the next level of that kind of community engagement. Thoughts from members? Mayor? Go ahead. Go ahead, go ahead.

We have talked as well about a late November gathering and one of the very positive things that I see about that is it's focused on the survey that we are doing so that we will have a meaty piece of information that we share with the public and we share it in the way of they own it and we own it. It's all of us together and have an opportunity to converse around that. I think that's going to be just extremely valuable.

Thank you. Just to pick up on that, I liked the format that we had in this past winter where council members were at tables with residents and we were able to talk directly with residents, hear from them, and then kind of move around. And so I think that kind of format for a deliberative study session or deliberative town meeting or whatever we happen to call it, I think is, I agree with you, Councilmember. Mayor?

Yeah, I was just going to say we've used the format that we learned from Nick twice already. We have a third town hall coming up. They were focused on issues that were kind of top of mind with the community. One was on the drone program. One was on, and other technologies that the police department is using. We had one on RPU and we have one coming up on public transportation and all its varieties. I think the format's been really nice because not only do people get informed about what's happening because often they're not aware of what we're doing as a city. They don't watch every one of our meetings. you know, as carefully as maybe we do. So it's an opportunity for them to learn, but also then to give feedback to us and ask those questions and have them answered real time by council members, by staff, by experts in their field. And so I'm really looking forward to this next one.

And I think that's, this is one thing that we can do and are doing and have done as well as the changes we've already made.

And I agree with Council Member Wald, the larger town halls, using those maybe twice a year. I think that's what we're starting with that kind of thing. It's great. I think the one issue, Nick, that I wondered about is do you have suggestions for how we take what we hear and turn it into something so that people... you know, feel like we've listened to what they've said and taken action based on what we heard from them. The topics we're talking about so far in the town halls have been educational. I think they've had questions answered real time, but I don't think it's, we need to take that next step where it's actually directing actions that we will take as a council or city based on what we hear. So do you have a, is that part of your toolkit on how?

Yeah, it is absolutely so. I mean, it, there's different purposes for hosting these types of meetings. You might just be wanting to have this type of conversations because it's ad hoc, it's really important. Something's come up and you really want to have conversations, or you might want to think about this really in a way that it's part of a policy cycle. Maybe there's an important decision that needs to be made and you want to start early and gathering input early and it's leading towards something. So as an example, the Deliberative Study Session which they called in Boulder Community Council Forum was about economic vitality. That informed an economic vitality report which eventually led to a bunch of practices which were implemented to support historically marginalized businesses and all sorts of other things. So you can think about this in terms of early on in the policy chain and what might be relevant. And if you're talking about the community survey, maybe what this is is the start of a conversation that outlines a really important set of things that you eventually zero in on that might lead to implementing some type of practice. Whatever it is that you choose to do, you can allow the public a few opportunities to provide the input. and to visualize that input and then to follow up with it and show like how you're connecting the dots and we can you know we can help support thinking about that and i think you know there's probably a lot on the the engagement team that that that has thoughts to say about that as well but you know consider how this might be the first opportunity um amongst you know that to start the conversation but it won't be the last and that's probably one of the ways of doing it

COUNCIL MEMBER KEANE?

YEAH, AGAIN, I WOULDN'T FOLLOW THAT.

ON THIS WORK AND MET WITH NICK AND THE MAYOR WAY BACK LAST WINTER. SO I STILL STRUGGLE WITH THE LEVEL OF DISCUSSION. I'M NOT SURE SOMETIMES WHEN I'M TALKING ABOUT PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT, IF IT'S EDUCATION, THIS IS WHAT'S GOING ON IN THE CITY, OR IF IT REALLY IS, LIKE, PEOPLE COMING AND DRIVING DIFFERENT PRIORITIES, THINGS THAT

they disagree with that the city's doing.

A lot of it is advocacy for certain positions. And I think my view is we should differentiate how we deal with those different kinds of input. There's this thing we talk about like just finding better ways to get... A FINGER ON THE PULSE OF WHAT THE COMMUNITY WANTS. I THINK THAT IS THE CRUX OF THIS. I THINK WE GET CAUGHT UP SOMETIMES WITH TWO MINUTES ON PUBLIC HEARING, BUT THERE'S SO MANY OTHER WAYS TO DO THIS KIND OF STUFF. THE OTHER THING THAT I'M STRUGGLING WHEN I'M LISTENING TO THESE DISCUSSIONS IS THAT IDEA, ARE WE TALKING ABOUT WHAT ELECTED OFFICIALS SHOULD DO AS INDIVIDUAL ELECTED OFFICIALS?

AS AN EXTENSION OF THE CITY, AND ARE THEY SUPPORTIVE OF WHAT THE CITY'S PROFESSIONAL STAFF IS DOING, OR ARE THEY SOMETIMES IN CONTENTION WITH THAT?

AND I THINK I WORRY THAT SOME OF THESE SORT OF THINGS THAT ME HAVING SOME SORT OF TOWN HALL MEETINGS CAN END UP BEING THAT SORT OF CONFLICT WHERE I TRY TO, ESPECIALLY IN THIS EDUCATION, FOR THAT, I TRY TO DRIVE THEM TOWARDS THE PROFESSIONAL STAFF, AND THAT'S WHERE WE DO THE MESSAGING. WE CAN DO IT INDIVIDUALLY, AND I THINK IT IS PART OF THE JOB, BUT I ALSO THINK THERE'S TIMES WITH ADVOCACY AND THAT WHERE THEY'RE NOT CONSISTENT, WHERE THEY'RE COMPETING IDEAS, AND I DON'T KNOW HOW YOU DEAL WITH THAT IN TERMS OF THIS. I WAS AT THESE PUBLIC MEETINGS AND I THINK THERE'S PEOPLE THAT JUST WANT US TO DO DIFFERENT THINGS. I THINK THAT'S DIFFERENT THAN HEARING PUBLIC INPUT AND KNOWING WHAT'S ON PEOPLE'S MINDS. AND THE OTHER PART OF THAT IS THE ADVOCACY. THERE'S PEOPLE WHO ARE, I THINK WE'VE STRUGGLED WITH THIS WITH SOME OF OUR SUSTAINABILITY SORT OF COMMISSIONS OR OUR HISTORIC PRESERVATION. This Council is not always aligned with their priorities and those things. That's not a lack of listening. That's a non alignment of priorities. We just have different goals in different values and I don't think we're going to talk our way through that. I think you do want people to feel heard, but I also think we're going to deal with the frustration that you're not doing what. I want you to do.

Member Miller. that have been more involved in the process than I have. I just think somewhere around the idea of there are newer tools that are worth evaluating that are helping us modernize our engagement. Obviously we exist in a technology and communications landscape that is sometimes in alignment with our capabilities as the city and the selected officials and sometimes not. And I do wonder how we, to that point about co-design operationalize this sort of working with residents, working with a representative sample on projects, hearing from them rather than just doing it every two year community survey alone feels like that's an area I would love to see how we expand and hear from people more frequently and communicate back how we're taking in that feedback. Again, I don't know if these are tools that would come as recommendations from the National Civic League. The mayor invited me to join a discussion with some folks from change.org who have a tool that brings together a representative sample, broadly surveys, offers electronic, asynchronous capabilities to weigh in on feedback. So I don't know if that's a tool, but I would like to see how we as an elected body, as mayor and council better coordinate on our communication, better engage and look at opportunities for collaboration. I mean, I would just note within the budget process, the council has shared travel funds. and then the mayor's office has access to a staff resource and additional discretionary budget and so is that the right balance going forward i think there are some opportunities to talk about that too because i i do think that while we can talk about what individual council members do or should do what are the resources that are equitably distributed because much like a travel fund Not everybody has to take advantage of that, but it is available as a resource for education, for networking, and advocacy to other partners. So I just think modernizing some of the features and resources to the council and this difficult communication landscape that we live within would help us be in better partnership and collaboration.

Administrator Zelms.

Sure, if I'm close enough. That was really quiet at first. Thank you, Council President, Council Member, or Council Members. I've kind of heard a little bit of a thread of all of this. I do think a good next step might be for us to kind of outline what the communication, like a communications and outreach strategy for elected officials that THE ELECTED OFFICIALS THAT ARE IN THIS BODY COULD EITHER AGREE ON OR BATTLE OVER SO THAT THERE COULD BE AN UNDERSTANDING OF LIKE WHEN IS IT ADVOCACY, WHEN AM I WEARING MY INDIVIDUAL COUNCIL MEMBER HAT, WHEN AM I ADVOCATING WITHIN THE GUARD RAILS OF SOMETHING THAT'S COMING BEFORE THE COUNCIL, HOW TO SORT OF, YOU COULD CALL IT A PLAYBOOK OR YOU COULD CALL IT SIMILAR TO YOUR COUNCIL RULES AND PROCEDURES AND CODE OF CONDUCT, WHAT ARE YOU COMFORTABLE WITH? collectively and how can you kind of establish what some of those norms are so that if you are painting outside of the lines of the comfort level of your colleagues, that there's something that you can kind of come back to and speak to to say, well, this is kind of how I was looking at it. Usually it's not intentional when there's disagreement on how something is getting communicated. Usually it's just a different point of view. And so I think that could be helpful in addressing some of the things that you're sharing. And also I believe, and Ms. Bowman could speak to this, we are evaluating a number of different tools

THANK YOU, ADMINISTRATOR ZELMS. WE ARE SPECIFIC TO THE PIECE IN REGARDS TO E-MAIL AND POTENTIALLY TEXT COMMUNICATION. WE ARE LOOKING AT A VARIETY OF DIFFERENT OPTIONS INCLUDING A COUPLE MENTIONED TODAY. I AM HAPPY TO FOLLOW UP, TOO. WE HAVE USED POLCO AS AN ORGANIZATION SINCE 2019. THEY ARE ALSO THE ORGANIZATION THAT FACILITATES THE NATIONAL COMMUNITY SURVEY. SINCE WE STARTED WORKING WITH THEM BACK IN 2019, THEY HAVE added quite a few features to Councilmember Miller's point in terms of surveys, simulations, polls, prioritization, budget simulation. So I would just say to City Administrator Zelms' point, if there were also conversations around in some direction on maybe some additional items that you might want to partake in. There are opportunities through platforms that we are currently using that even if it were to be used as a bit of a prototype would not be additional budget to what you already have invested in in terms of that tool. Before the pandemic, there were what you could consider almost like pulse-type surveys that we were engaging with POLCO in. They were preset questions that we were putting out to those subscribers. Again, we're at over 4,400 residents that are subscribers to POLCO. We do not make that a requirement to participate in those surveys, but I just used that. Then the pandemic hit and we moved away from doing those because it also gets to the point of, great, you're asking for feedback, but what are you doing with the data? But that is, for example, something we could look into if there was a desire to step more consistently into that pulse check, if you will, with the community. So I'll stop there, but I'll just say happy to continue to explore these things and ALSO APPRECIATE MAYBE SOME GUARD RAILS, IF YOU WILL, OF WHAT MIGHT THAT LOOK LIKE WITH AN INITIAL START AND STOP OF JUST TO WHAT EXTENT, WHAT MIGHT YOU ALL COLLECTIVELY DESIRE TO EXPLORE.

MAYOR Norton.

THANK YOU. I have my concerns over Polko, and they have some good products and some that I have concerns with. I think the IndieGov is something different, and it's one of the reasons that there's been interest in that. It gives us access to invite people to events, which we don't have access to our residents in a way that's particularly helpful, so I would appreciate continued investigation into that. And I guess for Nick, not this Nick, that Nick, Nick on the screen up there, you did mention a set of tools that you were putting together based on what you learned for the team. And I guess I think there's this tension that I sense between the administration wanting to provide a set of tools and goals and and whatever you might have. And I guess I think we can look at both. I don't think it has to be either or. I think you've worked on some suggestions for us. And I'm assuming those will be something that would be helpful to folks. And it doesn't have to be one or the other. We can look at the ideas that come from administration from within and their communication department. And we can look at the consultant's recommendations and do a combination or a blend of whatever will work best for the community.

JUST TO ADD, ONE POINT THAT IS PART OF THE COUNCIL CYCLE IS THE BUDGET PROCESS AND SUPPLEMENTAL BUDGET PROCESS. I THINK THAT ONE IS ESPECIALLY IMPORTANT TO CONSIDER HOW WE'RE HEARING FROM THE COMMUNITY, FEEDBACK ON NEW ITEMS THAT ARE PROPOSED AND WHAT WE'RE MISSING. NOT THAT WE'RE NECESSARILY ABLE TO ACT ON ALL OF THOSE IN THE BUDGET CYCLE, BUT if we are able to reallocate or consider alternatives. I think that's an important time. We expanded the community building fund amount last year. Obviously that's part of an upcoming presentation today. We're seeing some gaps and that being oversubscribed. But I just wonder how that point where we can take action on more things and consider real community input is an important one in the cycles that we work within.

So I look at it and I mentioned awareness and I think if we step back we talked about some of the feedback that we got in January, February, December was that people were not seeing their council members at neighborhood meetings on projects that were upcoming in their neighborhoods or at some of the NIM meetings and there was a desire for RESIDENTS TO CONNECT WITH THEIR COUNCIL MEMBERS BECAUSE THEY KNEW THAT WE WERE THE DECISION MAKERS. SO WHAT I SEE US HAVING DONE OVER THE COURSE OF THE LAST SIX MONTHS IS BRINGING GREATER VISIBILITY, AWARENESS TO ALL OF OUR ELECTED OFFICIALS. AND WE ALL KNOW THAT AROUND THIS TABLE THAT THE MAYOR GETS A LOT OF FEEDBACK, BOTH POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE. and the rest of us around this table don't hear that. And so it's important that our residents see who we are. And so building those relationships I think is important. And then education, the next step, awareness, education, and then you get to advocacy. Well, education then is educating both about what we do, where we make decisions, and both the specific in their neighborhoods as well as the macro decisions that we all make on an annual basis. And then to Council Member Keene's point of advocacy, I think that happens, and we all know it happens already, and we maybe don't get advocacy from others. a wide enough swath of residents. And so I think that is really up to us as ethical public officials to take that information and put it into our decision making. But I think that's really up to us individually to find where that in that gray area where the line is. And I think we've done a pretty good job. I mean, we have events where there's five or six of us and we don't talk about public issues and we trust each other. So I want us to kind of continue in that realm, but there are risks. Council Member Doering.

I'm just curious. Questions too about a possible council-led town hall kind of meeting at the end of November. I've heard a question from City Administrator Zelms about putting together a set of norms for us to operate with. I'm not even sure how we do that at this point. So I'm just wondering what our next steps are.

I'm not hearing anyone say don't have November 30th. So I guess that's an important one is talking about that. And you do have a study session about the community community survey two weeks before that. So you could be firming up some, some details. Obviously we'd want to have a location, et cetera, before that. But if there was some details of how you wanted to operate, you could do that. But I think typically what we would probably do is bring you something to talk about at a study session for like a set of norms or something. EXIST AROUND THE LAND BUT THE OTHER THING IS WE HAVE HAD A HIGH LEVEL AS MR. BLACHOS HAS REPRESENTED IT A HIGH LEVEL SET OF RECOMMENDATIONS THAT AREN'T ROCHESTERIZED YET FULLY. THERE'S ROCHESTER DATA THERE BUT IT HASN'T BEEN ROCHESTERIZED BY THE COUNCIL SO I THINK THAT'S AN IMPORTANT PART OF YOUR CONVERSATION TO UNDERSTAND LIKE WHAT ARE YOU ALL COMFORTABLE WITH OR NOT AND THEN BE ABLE TO GO FROM THERE WITH ALL OF THE OTHER IDEAS, SORT OF WITH THE SHARED IDEA OF HOW, LIKE WHAT IT MEANS TO YOU FOR COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT VERSUS BEING AWARE OF WHO THE COUNCIL MEMBER IS VERSUS INDIVIDUAL PUSH, ET CETERA, OR ALL OF THOSE DIFFERENT THINGS AND HOW YOU SHOW UP IN THAT. I THINK THAT THAT SEEMS LIKE AN IMPORTANT NEXT STEP.

Yeah, I think that's all very fair. And then just to follow up on, Council Member Miller has been very upfront and honest about trying to utilize technology for increased engagement. Can we expect to have some sort of recommendation in the supplementary budgetary process for implementation for that? Or will we have to wait another budget cycle, which means another year out for that implementation? I have

I HAVEN'T HEARD FOUR OF YOU I HAVEN'T HEARD FOUR OF YOU TELL ME WE SHOULD BE MOVING TELL ME WE SHOULD BE MOVING FORWARD WITH THAT. FORWARD WITH THAT. THAT HAS BEEN MY CONCERN. THAT HAS BEEN MY CONCERN. IT DOESN'T SEEM TO BE AGREEMENT IT DOESN'T SEEM TO BE AGREEMENT AROUND THE TABLE. AROUND THE TABLE. I'M GOING TO USE A WORD THAT I'M GOING TO USE A WORD THAT MAYBE PEOPLE MIGHT NOT LIKE. MAYBE PEOPLE MIGHT NOT LIKE. IF YOU WANT TO DO SOMETHING IF YOU WANT TO DO SOMETHING MID-YEAR, WE DO BUDGET for that very reason. So we do need to evaluate that. We would also, it would be helpful if the consultants are reaching out to staff because there is usually a user agreement and the one that I have seen is somewhat concerning. And so that's on Burnsville's website and it indicates that they have access to all of the content in perpetuity and can use it however they want. So there are things that we need to review with legal. There are things that we need to review with our IT department. there's a process that we go through for reviewing software to make sure that we remain cyber secure, all of those things. And then you would need to be comfortable with pushing, utilizing voter rolls and things of that nature in order to outreach to the community. Like there are some policy questions within this that I think are important for the body to tell us if they're comfortable with, but we haven't been getting direct outreach from this company. And I will say we are actively in in a contract dispute with them on other products that we use so there are a lot of factors not trying to not evaluate tools for you it's just that sometimes that doesn't end up with the tool that's been talked about but it doesn't mean it won't to council member doering's point and to council member miller's point and we do have some uh

AT LEAST ONE MORE BUDGET DISCUSSION TWO OR THREE COMING UP AND SO I THINK HAVING A BUDGETARY DISCUSSION ON THAT TECHNOLOGY AS WELL AS THE POINT THAT COUNCIL MEMBER MILLER BROUGHT UP REGARDING STAFF AND KIND OF THAT BALANCE BETWEEN THE MAYOR'S BUDGET AND WHETHER IT'S THE OVERALL MAYOR'S BUDGET OR SPECIFIC TO TRAVEL BUDGET. I THINK WE SHOULD HAVE THOSE DISCUSSIONS, TECHNOLOGY, MAYOR, COUNCIL BUDGET AT ONE OF THOSE SESSIONS FROM MY PERSPECTIVE. COUNCIL MEMBER MILLER.

And because the administrator asked, I would be in favor of the November 30th, the town hall. And I guess my pitch for that would be, as we think about going into 2027, we're post-election. We have potentially new members of the elected body or at least one. that might be a good time to test the community's priorities against what we've adopted as our strategic priorities and begin to think about that 2027 cycle to set the 28 and 29 budget around new priorities and understand how that process works from the point of education and bring people in and then ask for feedback both synchronously in that meeting and then perhaps a website or some sort of project portal that people can weigh in with ideas to better inform the process because I think that is, it is that frustration of how do people give feedback at the right time is when we solicit the scoped feedback for the process that we're already in at the right time so that they feel like they're able to weigh in at a time when it makes sense. and not after the fact and hear, well, you know, we're not in the budget process. So that would be my pitch for how we might think about that meeting that aligns with processes that we already have coming up for 27. But I would be in favor of it.

So Member Wall.

In a simple inquiry, I did have someone ask, and I just assumed that even though it's kind of a study session a day, that this would be an evening meeting on November 30th, like the mayor's town halls and like our December meeting, that would more likely draw a greater number of people.

I would be in favor of a later as well. Council Member Keene.

Yeah, just in terms of, stepping back here, the title of this thing today is Better Public Meetings, and then it is this sort of view on public engagement, and it's one of these topics that we can always do better at. So this idea of saying, like, you can do other things, but now you start talking about budgetary spending and things like that, and I I would like to know what key performance indicators we're going to use. Is this project working? Is this helping, hurting, or indifferent? Instead of just using the idea that you can always do more as a way of saying, let's make contracts with companies we're already having trouble making contracts with. I just don't feel comfortable with the direction this is going. As far as November 30th and holding town halls, I don't see that as any new thing that we're doing. I see examples of that we've done over the last many years. And usually they're when a certain topic comes up. Sometimes it's the mayor using her authority to bring people together. Other times it's other parts of the city have just have done that. So I'm good with doing things like that. As Council President Shubring points out, a lot of us show up. We're engaged in doing those things. But it's not everybody's job to do that. It's not part and parcel that that's part of the job. That's one of the things I worry about here too, that I still hear I'm hearing not just the city doing this, but it's the elected officials being individuals going off and doing things and I I'm concerned about that. I see we've done it. Councilmember Palmer has a newsletter. I think things like that for one way or you don't kind of telling people things I think it's good, but when you start having like competing voices representing the city, I think we can cause ourselves some trouble.

Any other comments I? Thank you, Nick. Any closing thoughts from you? So it looks like we're going to move forward on the 30th and have further discussions on technology.

Budget discussions that you mentioned.

All right. Thank you. Moving on to a... Thanks, Nick. A2, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Five-Year Update. Chao Matela, is she, there she is, and team.

Good afternoon, Mayor, Council President, Council Members. I'm really excited and grateful to be here today to offer an overview of a five-year update on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. I can hardly believe that it's been five years. It seems like time has gone by fairly quickly. And it's hard to figure out how to consolidate so much information into a short time, so figured we'd put together a small agenda so you know what to expect. We'll give you a little bit of background on the work that's been done, possibly in some phases of work, provide a little bit more context, and then take all the work that the organization has done and put it into four main categories, although they're certainly more expansive than that. Organizational impact, equitable community connection and engagement, which has already been a topic today. equitable economic growth, and then accessibility. And of course, we're always looking to see how this work aligns with the vision of the city, your priorities, et cetera. I'm completely biased because I see it everywhere, even in the very first sentence that says Rochester is a city that cares, right? So thinking about how we deliver services to every community member that's here, along with those that might be coming through. But I also see it under some of our strategic priorities, whether it's economic resilience, definitely inclusive growth management. I mean, if you live here, I'm sure you haven't noticed any of the construction that's happening and all the growth. Wanting to make sure that every resident is able to benefit from that growth in an equitable way. But most importantly, as we're thinking about our foundational principles, the root there, you know, are we compassionate? What does that mean? How does that show up in our policies and in our programming? But certainly, on the very bottom there, talking about social equity, sometimes there's quite a bit of conversation about what social equity actually means. Simplified would say it is the commitment to ensuring that every resident has a fair opportunity to benefit from public services, to participate in civic life, which is what we were just discussing, achieve their food potential, whatever that might be. But it's our role to then identify what those barriers are, and then think about the policies, practices, and systems, and how we iterate that. So I often say social equity matters because local government exists to serve everyone. So we don't get to choose as public servants who that public is, right? Whether they have the same lived experience we've had, the same background, believe the same things, or maybe don't believe the same things, we're here to serve all of them. So when public services are designed so every resident can access opportunities, we certainly have a more thriving community. So it was often that public service, people thought about economy, efficiency, effectiveness. That was often the way that people thought about social equity and governance. But not too long ago, they realized that if social equity wasn't part of it, that all those other things didn't matter. Because it didn't matter how well you were able to think about economy or budget, et cetera, if people who were living in that community were not able to access the services, and it didn't quite matter. We were not doing our jobs. So we start our work by thinking about community considerations. Who is our community? And this is where the definition of diversity comes in. As we talk about it within the city, it is the broad variation in human identity across lifespan, right? From our young residents to our aging residents, we're thinking about people based on their race, ethnicity, ability or disability, gender, socioeconomic status, veteran status, migrant status, and we can continue to add to that. How are all of those people who live here able to access the services that we're offering? At the same time, pulling demographic data at every opportunity. This is by no means expansive, we could add to this. It's just pulling up what is kind of important and glaring to us. For a community of our size, about 125,000 people, about 13% of those residents are foreign born. We have a large number of people who are multilingual, multicultural, certainly have lots of guests, visitors who are coming in for healing and ensuring that they're also able to participate as best as they can. about 11% of our residents with a disability, but quite important to note when we're thinking about socioeconomics, about 48% of our renters that are cost burdened, 15% of homeowners who are cost burdened, which means they're paying a third or more of their income towards their housing. So what does that mean, and how they're able to access any of the services that we offer, and are they able to, and how does that impact the decisions that you get to make all the time? At the same time, thinking about who our city teammates are, an important part. As we make decisions, who will be impacted by those decisions? How will they be impacted? Really, really important. And then being thoughtful about, based on all of these, who has access to those services and who does not? And are there things that we could do to then change what that means? As we're talking about those internal city considerations, that's where the term equity comes from, right? That's a parity in outcomes. is able to buy a home, who is able to get to work by whatever transit mechanism that they need to get to. That's also where inclusion comes in. It's an active part on our end to ensure that people are able to access those services. So our team has expanded slightly since 2021. We have two compliance specialists. We're joined by one of them here. Their work is basically in the infrastructure space. He'll have an opportunity to share a little bit more about the work that he does. Two community connectors that joined us in 2024. They are part-time Somali-speaking one and a Spanish-speaking. They are both cultural and linguistic liaisons to the community. Management analyst, Andrea, who joined us just this year. She has an accessibility focus. Summer intern, who is with us today. We've had one every year since 2023, I believe. They're always really wonderful and creative and innovative in how they see the world and bring a good perspective. And then certainly a DEI director, one at full-time. I will also say, should go back to that slide, that although there are only a couple of people represented here, the work that we share is everybody's work. So small but mighty team, bucked by a thousand is what I like to say. So first area, as we're thinking about organizational impact, there are three priority areas. Thinking through how we develop and sustain a diverse, inclusive workforce. What that means to us is not necessarily in the external identities that we're thinking about, but it could be the lived experiences, how connected they are with the people that they're serving. So diversity of thought, opinion, et cetera. Secondly, how are we developing highly skilled folks who are culturally aware, inclusive in the way they do their work, and making sure that we're providing ongoing professional development and not training. Training is a one and done. Professional development is an integral part of what you're doing every day. And then lastly, how are we developing and sustaining an organizational culture, infrastructure, et cetera, that allows us all to ensure that our work is meaningful to every resident. We have a couple of KPIs, won't read through all of them, but being thoughtful about the employee life cycle. Our human resources department has been a wonderful partner in that. How are we attracting folks to our organization to be part of it? How are we tracking the experience within the organization? What does attrition look like? Is there disparity in that or not? Are we providing information? You were just talking about demographic data a little bit. How does that impact and influence the decision that we make, et cetera? I also love to include images of city teammates who are embodying the idea that we are welcoming and inclusive. Thought I would include that. But as we're talking about organizational impact, an important part is to think about this. I said culture, it's strategy for breakfast, right? We know that we can come up with the best ideas and strategies all day. But if our own internal organizational culture does not match that, if people don't trust or are misaligned with the value of the organization, then we will not make the right decisions for our community members. So one of the things that we think about is our own internal auditing. Are we thinking about our own organization? not only auditing ourselves, but looking at other external agencies that might be evaluating us. A couple of things that we've done throughout the years that are ongoing, first one being a justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion JEDI audit that we'll talk about in a little bit. And this is department specific. Each department gets to select an area that they want to be evaluated on, provides a baseline, but also provides them a launching pad. Like, what do you want to prioritize within your own department that allows you to be focused? We have about seven departments that have gone through the JEDI audit and then have used that information to infuse it into the diversity equity inclusion plans. We also participate, or it's not quite voluntary, the Human Rights Commission does a Municipality Equality Index, evaluating all organizations, usually local government, to see how they're inclusive of our LGBTQ plus community. When I joined in 2021, I believe our score at that time was 67 out of 100, and we've worked fairly hard, and I'm really happy to say that in 2025 our score had gone up to about 85 out of 100. So policy changes over time to ensure that our city continues to grow. We also, in 2023, participated in the Racial Equity Dividends Index, and in 2025, for the very first time, participated in the State of Minnesota Joint Disparity Study. This would be a good time for me to let you know that our supplemental documents did include some of the impact reports that includes links to some of these documents should you really want to take some time to read through all of them. ADDITIONALLY, THERE WAS SOME INTERNAL EVALUATION THAT WAS DONE.

COUNCIL MEMBER MILLER.

I WAS JUST CURIOUS. I APPRECIATE YOU MENTIONING THE IMPROVEMENT IN SCORE. I WAS WANTING TO KNOW IF THERE WERE ANY, LIKE, LARGE AREAS WHERE THERE'S STILL BIG OPPORTUNITIES. I MEAN, ARE THERE THINGS THAT THIS EVALUATION WOULD SCORE QUITE HIGHLY THAT WERE NOT YET PROGRESSING IN THE MUNICIPAL EQUITY INDEX OR QUALITY INDEX?

Yes, I wouldn't say quite some large, large areas, but small improvements that we could make. One of them would be having a liaison within our law enforcement departments to the LGBTQ plus community. Another area, maybe not related quite to us alone, but also to the county, is having someone who has that particular role within the organization. And so I think as we continue to grow, we'll be able to cover some of those areas. Yep. So going back to the internal evaluation in 2021, it was an overview of the entire organization. If you remember, we prioritized three areas. One was recruitment and retention of diverse teammates, some professional developments. We've had a lot of teammates go through that process. Departments have come up with their own learning that is relevant to the work that they do. And then for those of you who have ever tuned in, in conjunction with Destination Medical Center, we launched an equity series. It is learning for anyone who might have any interest, particularly for people who are making decisions within their own organizations. Tune in, 35 episodes ongoing. We bring best practices, et cetera, to community members. And then all of this information is then used to curate this diversity, equity, inclusion plan. Again, it's department specific. We ask each department to come up with action items aligned with those three goals. And I'm happy to say over time, over the five years, we've improved on 75 or so different areas. When it comes to equitable community connection and engagement, in 2021, when we talked to the community, one of the things that they said was, you know, we tend to only hear from the city when they want something from us, right? What does that mean? Usually it was a survey or come to this meeting. And we've been really thoughtful about how do we kind of change that connection? It's been a good partnership with the communications and engagement team. But in this area, we want to prioritize two main things. How do we build and sustain mutual understanding and collaboration between the city itself and diverse community members. And then secondly, ensuring that we have equitable access to services, opportunities, and infrastructure. I use the diagram in here, the example, because it's one that is very dear, I think, to many people in this community. The Parks Department that has partnered on lots of different engagement, as they were working on their Silver Lake master planning project, said, how do we ensure that we are reaching out to indigenous communities? It would be the first time that we're doing so in a public space. And they told us that it would be wonderful at Silver Lake to have a ceremonial site, right? And we got to walk through that site with them for them to select what would be really important. And if you notice on this next slide, we actually got to see that to completion, right? And it was deeply meaningful that space can be utilized by anyone within the community, but very specifically important to indigenous communities. We do have some key performance indicators here. How are we reaching the community? Is there participation? How deeply are we reaching them? Do we have sustainable partnerships and collaborations with grassroots organizations, folks who typically aren't engaged in these processes? Resource distribution, which we'll talk about in a little bit, and then equitable access to program services and infrastructure. What does that look like over the five years? Again, this is a broad overview. I talked about the partnership with the communications and engagement team. We got together in that first year, developed an engagement toolkit that's available to all departments. So if our department says, I'm not quite sure, similar to what you were discussing earlier, how to do this particular engagement, they have some guidelines that they could utilize, but certainly that team as well as myself are a resource to them. We've also included a rubric in an RFP process So that way, if we're using a consultant, we at least understand our base requirements when it comes to public engagement, because that might mean different things, you know, depending on the jurisdiction. We are requesting for fairly deep engagement from our consultants. And then making sure that we are present and seen and collaborative at community events. That would be Pride, Juneteenth, Back to School, Latino Fest. They keep expanding. But we would like to be present as a connector to ask questions. Again, not only asking people to come to us, but making sure that we're in their spaces as well. You will notice that on Polco, we included standardized demographic questions. One of the wonderful things about Rochester is we're often ranked as one of the best places to live. A couple of years ago, it ranked number three as the best city. But our demographic questions allow us to ask a follow-up question, which is, for who? Because in some areas, our young people might say, well, I don't know if that's true, and here are my reasons. And being able to have that information is really useful for us when we're making decisions. In 2024, using budget stability funds, we're able to pilot the Community Connector Program. Again, as I mentioned, there are two of them. They have been unbelievably wonderful in being that liaison between the city and the community. I'll give an example here. We've had budget billing for Rochester Public Utilities for many, many, many years. Very underutilized by those communities, multilingual communities, either because they didn't know about it or didn't know how to navigate the process of signing up. And once we had the community connectors join in and have people enroll, we had numbers go up quite quickly as a result. We participated in an emergency management exercise quite recently. And we had our two community connectors there. And they were booked and busy. They were translating. They were interpreting. And it was interesting to see how the city of Rochester is one of the only entities that had kind of planned for that. but how are we not only influential to others, but showing that it can be done if we make a commitment to having that present. And then lastly, making sure that we're collaborating with grassroots organizations that maybe aren't always seen by local government. We have a monthly connect to the immigrant community groups. We help and assist and support planning of events. And then ensuring, along with our communications and engagement group, that we're thinking about focus groups and working groups when it comes to public engagement. especially when our survey data tells us that certain demographics were not as responsive. So, you know, being intentional in that space. And then it came up again, I said, I don't think I need to do my presentation because we already talked about equitable community co-design, Bringing this up because this is a very different way of thinking about engagement. Certainly we don't want to utilize community co-design all the time. It is never the beginning of engagement, nor is it the end. It's when we recognize that we need deep engagement on a certain topic because we haven't heard from certain demographics or groups of people. I love that it changes how systems behave by embedding those most affected into the process. A lot of times local government will say, we know what the problem is and we have a solution. What do you think of our solution, right? Community co-design begs for something different. Please help us understand the problem from your perspective and then also design a solution to that problem. Most probably easily to see is discovery walk that use this process completely changed what that linear park looks like, right? You'll notice the landscaping is different. They are heated sidewalks, et cetera. Um, there've been about 15 projects or more across the city that have utilized this process, but along with utilizing it as an engagement process, there's also been leadership training to over a hundred leaders within the community. so that perhaps they can use it within their own organization, which some of them have. But we also trained community facilitators, about 19 so far, who can facilitate their own process. You're getting a sneak peek at the 2.0 toolkit that is coming up soon, possibly by October, that will include some of the case studies of all of the different projects that have utilized it. And then third as a priority, as we're thinking about equitable economic growth and development, the goal here is to develop and sustain equitable opportunities for economic development and mobility across city departments. I know that the city is not always the one who is leading something, but we can certainly support and lead by example when it comes to some of these areas. And I highlight two of them specifically, the equity and built environment program that Zach will talk about as we're thinking about compliance. We have lots of infrastructure projects. How do we ensure that the city is a lead and an example in how we engage different community members in that space? but also the building community grant, which we'll reference in just a little bit. Performance indicators here, equitable access to participation. Simply because we have something does not mean that people are able to access it. So how do we continue to measure that? Is there trust from those community members? I included for this an example of that BIPOC home ownership project. which I think is one that's significant and important to the city participated in. It also shows a lot of collaboration. You notice Destination Medical Center, the city Mayo Clinic, Olmstead County, Rochester Area Foundation, New East Bank, all collaborate on that project. Why? Because for our state, the home ownership disparity is grand. 77% for white residents, 22% for black residents. So how do we include those residents in identifying the problem from the end and then working on a sustainable long-term solution? I'm happy to report there's been some good progress in that area. And with that, it's a good time to pass it on to my counterpart to talk a little bit about compliance and how equity ties to this, because folks don't always see that.

Good afternoon. Thank you for having me, Mayor, Council President, and Council Members. My name is Zach Eitens. I'm a compliance specialist for the City of Rochester. I'm here to discuss the City's compliance program and growth over the last five years. First, a little history. The program technically began in 2014 with the Destination Medical Center's minority and women-owned business enterprise utilization plan. It initially focused on BMC-funded infrastructure projects with three main areas of focus being workforce participation, targeted business opportunities, and prevailing wages. This created the framework later that expanded to the eligible city-funded construction projects. The expansion started in 2020 when city council approved an updated targeted business plan for DMC projects and directed city teammates to evaluate expanding similar requirements to city funded construction projects. Then in November of 2020, city council adopted a citywide compliance framework for eligible capital improvement program projects moving forward. The scope of the compliance monitoring, the portfolio is broader than just CIP projects. It includes DMC projects, state funded projects, federally funded projects, and mixed funded projects. Some of these have requirements that vary by the funding source, which may include prevailing wage and certified payrolls, workforce participation, targeted business participation, and other funding specific requirements. The city administers three primary compliance requirements on its eligible construction projects. The first being prevailing wage, which ensures that workers on eligible projects are paid the applicable prevailing wage as required by a state or federal law, federal money. project workforce participation monitors participation goals for women and people of color working on projects it's usually expressed by the number of hours that they have worked towards project and finally targeted business participation that monitors the participation goals for certified targeted businesses on eligible projects that's usually measured by dollar value that's provided per project to targeted businesses, which may include minority-owned businesses, women-owned businesses, veteran-owned businesses, and other small businesses in the community. Why this program matters. It provides structure for administering requirements. There's requirements from state and federal funding, and the city's also adopted the requirements that must be explicitly stated in the contract. In practice, we communicate requirements, review contractor reporting, we monitor progress towards their goals, and we address the compliance issues as they rise. The broader goal is to ensure that public investment creates benefits beyond the finished product. That includes expanding access to contracting opportunities and employment opportunities in the community. Over time, that can support economic development and longer term economic mobility. Why targeted business participation matters? Well, it expands access to public contracting opportunities, focuses on businesses historically underrepresented in government contracting, provides an opportunity for them to gain experience, build capacity, develop prime contractor relationships, and compete for future work. The city establishes project-specific goals. We monitor commitments and actual payments towards those goals. And it's not just about hitting that percentage. The goal is a meaningful opportunity for long-term business growth. Why prevailing wage matters workers ensures that workers receive at least the applicable state established wage That supports fair compensation quality workmanship and skilled Skilled construction workforce in the community it also creates consistent Contracting expectations and it supports the local construction workforce when the city chooses to pay the same amount that the state of Minnesota may pay on its projects it encourages workers to stay and work on projects within the city and The phase of implementation of this program began in 2021.

Council Member Fredericks.

Yeah, before we go by prevailing wage, my question is, are we requiring prevailing wage on projects where it's not state and federal mandated? Yes, the city adopted the prevailing wage mandate on CIP projects. Okay, well I have a few questions about that then, if we are doing it where it's not mandated by them.

comment hold a minute uh council member is this a topic that we will be discussing separate we did i have a request for prevailing wage to be discussed at a future uh study session so accounts president council member there is there was a request for when you bring we bring back the updated tiff

Excuse me, TIF policy that include a discussion of prevailing wage.

Okay, so we will be discussing that later. But go ahead, Councilmember, I just wanted to.

I can wait till that time. I just don't want to be too late to the party. So I actually, it's kind of in depth a little bit here, but if we're going to have a discussion, that means we're already 15, 30 minutes behind because other. So I'll just wait on it if that's the case, because I don't want to make us even later.

When is that discussion, Administrator Zalms?

Yeah, I'll chime in. That is planned, and I don't think we have a specific date yet, but we're hoping for early October, I believe, is what we're looking at. But I just want to emphasize that that's specific to prevailing wage on TIF projects, and it sounds like your question is more on compliance of capital improvement projects like Zach was talking about. So they're not identical, so you may want to make some of those points in this discussion. Go ahead, Council Member.

The general understanding of prevailing wage is that it's a wage that is applicable or reasonable within the community, where in fact it's a lot of times up to 50% higher than what the going rate is in a said community. And when we're trying to do affordable projects, save taxpayer money, and create affordable housing, paying higher wages doesn't make sense when we're trying to provide that, when we're trying to provide tax relief and we're trying to provide affordable housing also there isn't like evidence out there that says paying prevailing wage delivers a more quality project because on the local level here were several private entities several private builders do large projects they're not paying prevailing wage and they're delivering great great results so it's it's when we're it's like saying we're trying to do something affordable but we're gonna we're gonna pay more doesn't just doesn't make sense

And I would say, Council Member Fredericks, thank you for that comment. It's certainly, I don't know if I should use this term, a double-edged sword, right? So on one hand, what you mentioned is accurate in that the wages are quite higher, right, than not paying prevailing wage. Yes, but on the flip side, we have residents who say, you know, we're working within the community, working in the city, and we can't afford to live in the houses that we're building or the structures that we're building. because we're not necessarily making a wage that allows us to do so so perhaps that conversation you know at a later date specifically on prevailing wage and some of the commitments that the city council had already made would be a good one to have mayor norton and could i have some clarification i'm thinking back to my days in the legislature so that's like a long time ago

But it seems to me prevailing wages done regionally, it's not just done one range for the whole state, that there are regionally set wages. Does anybody have clarification on that? Because I think that matters.

Yes, yes, they are regionally based. Olmstead County would be region 55, I believe. Yes.

Just want to make that point.

So we will have a prevailing wage discussion, whether it's attached to TIF or broader than that at another point. Any further comments?

Yeah, can we add a few more bullets to that, please? Thank you.

Go ahead. All right. So, this graph shows the phase implementation of these requirements from when the projects, sorry, the compliance program was initiated. In 2021, it was all projects that were valued over $5 million would enter compliance oversight program. In 2022, that threshold dropped to $3 million. The following year, it dropped to $1 million, down to $500,000 in 2024, and eventually in 2025 to $175,000 per project, and that's the threshold that is used today, meaning any projects valued over $175,000 are part of that program. Okay, so these are the compliance requirements that were adopted by city council, prevailing wage, which we just discussed. Workforce participation, 15% of the work should be completed by people of color and 9% by women. And then targeted business participation, 7% of the total dollars should be awarded to targeted businesses on commercial construction projects and 4% on heavy civil. Workforce participation results, The 9% for women at the top and the 15% for people of color, that's what the current goals are. At program adoption, women hit about 3.83% of the total work on citywide projects. People of color were at 8.77%. Current results through 2025, women moved a little bit up to 3.96%, but people of color got much closer to that 15% goal. This shows that we need more effort getting women on these projects. So target business results. At the program adoption, about $556,000 was awarded to targeted businesses during that first year. Over time, through 2025, about $13.4 million was awarded to targeted businesses. That's out of about 268 million in payments. Now this graph shows- Can you hold them in?

Council Member Miller.

So on the two sides earlier, you showed a percentage as goals. And then on the side, you're showing total numbers. How should we interpret those? Like, how close are we?

So if you go back from Joe. Yeah. So 9% for women.

I understand the workforce participation. I'm talking about targeted business participation. They're shown 7% for commercial construction, 4% heavy civil construction, but I don't see a comparable percentage of where we are to goal.

We'll be touching on that in a second. On this page, it shows, okay, so we're showing about project value by year. In 2021 through 2024, the projects hovered between 100 million and 150 million. And in 2024, when that threshold dropped to, or going into 2025, when that threshold dropped to 175,000, it nearly doubled the amount of projects that were under compliance oversight. That was about nine projects in 2021 to over 65 projects in 2025 and 73 projects as of today.

Council Member Miller, though, I just was trying to see if we understood your question correctly. And I think Zach did pull up some numbers specific to what you're saying. Part of why it's not quite accurate to provide a percentage. And I think you have a kind of plausible explanation for that.

Yeah, in the beginnings of the program, before I was here, things were being tracked manually by contractors and also by city staff or teammates, and that gives us a little trouble trying to get the perfect percentage split up between civil and heavy. So really the percentages were being... monitored per total project for that whole pool. Yeah. And so in 2021, the total targeted business percentage is about 0.98% of the total payments that year. 22 is about 2.56%. 2023, 6.26. 2024, 10.88%. 20 to 25, 7.1% for a total of about 5% on average. Okay. Yeah. And the average between those two would be about five and a half percent. So about half percent short across the whole lifespan of the, okay. So we are making progress. Yes. Yes. Okay.

Excuse me.

All right, so as a result of those numbers and the amount of projects that are being overseen by the compliance program, technology has become increasingly more important. This summer, the city has implemented two new compliance programs that work together. It's B2G Now and eComply Solutions. B2G Now tracks targeted business participation. It integrates with a certified business directory, meaning that prime contractors will be able to search that directory for certified businesses that they can subcontract on the work within the community. The program also supports payment reporting and improves compliance reporting overall. eComply Solutions on the other end monitors prevailing wage compliance, workforce participation, and certified payroll reporting. It helps us automate some of the compliance monitoring as well. So what does the compliance program do? Well, its involvement spans the entire project lifecycle. The planning and procurement phase, we determine applicable compliance requirements and provide compliance language for bid documents. During the compliance review phase of the project, we'd review contractor documentation, review certified payroll records, and conduct payroll audits. It's an ongoing process. Construction monitoring, it's where we continue to monitor prevailing wage compliance, workforce participation, and targeted business participation. We also conduct site visits and wage interviews when deemed necessary. and for reporting and closeout we maintain compliance records throughout the life of the project and at closeout and afterwards we prepare reporting as needed and support project closeout by ensuring contractors have met the requirements of their contract yeah for a continuous improvement the program has grown as it has grown administration has to has continued evolving over the last five years standardized processes have been created better coordination with project teams we've had updated contractor guidance and forms we've expanded electronic reporting and we've made more consistent administration the goal has been to make compliance more efficient and predictable for everyone involved And looking ahead, our priorities going forward really center around three themes. It's earlier identification, clearer requirements, and more reliable reporting. We continue developing a centralized intake process. We identify funding sources and applicable requirements before solicitation. This allows requirements to be incorporated correctly from the beginning rather than addressed after project is underway. We develop more consistent bid language and compliance information. We've provided funding specific guidance where requirements differ and continue targeted education so project managers and contractors understand their respective responsibilities. We continue implementation and refinement of B2G now in eComply and we continue evaluating opportunities for future system improvements. We've improved project setup, contractor reporting, and data quality. The end goal is a more consistent program, better reporting by project and funding type, clearer responsibilities for project managers and contractors, and better information for evaluating program performance over time.

And maintaining all funding.

Council Member Doering.

Before we move on from compliance, which I think we're making that transition now, I want to double check an assumption that I'm making that if we have a mixed funded project, we always go with the more stringent level of compliance, correct?

That's correct.

Okay. Thank you.

It's a good segue to what you all have told me is your favorite part of the presentation at all times, right? Reading that report. So I just want to make sure that you know that that packet is enclosed. Again, for Building Community Grant, began in 2024, we're really grateful for the funding that was allocated to try and do this. It was about $50,000. The goal was to ensure that community members got to participate, a little bit of participatory budgeting, but also what would they prioritize because they get to pick the projects and submit that application. Again, we have teammates that review it, we have a standardized rubric, and then we allocate funding to community members. You're able to see that the number of applications over time has increased. Again, in 2024, we only had small grants. 2025, we're able to get an additional $50,000 to apply for those large grants. And then in 2026, we kind of had a unique year where we had a lot of applications at the very beginning of the year, about 34 of them. Lots of funding was requested. Of course, we only had $100,000 to allocate, but we did so with all of the due diligence that we've utilized in the past years. So what we're hoping for in the coming year, in 2027, is to change that process slightly. If we are allotted that $100,000 again, is to break it down into quarters and evaluate applications as batch applications at the end of each quarter. That will allow us to have funding that goes throughout the year. But please let me know as you review that pocket that I enclosed, if you have any questions, but mostly wanted to showcase for those that have completed the implementation, what wonderful work community members are doing from community gardens to festivals, et cetera. I would be remiss if I didn't highlight that you're looking at a picture of Latina Fest over at Chateau. It started out inside the building, just inside, and then by 2025, expanded all the way through Peace Plaza onto the other side, and it really activates the downtown in a really wonderful way. But we're also being thoughtful about how we have other departments collaborate. I think coming up to you in two or three weeks is something from sustainability, next week, right? So if that is approved, how do we maybe take some additional dollars focused on sustainability initiatives and roll it into the same process so that if we have any community members that are interested in sustainability initiatives, which tie really well into equity, that we're using the same process to vet those applications and have community members proceed.

Council Member Miller.

Thank you. I know I've brought this up before as well, but the park board has some funding that they've set aside as well for community grants. Has there been any progress on working with them to better understand how those processes can work together? Are you making referrals? Are you hearing from them? Is there collaboration happening there?

I see Director Whitman here, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but when I talked with him about that funding, it was specific to making park improvements specifically. Is that correct? And I think we determined at that time that this process might not necessarily work the best way for that, but being able to lend what we've learned from our process to their process. Right, and with that, we'll go to our fourth area, which is accessibility. We'll try and move this through as quickly as we can.

Mayor, council members, council president, it's lovely to be here with you this afternoon. My name is Andrea Jones. I'm the city's new management analyst and accessibility coordinator. Accessibility goals for the city aim to improve accessibility of city and community services, improve resources and opportunities for Rochester residents with disabilities and for those who are multilingual. Key performance indicators are accessibility compliance and infrastructure, inclusive communication and language access, disability access framework, and organizational capacity and culture. Go to the next slide. Some disability data relevant to Rochester for you, this time from the US Census Bureau. Approximately 17,553 community members, that's about 14.4% of the people in Rochester are living with one or more disabilities. This is up from 12,000 community members or about 10% in 2022. Next slide, please. We also have some legal context for you here today. All of the following policy is applicable to the work we do toward disability access in Rochester. So of course, well, maybe not of course. The first disability rights law in the US was enacted in 1776, and this was to ensure servicemen disabled in the Revolutionary War receive financial support. I found that very interesting. The first federal law, however, was the Social Security Act of 1935 with provisions for people with disabilities. The most familiar is the Americans with Disabilities Act, otherwise known as the ADA, which I'm sure you're all familiar with. This was passed in 1990 after the now-famous Capitol Crawl took place. It was implemented in 1991, and then it was amended in 2008. Next slide, please. Other applicable disability-related laws that we work in accordance with here in Rochester include the 1968 Minnesota Fair Housing Act, the Minnesota Human Rights Act of 1975, the Minnesota Building Code, which was last updated in 2020, And there are also Minnesota statutes regarding disability parking and right-of-way, which was last updated in 2025, code of ordinances here in Rochester. And then policy to watch for is the Minnesotans with Disabilities Act, which was proposed in this last session. And we'll see if we hear more about that. The city has made some huge strides toward disability access since the last update. We'll go into all of these more in depth in following slides, but as you see here, since 2021, we have centralized equity efforts. A large piece of this accomplishment was hiring a DEI director in 2020. This role was expanded to a DEIA director this year to acknowledge the accessibility aspect of this work. In 2024, the city welcomed a Bloomberg Harvard Equity Fellow who did a great deal of work that we'll discuss more in upcoming slides. Also in 2024, the Rochester Public Library convened their Accessibility Committee to focus on access needs in the library. 2024 was also the year that the Accessibility Community Action Group, or ACOG as we call them, was formed. At the time, they called themselves the Cross-Disability Focus Group. In 2025, ACOG hosted their first annual disability summit which the city's Bloomberg Harvard Equity Fellow Corps organized with them. The second annual disability summit took place just at the end of July and was a wonderful success. I believe a couple of you are present there. 2025 was also the year that the city launched a new accessibility page on our website, and we'll talk about that more in following slides. Finally, in 2026, the city created the role of management analyst and accessibility coordinator, and I'm extremely happy to say that I was hired for that role and began in late March.

Next slide, please.

Now let's dive a little deeper into those main points in the prior slide and talk more about the great accessibility work that is and has been going on here in the city. Much of the work of the Bloomberg Harvard Equity Fellow did during his time here was to establish an accessibility baseline. And so that entailed IDing gaps that need to be bridged and legal requirements that needed to be met. There was a federal requirement for a city ADA coordinator for Title II matters that was rolled in with the management analyst and accessibility coordinator role. And just in case anyone here is unfamiliar, Title II ensures equal access for people with disabilities to state and local government facilities, services, programs, and activities. The fellow also forged and nurtured relationships in the community with organizations, individuals, and eventually convened the Accessibility Committee and Community Action Group, as noted, and where possible, he created needed resources, processes, and procedures. He also drafted the Accessibility Change Management Plan, which outlined needed changes to increase access in the city, and offered a change management strategy to implement them. He also collaborated with transit regarding the paratransit program. As you all know, we're expecting big, exciting changes and improvements to paratransit in Rochester starting next month. The accessibility page on our website We have linked resources and organizations, information about accessible parking. We have the ADA Title II grievance procedure, which is a federal requirement and did not exist before. We have information on conducting disability inclusive meetings and conferences, county info and links, a reasonable accommodation form for community members who would like to request accommodations to be able to engage in city activities. information and links regarding rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act, information about service animals and emotional support animals, and finally information about accessing TTY and TTD services for deaf folks. And we'll talk a little bit more about upcoming improvements to the accessibility page on the next slide. One of my favorite upcoming additions to the website is a form that's already active and is soon to be published now that our new website is up and running. Shout out to comms. It outlines the process that replaces the prior ADA Title II grievance procedure. We collaborated with the city attorney to ensure that it was okay to offer more than just the one grievance option. And so now we can offer a conversation with the city's ADA coordinator filing a report with the ADA coordinator, filing a grievance with the city like before, and in line with the federal requirements. We found this to be a more relational way of addressing the public's ADA Title II concerns, and it offers an option that isn't a formal legal process for folks who might be kind of intimidated by that sort of thing. And it also gives the city an opportunity to address concerns before things escalate to a formal grievance, but still preserves that legal right to do so if people do prefer.

And so far, it's been working well.

Other website accessibility improvements are pretty huge, and they include meeting the new WCAG standards a full year before the new deadline. Really extraordinary. We have an accessibility feature icon with options for a whole bunch of things. I'm not going to read them all. It's very many things, but it includes different things that you can do with the font, spacing, alignment, dyslexia-friendly text, which is really amazing, changing the saturation, the height, between lines, all manner of things that can be used to make a website more accessible. And we also have changes that take place throughout the entire website. One of those is being able to translate into over 100 different languages, which I'll touch on later. First, though, a bit more on the current disability access work happening. We are maintaining and building community and organizational relationships that existed prior to the accessibility coordinator role. One example is continuing to work with the accessibility community action group. We're also continuing to partner with transit stakeholders to enhance that paratransit service as noted before. And we're connecting regionally and nationally with other city ADA coordinators so we can learn from them and bounce ideas off of one another. And last but not least, we're developing a process for upcoming audits of city facilities, programs, services, and activities. What? Do I need to just wrap it up?

Thank you. Oh, wrap up.

Should I just rip through these, or what do you folks want me to do?

Just wrap it up.

OK, wrap it up. Next slide, next slide. Limited English proficiency. I'll go to this one.

OK. Any highlights that you would like to share?

Any highlights? The language line, we have seven departments that are using the language line. Is everyone familiar with the language line? Yeah, okay, great. So I'm not going to go over that. Seven departments, it's going great. Really super utilized. The language pay differential, do you all know about that too? Great. So wonderful. Can't say enough good things about that program. It is going so well. The expanded translation options, we have options for translating their website. We can send things out to an outside vendor to have them translated. And we can also have our lovely language access providers who are teammates in-house. They are also providing that translation, which is largely expanded from the first update or the last update, rather. WEBSITE LANGUAGE ACCESS IMPROVEMENTS?

WE'VE ALL GOTTEN THE PACKET. I WANTED TO MAKE SURE WE HAVE TIME FOR QUESTIONS SO COUNCIL MEMBERS CAN HIGHLIGHT THE PARTS OF THE PRESENTATION, WHICH IS VERY DETAILED. ALL THREE OF YOU APPRECIATE BUT WANT TO MAKE SURE THAT COUNCIL MEMBERS HAVE AN OPPORTUNITY TO ASK QUESTIONS.

Don't worry, sir, this is not the first time I've been told to wrap it up. That's totally fine.

And you just happen to be the third of two other long speakers.

Well, we have a lot to say about the good work happening here, but we would love to hear your questions.

All right, questions. It was so thorough, we don't have any questions.

My feelings aren't hurt, just so everyone knows. It's okay.

There we go. Council Member Miller, go ahead.

Throughout the presentation, there are various mentions of KPIs. How are those tracked? Is that reported somewhere in actual outcomes and over time? Is that part of our action plan or something that's managed internally?

I would say both. Some of the items are included within the action plan, right, depending on what they are, housing access, et cetera, but some of them are within the diversity equity inclusion plan itself. So they're tracked that way. And then I would also note, because we were quite long-winded, that I also included the packet that talks about department service impact, so having departments reflect on their own on what has been impactful.

Okay. Related question. These language access services, hours utilized, are you tracking how many people or hours or comparables to what we're saving by not having to go out to external translation or external language lines? How might we understand that?

Absolutely. Andrea had an entire slide on that.

Yeah, I had an entire slide. But we are saving quite a bundle. It's actually pretty extraordinary. What we would pay for one hour of translation services actually is about the same as a two-week stipend on a person's paycheck. Yeah, we're saving an extraordinary amount of money. Right.

And just for context, if we were to send something out to an external vendor, it's $55 an hour where they take some 10 minutes or 30 minutes. Right. Versus having somebody internally that could perhaps do it in five minutes. Police department has been quite happy with that because having that internal resource also allows beyond the fiscal efficiency, also kind of the credibility of maybe a witness in that moment where they don't have to wait 45 minutes. Okay.

Council Member Doering.

If I were going to find the statistics around diversity, equity, inclusion, recruitment, and retention of city teammates, where would I find that?

That would be the Human Resources Department, Council Member Doering. Thank you.

Council Member Miller.

This is a question that I had forgotten, but I asked you about the Municipality Equality Index and opportunities. I was able to pull up the scorecard in our progress over time, and I just note that another area that we consistently are at zero at and has existed perhaps at the county and between the city is the Human Rights Commission. Can you talk about any opportunity, how we're meeting that need, or is that a gap in our engagement with the community?

I would say that has been an evolving conversation. So my understanding historically was that that was housed at the city, transitioned for some reason to the county, and then they recently sunsetted their human rights commission. So we haven't had a conversation about where that should land transparently. Thank you.

Council Member Keene.

Yeah, specifically, Zach, coming and going through that thing, I've always seen that, you know, we have these requirements, but I think it helps me see the rigor behind it to see how some of that stuff's done. My question, though, is are these sort of programs that we put in place to get us to a certain point that the programs aren't needed in the future, or is this the new steady state? Hmm.

That'd be the new steady state, correct Joe? Yes. So yeah, the program exists to ensure that those projects are hitting those goals. And once they hit those goals, it's still going to be monitored afterwards and future projects would as well.

So let me ask it slightly different. You think if the programs went away, the old behaviors would be, they wouldn't have the minority owned businesses or the wage things would not, they would go away?

Yes, I think they would go away because it would be the easier route forward.

That's unfortunate, but that's what I thought might be the answer.

Thank you for an extremely thorough report, and we very much appreciate all the work that you all do.

Thank you.

Thanks. Do folks want to power through or should we, I'm seeing power through. Yeah. Okay. Next up we have the Chateau Theater Operations and Investment Strategy Update. Mr. Josh Johnson and Ryan Yetzer and Mr. Experience Rochester, Joe Ward and All right, who's getting, Mr. Yetzer, go ahead. I'm gonna kick us off here.

Good afternoon, thanks for having us. I'm excited to bring to you, along with Josh and Joe, an update to the Chateau Theater proposal and the feedback that we're seeking here today on hopefully a path forward on what comes next for the Chateau Theater. So, if you'll go to the first slide, I'll kick us off with some of the timeline that led us to today, pretty quickly hand it off to Joe to walk through the proposed vision from their perspective, the programming, and then we'll get to, and the operating partnership, and then we'll get to the capital investments toward the end of the presentation that Josh will walk us through. So I want to make sure we spend a little bit of time on the timeline itself that has led us to where we're at today. because I think this is important to really think back and reflect to the beginning of the city and DMC's and Mayo's journey with the Chateau Theater. And so I'm gonna spend a little time walking through this. So in 2015 and 16, the city and DMC came together along with a contribution from Mayo Clinic to purchase the Chateau Theater after the Barnes & Noble closure. The vision was simply more than preserving a historic building. This was really seen, and I invite Mayor, who was certainly a part of this at the time, seen as a catalyst for the heart of the city sub-district in the DMC planning effort. So this was more than just preserving the Chateau Theater, it was bringing a piece of infrastructure to life to invest in our downtown. to bring arts and culture and experiences and all that good stuff into our downtown. From the beginning, delivering that vision was seen as a partnership between the city and DMC, as well as, like I said, a contribution from Mayo Clinic. This included a significant capital investment request, again, at the original vision, as well as a significant investment in operations and maintenance. In 2017, there was a task force that put together and evaluated options for the Chateau Theater. The challenge was that coming out of the task force was a significant request. At the time, the request was $23 million of capital, which is, in today's dollars, 30 plus million. Additionally, at the time, I think it's safe to say there was a thought that that seemed like a low projection for what was being talked about. It's also worth noting that the operations at that time was closer to 900,000 to a million in operational subsidy for the city for each year to operate that vision. And so the feedback between the city council and the destination medical center board was keep working. This isn't reality. So let's go back to the table and think about what we could do with the Chateau Theater differently. That led to sort of this 2018 to 2024 period, the interim activation, what I'm calling interim activation and experimentation. We did two RFPs through this time. Neither of the RFP processes led to more than three submittals. And one of those times, one of the three submittals was city departments. And so there hasn't been extensive interest. There's lots of ideas that circulate the Chateau. There hasn't been extensive interest to actually invest and operate the Chateau. That being said, we've had critical partners such as Threshold Arts and others that have done a fantastic job of Continuing to operate the Chateau and allow for community access throughout this interim period This has led us sort of lean into the activation of the space following the heart of the city investments that did happen However that never truly delivered on the vision of the 2015-2016 Conversations on why the investment in the Chateau was critical We also have continually We also have continued to maintain the asset by investing in things like roofs, roof replacement, HVAC, restrooms, et cetera, other improvements that were critical to allow the building to continue to operate. But again, those investments were never seen as delivering on the original capital investment model to deliver an asset to the heart of the city. Then in 2015, as you all know, we commissioned an operations sort of model analysis to formulate some thinking around what could the future of the Chateau look like to deliver that that original vision. This work was really to sort of bring to life the direction that we received from Council and Destination Medical Center of we should no longer continue to patch work investments until we had a substantial vision for what the long-term view of operating the Chateau actually looked like. Council, then we came to a study session in January that you were all a part of and asked sort of what model were you folks interested in and what we left with was some pretty clear direction to engage Experience Rochester further, better understand their proposal as well as chat with Threshold Arts to potentially talk about is there a way to get the best of both worlds. Now, since that time, Threshold Arts has informed us that they're not interested in the space. However, I think the essence of that guidance was we want to make sure community use continues to be a priority in the way that Threshold Arts was delivering that, and we have continued those conversations through our conversations with Experience Rochester, and I think Joe can speak more to that. That brings us to today. I'm excited to have Joe here and have him walk you through kind of their vision for the space. I think we finally have the pieces coming together to deliver on the 2015-2016 vision of a tool to activate downtown in the heart of the city. We have a partner here that's focused on programming that has a proven track record to be able to bring performing arts, community events, private events, downtown experiences to the heart of the city. This is a partner that is, I'll say that we as staff see as a very stable partner. Again, we've had great partners to continue allowing community access to the Chateau. However, they have been a smaller team and anytime anything small goes wrong at the Chateau, we're the first ones to get a call and there's a sizable staff investment. to partnering with those, whereas we see Experience Rochester as really having the expertise and the power to bring us to the next level with that facility. What we're asking for today is your feedback on the vision that Experience Rochester's gonna share. We are also going to then get feedback, provided you all are comfortable with us moving forward. We would then go to the September Destination Medical Center board meeting to get their feedback on this same vision. As I mentioned, Josh, towards the end we'll get into the capital investment required to bring this vision to life. I want to emphasize what we're seeking here is not everything that could possibly be done to the building. There are more things that we could do to improve the space, such as skyway access, those sorts of things. However, these are what we see as the bare minimum to deliver a product that Experience Rochester can then use to deliver on the original vision of why we purchased the facility in the first place. We tend to talk about DMC and city partnership investments as yes and yes models, and certainly that holds true here today. I like to think of this as a yes, yes, and yes model, because in addition to that, we need to have Experience Rochester's board on board with this plan as well. And so we really need a three-part partnership to bring this to life. We need Experience Rochester to bring the programming, activation, and relationship management. We need the city. to come to the table and commit to an investment of operations and maintenance now and into the future, and then we will need our partners at Destination Medical Center to commit to an investment strategy on the capital side. Again, I'll just close with and then hand it off, or I'll have one more slide after this, but 10 years ago, the city, DMC, and Mayo came together around a belief that this building could be something special for the heart of the city, and I really feel like where we're at today is at a place where we can deliver on that original vision. So next slide and I'll go back here.

Council Member Miller.

Yeah, just I appreciate the history, the context, and I guess my question before we go to the operating model is one of the things that I asked for and I felt like I heard some consensus around before we went into this process with Advancing Experience Rochester as an operating proposal was what are the facility improvements that would be made? And so I feel like this presentation almost structured out of order is if we were to agree on this $6.2 million in improvements, what would the operator landscape look like? Because I think it's one thing to ask Threshold Arts or another operator to look at the Chateau as it existed then. It's quite a different thing to ask who might operate this and what would the focus be and what would the model be? at a facility with $6.2 million of improvement. And so I guess I'm just disappointed that we didn't pursue that RFP process or look at other potential operators as the what would we improve in the building and then who might operate it, how might it be operated, no judgment at all about what experience Rochester has done with the Civic Center. But I do feel like this presentation is structured out of order.

Sure. Sure, I'll maybe address the RFP piece, and again, as we thought through this presentation, I went back and watched the study session, and I did try to make it very clear what we thought we heard, which wasn't necessarily an RFP process. It was what I had restated at the end to make sure there was general consensus around was to bring back experience Rochester's proposal. However, I could totally agree with you on the order of how this presentation is laid out. There's a chicken and an egg thing there where you could say we're doing these investments, what can you do? Or you can say, what's your model and what are the investments we need to bring it to life? And I agree that those are challenging to think about.

Mayor Norton.

I just have a quick minor correction on the timeline. I did not become mayor until 2018. It was Mayor Brady in 2016 who served on the DMC board and was mayor of the city that was part of the purchase of the Chateau. So just for clarity.

Yes, certainly didn't mean to suggest you were the mayor at that time. Sorry.

It didn't have anything to do with the purchase of the Chateau, but came around in 2018. So just wanted to be clear.

Okay.

Okay, so the last slide before I hand it off to Joe is just... Oh, sorry.

Councilmember Keene.

Just a clarifying question. Going back to the ordering, Experience Rochester is going to go through their activation plan, but does it assume the investment? That's correct. It does assume the investment. That's correct. Okay, thank you.

Okay, so lastly, again, I wanna really lean into this, what does a fully activated Chateau mean for downtown? And I think we all know or think we know what that means. And one of the things we hear a lot about is events for all ages in the downtown. And that's what we think about when we hear activation of the Chateau. How do we get events for all ages in downtown? How do we drive foot traffic on nights and weekends? How do we support the local businesses? How do we have a tool down there to really drive downtown activation? And that's what I think we have, an option that we have in front of us. So with that, I will hand it off to Joe to walk through their proposal.

WE CAN OPERATE THE CIVIC CENTER BUT I CAN'T OPERATE THE MICROPHONE.

I KNOW YOU HAVE A LOT OF SLIDES BUT IF YOU CAN KEEP THEM HIGH LEVEL BECAUSE I SUSPECT THERE WILL BE A LOT OF QUESTIONS AS WELL AND I TRUST THAT MY COLLEAGUES HAVE LOOKED AT THE PRESENTATION.

fair enough council president um appreciate especially with my track record of not being uh adding a few extra words so oh i didn't know that um there is one pair of prepared remarks intended to actually keep me on uh track a little but i do want to give some perspective and i also just to council member miller's Question we were involved in a lot of the discussions around capital certainly understand where you're coming from, but I would say To give you a pinpointed pro forma we definitely would need to know what council approves or doesn't approve to really get a better idea about that because if you did a capacity for 1200 it's one thing if you have capacity for 500 it's a it's another but I think for this sake of what we have Councilmember Miller

To that point of capacity, this was a key point of our last discussion, and I don't see anywhere in this packet that talks about target capacity. Can you just start with what you're assuming here for capacity?

I'm going to look over at Nick Landry, but it's about, was it 500 to 800, Nick? 400, OK. So 400 people, because when you've advanced, if you had 1,000 people, put them all next to each other. That's basically the only format you could really have is everybody standing right next to each other. And very few events have that. Thank you, Nick Landry. So I just want to start with four years ago, the city of Rochester approached Experience Rochester about the opportunity to operate the Chateau Theater as if we would be interested. At that time, the world was quite different and we respectfully declined. We were coming out of the COVID pandemic, rebuilding our team. As you all know, there was a significant transformation at the Mayo Civic Center in the operating model. And we focused on ensuring we had the capacity to effectively manage the Mayo Civic Center. We also wanted to demonstrate that our management model could bring greater cost certainty to the city. Fast forward to today and a lot has changed. Experience Rochester we believe is a strong organization. Our team is well established and we have several years now of experience managing the Mayo Civic Center and working in partnership with the city. We also have a much clearer understanding of what it takes to operate a successful civic venue. and the opportunities, and I'll add the challenges that come with it. At the same time, we recognize that the Chateau Theater is a very different facility with a very different, unique purpose. It has a unique history, character, and place in our community, and in fact, next year celebrates its 100th anniversary. So when the city once again invited us to explore the possibility of operating the Chateau, We believed it was time to take a serious look at what that could mean not just the building, not just for the building, but for downtown Rochester and the community as a whole. We see the Chateau as more than just a historic building or a venue. We believe it can be a catalyst, a place that helps bring more people downtown, creates activity and vibrancy, and I would say from Thursdays through Sundays, which is a big neat area as well, or weekends, supports other businesses and attractions, and helps create a more active and connected downtown. What you'll see today is our initial vision for what the Chateau could become. how we believe it could be operated, and how it could complement the many other things happening in Rochester. We believe there are opportunities for Experience Rochester to play a broader role in supporting the future of Rochester, but we can't do it alone. This definitely needs to be a collaborative community effort. What we're presenting today is not a finished plan. We took it literally that this is a study session to talk and learn from all of you. It's a starting point for discussion if the city would like to move forward and consider it as a potential option. And we're here today to listen, receive your feedback, and determine what the next steps should be. And we also have Bill Von Bank and Nick Landry. They can still sit over there from our team who were heavily involved in creating this plan. And so, we can move on to that one. The opportunity, I will kind of, I think that a lot gets laid out in what I just said, so there we go, we've moved along from one. You know, the programming of the Chateau, when I was here at that last study session, and we definitely heard a clear and consistent message from council. Ryan just got into that. It needs to be a flexible venue. And in fact, it has. Threshold Arts did a great job in a lot of ways of activating that in those categories. know what we see are perhaps an enhancing and advancement of that we have the ability to scale just a unique model to what we we have because of the Mayo Civic Center we can scale to larger events to more frequent events I would say so again music theater dance but in that nonprofit events weddings and corporate fundraisers and I would say we have we get a fair amount of inquiries for the Chateau to book from our convention site as a add-on. And we kind of have struggled to book that with just, I would say, seamless communication that needed to be there. And in fact, it's not necessarily a selling point for this, but we did get an inquiry last week for a conference, a banking conference, to have an event there next July, which we kind of said we'll book for the following year and we might be able to deliver on that. But I thought that was a unique one because it's a banking conference.

Can I ask a question in relation to the previous slide? So at our last study session, that report, which I think we all had a lot of problems with. But one thing that I did appreciate was that they had a pie chart of kind of how much community events versus the private business events versus the maybe destination events. And do you have a sense of kind of the mix that is going to be the best for both ensuring that we keep that community peace but it also does bring in the revenue to then offset um some of the additional expenses

Yeah, I mean, I don't think I have the percentage right now of how that's broken down, but I would say if you look at what we do at the Mayo Civic Center, there'd probably be more of an emphasis even on civic there to make sure it's open more often. But really, there's a couple pages ahead, which I can, why don't you just jump to the, engage in the community. I think We've heard a lot in this community, and I've seen it, which is about engaging the community in the Chateau Theater's next chapter. So if we hear today, one, thanks very much, Joe, stay over there, stay focused, or thanks very much, Joe, we'd like to have this conversation further, we can certainly move forward with engaging the community to find that out more and give you feedback, because I think the community needs to have a role. When I said collaborative effort in my opening statement, I mean it. When I came here seven years ago, there was a plan that was already put forth through council, approved by council, approved by the hospitality partners in the community. Wasn't a lot of room to add a whole new vision. This allows for flexibility and I believe that there's still time to do that. And I would just offer as a community partner anyway, if you're not interested in having us operate it we'll do that anyway we have the capacity to do that kind of engagement and it also fits a tourism master plan project that we're just going to be getting going on and we'll be glad to to do that for you as well council member miller to the point of community engagement i appreciate that you skipped ahead can you talk about

who you've involved and how in the development of this presentation of community partners. I've heard you mention Threshold Arts. What sorts of engagement is that?

I mean, I would say certainly we've had limited really more of working with the city and through, I guess, DMC's feedback through them. Very little bit right now with RDA. But again, I think we're trying to be in a spot of what's the chicken and egg here? Because what do you actually it's hard to go out and say, hey, we'd love to involve you in the theater when we don't know if we're involved. We literally were asked and heard here that. people wanted to hear a presentation from us. And so, again, just because I think, I just want to make it clear that if Council was to move forward with even exploring this idea further, I mean, RDA is a completely critical partner in there. DMC is. We can see if Mayo wants to be involved. The city, obviously. I look at that as this expansion beyond just the running of the Chateau in this sort of destination vibrancy area that we have, that's our permission, that's our real investment to be able to get beyond the walls of the Mayo Civic Center more. You know, this year we were asked to assist in 4th Fest. We're glad to do so. Maybe more requests come like that, whether it's that event or something else in the future. We want to have the capacity to do that. Right now we have stretched the team and the budget that we have and we believe that we're accountable to all of those performance metrics that you asked for, but the team can't just continue to stretch it that way. So I would just say, and that's with the bottom of my heart, if you go forward, And six months from now, you say, hey, Joe, you haven't talked to anybody. I think that's an omission on our side. We're trying to kind of get our hands around because the difficulty in the venue is the capacity, is as far as, let's say, a moneymaker or a break-even project. And so when I look at, and also I think the people that we've surveyed say, we want more activity, we want more vibrancy, And 20 years ago, maybe I was the invest in fun for the sake of fun department guy. It's always Saturday and it's always sunny. As I've gotten older, I think I've gotten to be a little bit better of an administrator. And I think I also understand there's economic impact and vitality that comes from that. And I look at more activity downtown, more... ability to deliver us something on the weekend in addition to so when those sports teams come they're not they're at restaurants and they're at retail and our community becomes a little stickier and I think that that's good for kind of everybody and when we did we surveyed visitors local businesses um and local folks through a public survey so it wasn't like a engagement sessions um Clear across the board all three three out of three folks agree kind of like an old commercial They want more festivals and they want more events and they want more vibrancy in Rochester recently spoke to the University of Minnesota Rochester because I think a lot of you probably are aware that we're gonna be home to many it's a fair amount of their classes at the Mayo Civic Center this fall and we're trying to explore and grow that partnership and And they told us that they just did a recent survey of their students. Students say the exact same thing. Questions were asked a little different. So a survey doctor might get upset with me on that. But I think there's a want and a desire for that. So I've probably covered a lot as I'm trying to cover those topics.

I guess as a follow-up, if I may, in the study session from earlier in the year, the occupancy at stabilization was listed at 490. An increased occupancy, more stable model, was listed at 800 plus, and all-inclusive, as the label, was listed at 900 plus. So are you saying that it's just impossible to reach any capacity over 400? I think it's...

Not impossible. I would say the average occupancy is probably going to be closer to that 400 number we mentioned because you can have open floor concerts and comedians that are going to reach that 900, but I don't think you can build an ROI around that specifically. And if that was done before, to be honest, I think that there was that survey and the feedback you'd gotten, there was opportunity in there all over the place.

Okay.

On the other side of that, I've heard you talk about a lot of visitors' needs and UMR needs and others. I haven't heard you talk about any local programming, local performing arts groups, local nonprofits. How have you thought about those audiences? Because I consistently hear that access to affordable, accessible, flexible space is also part of that, but I haven't heard as much about the local community's needs and not the visitors'.

No, no, no, I was gonna say, why don't you go back first? Yeah, I mean, go back to that, sorry, the engagement one, it's okay. Thank you, council member, for the question. I think, again, that's part of that community engagement. I mean, I think, you know, my favorite, I mean, I don't know if everyone knows this or not, but my wife is Mexican, so our favorite event at the Chateau is the Latino Fest. That event, Chao has it right there, beautiful picture in her presentation, which we'd like to borrow, by the way. And what a terrific celebration. My family came here seven years ago. My wife, I would say, felt a little, you know, out of place at first. That community helped welcome her. There's other families like ours, like my kids can get a little touch in that, you know, kind of community. And to see it grow is awesome. This year, they've also reached out to us and we're going to be hosting a gala at the Mayo Civic Center. So we, and we adjusted under our civic goals, our pricing structure and everything to accommodate them. It's a sincere thing. Honestly, I'll tell you, when we worked with the night market, when we worked with, They're starting to work with Latino Fest. Those are my favorite things to do. I come from that background. I learned how to kind of operate a convention center. Our team loves to do that, the New Year's event. We love to do that. I think for us, what I like most about it is there's a lot of times that we have to tell people at the Mayo Civic Center, well, sorry, the place is booked because you have a medical conference here. And you've all gotten emails about that, I'm sure. This allows us to say yes and yes more often and it takes a bit of an investment. One of the things in my career that I've heard so much of is well what's the ROI and I get that and we have that in so many areas and I think there is an ROI when money that comes back to us but in the end some things are worth investing in from a cultural standpoint and When I've heard the stories over the years, whether they went to the bookstore or they watched their first movie in it, this place means a lot to people. And it should. It's quirky. It's unique. It definitely moves you down, whether should you have a Renaissance festival or Renaissance weddings. I'd heard Councilmember Wall mention that at the last meeting. Hey, embrace it. Whoever thought as many people would take pictures of our water tower as they do right now. So anyway, I guess to answer your question is that's a sincere part of just who we are and who our staff's DNA is. What I love about this is that it gives our team the ability to actually brainstorm, whereas so often we are delivering somebody else's vision, which, you know, depending on meeting planners can be quite strict. So, why don't you just keep on moving. So, which, where is it? Yeah, yeah, that's the one you mentioned. The operating plan overview, obviously, you understand the experience Rochester side. I believe you understand the sales and marketing capacity. We talked about new festivals. But maintaining legacy events. And I mentioned Latino Fest. I know I was there at Hanukkah. Those are other ones. They have to happen there. And we want them to happen there. Build partnerships, like I said. Again, this is a great way to take our idea around partnership and actually live it and walk it more often outside of the Mayo Civic Center. And then I would say in particular, really excited to bring back the Certified Tourism Ambassador Program, which had been removed from the budget. part of those discussions years ago and got a lot a lot of feedback over the years about bringing that back it helps unify our hospitality community and through the success of the Mayo Civic Center we were able to bring that back and in the process of just wrapping up completion of the new program and You should have your first certified tourism ambassadors again by the end of the year or early next year. So, and then, oh, and one thing I really heard, I think the mayor actually brought this up at the last meeting and that was, and even at the time I had this idea, but is, you know, the idea that the Mayo Civic Center right now is one caterer, one operator. That's a facility that is huge. And we have events at times for 4,000 people. That's not the plan here. The plan here is to embrace. If somebody wants to plan an event and they want to cater, let's hire one. Let them hire one. We can sometimes do it, and others can. Because that, I think, matches the community. That matches the... It matches people's desires for one and it matches the diverse the venue itself again is quirky. So I think that's something that I just want to make sure that that's clear because I think probably anybody who thinks oh my gosh Mayo Civic Center is gonna get involved It's gonna be just them catering there's days We don't we wouldn't even have the capacity to do it if we're full at the Mayo Civic Center and I want to make sure we stay Focused on what we do best as well or more often I should say and then I want to keep going. I Let me just make sure. I just want to try to see if I can skip some slides, I will.

If you get to maybe the operating model, I think it's right after this, and really speak to, I think what you're hearing, and I'm hearing your commitment to listening to the community, and I think going back to our previous study session, there was a really strong desire to hold on to what THE THRESHOLD ARTS HAS BUILT IN THE LAST FOUR YEARS AND IN THE COMMUNITY SPACE. AND SO TALK ABOUT YOUR OPERATING MODEL

Oh, I'm sorry.

Talk about your operating model in the sense of how... So we had Threshold Arts, which basically was in there operating at whatever margin they could make. And so we are now being asked to put more... MANAGEMENT AND OPERATING REVENUE EXPENSES INTO THAT AND WHAT ARE WE GETTING FOR THAT? AND MY ASSUMPTION IS AND MAYBE COUNCIL MEMBER MILLER'S QUESTION REGARDING THE SIZE CAN BE SOMETHING WE TALK ABOUT AS FAR AS THE CAPITAL INVESTMENT. I DO AGREE THAT WE PROBABLY SHOULD HAVE KIND OF PUT THOSE PARAMETERS ON. But if you can speak to the operating model that I'm assuming is based on a 400 capacity facility.

Yes. Thank you, Council President. The operating model, and I really got into it, just touched on it in the beginning. It is not just... it's not just operating the Chateau. I get that there's a high priority to speak to the Chateau and what's the investment there, and obviously it needs to. But what we put forward is to actually look beyond that and to have that support outside the community. So one, you'd have a visitor center. So directly through that, you'd have an area that becomes a visitor center. More often right now. We have a visitor booth in Peace Plaza. That's open for about 120 days a year We have a city with millions of people visiting we had there's an out nice alcove side room in there that could Absolutely be that section in the future. That's part of that. That's that additional money that's invested there of that 300,000 as well as this home to the CTA program because that's a very much a hands-on operating you have to do presentations and people get certified and you're in there daily so when we hear from you about more activation it's going to be really activated I think this model also allows and encourages that there's something to do most nights of the year whether it's some people coming in for a film and maybe it's a smaller audience if you check into your hotel on a Monday or Tuesday but by the weekend we move up whether it's a wedding or it's a concert or it's a comedian series or it's dueling pianos etc and so that's that piece where that additional funding is requested to be honest if you if you hire us just to run the Chateau I think that that's There's an opportunity way beyond that. You've seen it, if you saw the paper this weekend, the increase in hotel activity, which also means hotel lodging tax, and I believe our hospitality partners have also asked for that to be invested in new, a certain portion of that to be invested in new ways to bring vibrancy. This year's probably in a... The end of the year facts will be checked, but I would say you're probably looking at $1.3 million in increased lodging tax this year. So I would say investing about $300,000 of that going forward is a worthy investment. But again, that's my opinion. That's not yours. We respect that. But that's how I look at that. And that's paid for by visitors. You don't have to build schools for it. You don't have to provide long-term water. It's a very different model. And then this part comes out of there. As you grow... you're more expensive. We've learned that. And I would also say that we had very limited data. Only nine months' worth of data from the previous operator. Very similar to how the Mayo Civic Center was, I believe the Mayo Civic Center may have been built without a Expanded without a feasibility study. So some of it was learning how to build a plane in mid-flight And I think that we've we've done that I wouldn't mess if I was a council member I wouldn't necessarily suggest that on a daily basis But I would be open to it if I had a partner of seven years who also has been Not been shy to call up and speak with Allison or her team. I should say the city administrator and And and have conversations that can be difficult at times like, hey, like this is we're seeing this and we appreciate council support along the way to to handle that. So I would say let's look at it beyond just operating a theater and actually infusing our visitor economy again and take those first steps. What I heard even when I took this job and was very interested in it. There's a different model. They have a flat amount of lodging tax. This is compared to many most destinations I had heard that if experienced Rochester successful in the new model and again, there's I believe only two Council members left from that time period so I know don't speak for all of you But there was definitely a prove it and maybe there's more and again, we've heard a lot particularly recently from our lodging partners especially is to say hey, this is being collected by the visitors. What are we doing more? And there's a massive opportunity from Thursday through Sunday in this community. We have probably 50% of our hotel rooms available. That's why you see the difference in rates on a Monday versus a Saturday or Sunday. And I think if the Chateau is more active, if the community is more active, you're going to see a coffee shop open on a Saturday and take a shot. And right now, as we've seen, the individual business, let me please say that, is the lifeblood of a community. It also is what visitors want to see. They always want to do what locals do. I believe that this takes it to another level. Yes, we have great corporate restaurants and things in this community, but that's the stuff that makes a difference, a unique building. As much as maybe we say, wow, who wants a renaissance this or that? I SAY EMBRACE IT.

YOU ANSWERED MY QUESTION YOU ANSWERED MY QUESTION ABOUT THE $300,000 ANNUAL ABOUT THE $300,000 ANNUAL INVESTMENT BUT I GUESS MY INVESTMENT BUT I GUESS MY QUESTION IS MAYBE TO THE CITY QUESTION IS MAYBE TO THE CITY ADMINISTRATOR IS THIS SOMETHING WE ADMINISTRATOR IS THIS SOMETHING WE COULD CONSIDER MORE EXTENSIVELY IN COULD CONSIDER MORE EXTENSIVELY IN PART OF THE SUPPLEMENTAL BUDGET PART OF THE SUPPLEMENTAL BUDGET I GUESS I WAS SURPRISED TO SEE I GUESS I WAS SURPRISED TO SEE THIS HERE BECAUSE MY UNDERSTANDING THIS HERE BECAUSE MY UNDERSTANDING WAS THIS WAS REALLY ABOUT THE WAS THIS WAS REALLY ABOUT THE CHATEAU THEATER OPER

Council Member Miller, Council Members, you could. I think it's important because we're quickly approaching setting the preliminary levy. What's shown here is absorbable within your operating budget, and then what's shown on the next slide could be an adjustment to your lodging tax. And of course, we're far, far off of the presentation, but I believe that their intention is not to hire the entire team while the building is being renovated, but we have a long way to go deliver what the DMC board asked before we come back for additional funds. So if we don't know if we have the additional funds, it is a chicken and an egg all the way around. This building has been a chicken and an egg since 2014. And so trying to make sure that the building isn't dark, which is a concern that I have, that I want to make sure we are able to proceed forward if that is the desire of the Common Council to proceed forward to try to go to DMC to get the ask they have asked about an operator, not just funding, but also an operator. So we're kind of also in this sort of yes, yes, and yes challenge here. So of course you could always consider it within that. It's just, I do want to make it clear, the lodging tax generally has, then assigned to any excess funding goes into the capital fund for reinvestment in the Civic Center. It's not all of the lodging tax, but you could consider it there. I just want everyone to be aware that the DMC board meeting in September, which forecasts an ask in December, is somewhat important for the whole thing to work because, and we're not there yet, the investment in the facility is important for at least this operator to feel confident that they can be successful.

I appreciate that. With slide 14 here, I mean, without the funding source directly called out on the slide, I've already gotten questions saying like, well, what are the alternative uses? Like, what is this money? Is this a levy increase? Is it lodging? Is it something that can be reassigned to other things? What are we comparing as alternatives? So it's helpful to define that, but I just feel like it was surprising and feels more related to the operation of Experience Rochester as tourism promoter than it does to the Chateau Theater operation capital investment.

So maybe Joe Ward could have the floor to be able to explain what that pays for.

Yeah, what it really, council member, what it really is is what this slide says. It's a new destination development initiative. I think when we first were kind of asked to move along on this, we jumped away from a pillar. We have pillars that we live by and that we are governed by, and that is fiscal responsibility, campus management and operations, economic impact, community focus. And what this is creating is a destination development And that is something that is very much part of our industry, which also includes operating venues. We could come out and ask for 300, 500,000 in the best destination development initiatives if you prefer that way. But I think this allows you, this investment allows you, one, to have somebody that not just creates festivals and does them, but helps cultivate them. Do you know how... I mean, it was hard for us to see Night Market go away because, thankfully, you had... Tiffany, who, I mean, was the energy behind that. She's one person. She can't keep that going forever. Thaw Music Fest. These are the types of things where we'd have a person trying to cultivate and make sure that they are, even help them walk through the process of getting a permit for events. To actually be with them. coordinate with Sean at RDA to say, hey, Sean, what are you looking? What are you hearing? How can we help this? Again, so you're getting the festival side. You're getting a visitor information center, which for a city of this size that you don't have, It's surprising. Certified tourism ambassador headquarters. And then through that, you're supporting workforce development. Again, the industry that's generating a lot of this is asking for that. That can be done in this venue. Community partnerships. I guess because we've moved along, we didn't focus too much on the very large list of things that we would try to activate in the building. I don't as we look through it the reality I we look through what you were proposed before which were very much operating ideas With some holes in there with some opportunities We looked at what one would be just operating It's not much different than what you have right now the building the way it is the capacity without some decisions If you put $40 million in it, it's a whole new ball game. But I don't see the appetite for that, nor would I necessarily recommend that. So I think for us, that's where we look at that, is how can we actually be a player? Where does it hit our vision? And also, to be honest, where does that match with what our board wants to do? You recently appointed a board with two hotel members on there. And they're very interested in building a destination that drives new visitors to this community. And I believe you have a vehicle to do that through this building and bring some more people downtown. I mean, to my understanding, Threshold Arts isn't operating it. We were asked to do that. And so to not do it, but to give you an idea what that would look like. If you would like a different idea, we'd be glad to consider one. And so I would just say here, looking ahead, the Chateau Theater represents an opportunity to preserve an important historic landmark while creating a vibrant space for future generations. And I think when I was at 4th Fest, and it was like this before, but for me personally, I had a bit more of a moment because we were more involved. Where I just saw kids being happy. I saw people getting along. I saw community. And we can build more of that here. And we'd love to. You're looking for solutions. That's one potential solution. So we believe that the Chateau Theater can become a thriving arts and culture venue. It's had its moments. Is it going to? You're not going to see Blue Man Group there anytime soon. I'll let you know that. But could you see a month-long comedy festival with more regional comics in a community that has proven to support comedy? Oh, yeah, without a doubt. Could you have a small food and wine tasting there? Yep, you could. You know, and we can show you more of those ideas if you wanted to hear more down the line. And we can just focus on that. And it's a catalyst for downtown vitality. I think we've all heard that. We've all heard that this could be more of that. And really a welcoming destination for residents and visitors of all walks of life. The best thing is that people want, again, they want to visit what residents like. If you build, and we can go to that wheel at the end, but I'm not going to read it all. But if you essentially build a community people want to visit, people want to live there too. People want to work there too. It fits it all. That's why I think you're seeing in the survey result that people want something like this. Because it does. It creates... People are going to stick around longer. Is it the only answer to all of those issues in our community? No. But I would say that there's a difference between events and legacy things, especially events, legacy events. But every legacy event begins with a special event that could just start at the Chateau and we could help them, could have 30 people the first year, could literally have 20,000 three years later. Tiffany did a fantastic job with night market I think the first year we she expected like 600 and we had like 4,500 and then the next year after that was like 20,000 and the street was closed down and then understandably her capacity was reached at that point so let's move on to the capital plans

Thanks, Joe.

Thank you, President. I'll take the section that seems now like to be out of order. So I'll start with a couple of questions for like capacity. So I've done my best to track that down. If you look at like the building code, you're looking at floor area ratio. So the building itself can fit 800 people. But then you have to look at, well, what's the use going to be? Because a nightclub has a different fixture level in terms of bathroom and sinks and whatnot than an assembly hall. And then you look at, well, both those uses need to have certain amount of ingress and egress or emergency exits. So I did a lot of what-if scenarios with the building official. And again, to be the fourth person, it became a chicken and egg scenario. So I think first we need to identify what the build-out's going to be, what the improvement's going to be, what's the use going to be. And then we can pin down what the max occupancy is going to be for those certain events. Because different events are going to have different levels of max occupancy. Going to, so this baseline facility needs will likely look familiar. So we previewed this in January during the study session. We had our consultants take a look at the 2024 facilities report. We heard a lot of concern about the estimates that were being provided at that time. So we had them update them to today's numbers and even looking forward a little bit. So appreciation on those items.

Can I ask a question on, so you got roof replacement there. Is this what we've done so far? No, so thank you. On the previous slide, you had a $1 million in roof replacement in 2020.

So what still needs to be done to the roof? Detail was omitted here. So that's just the copper section of the roof. That's about less than 5% of the overall building envelope. So the full roof was done, just that copper section. Portion on the very front that you see facade the facade needs to be needs to be replaced So the bulk of this I'd say 95% is actually tuck pointing for that section member Miller But to expand on that question for both sides 17 and 18 is there a supplemental report that could be shared?

I mean these are summary levels, but like what are the underlying improvements that are falling into these categories? Because that wasn't part of the packet

No, we can definitely provide that in more detail. These are summarized versions of the city's facility report. So these are the improvements that the facility has identified that need just to stabilize the building.

But yes, we can show that in more detail.

So for historic preservation, the lobby and ceiling restoration, there's a lot of interior architectural work that needs to be completed. And then the special construction is really the main thing here is the marquee restoration. So we've had some control failure. So instead of the lights chasing, they're either on or they're off. It could also use some other TLC here in the future. And then building systems, the bulk of this category is really replacing the elevator.

That's the majority of that 480,000.

So just baseline facility needs, we're looking at $2.8 million just to secure the structure. Going into the more activation in order to operate it effectively categories here. So, One of the things that I just want to identify is, and Ryan, I think, made this point, is we heard a lot of comments about preemptively going out or just guessing on what a future operator would need. The benefit of working with Experience Rochester is their partner, which is Legends Global, who is a worldwide live event entertainment company. They do events. This might be the smallest one they've probably looked at.

It probably is, yes.

But they do large events all over the country, all over the world. So they were able to go in and they looked through every nook and cranny. We were in the basement. We were on top of the roof. They took photos. They were very thorough with their analysis. So they were able to tailor what they see as experienced Rochester's vision in order to what we need to then do in improvements. So I feel like we were able to get a much more detailed estimate on what it would take in order to effectively and sustainably activate this facility. So again, there's a lot more detail behind these numbers. We broke it into categories. A lot of these are gonna be similar. President Shubring, you mentioned the analysis that we shared in January. A lot of these did show up in there. are showing up in this report. So we did see a lot of carryover. Biggest things in the performance area, permanent stage. We need better lighting, audio to have those professional types events. Like Joe said, to have a month-long comedy festival or have a regional, national touring artist that might be up and coming. We did do, we took steps, we created a bathroom in the mezzanine, but there's no dressing room still. So in order to have those professional type artists, we need to have better dressing rooms. Accessibility, how are we welcoming people? When you come in, well, first I wanna say visitor services. Visitor services, when you're walking in, how are we welcoming it? How are we giving information out to the community that's walking around downtown? And then accessibility, how do they feel when they come into the space? Are they feeling welcome, comfortable, and easily accessible? Infrastructure, the big thing, building systems infrastructure, biggest thing here is kitchen improvements. So in order to have catering, full catering events, wine tastings, you need to have a much more substantial kitchen improvement. Flexible event structure. One thing that we did identify, instead of having permanent food and beverage facilities, Legends and Experienced Rasterists thought it'd be more effective to have mobile food and beverage facilities. STATIONS, OBVIOUSLY REDUCES COST AND MAKES THE EVENT SPACE MORE FLEXIBLE. AND THEN PROFESSIONAL SERVICES, I THINK WE ALL UNDERSTAND WHAT THAT IS.

AND AGAIN, I JUST WANT TO SAY THIS ISN'T EVERY POSSIBLE THING THAT WAS IDENTIFIED BY LEGENDS. THERE ARE THINGS LIKE THAT MAY BE IN THE FUTURE WE WANT TO CONSIDER INVESTING IN BUT WE WANT TO CONSIDER INVESTING IN BUT WE TRIED TO ALIGN THESE TWO THINGS. TRIED TO ALIGN THESE TWO THINGS. HERE'S THE LIST OF ALL THE HERE'S THE LIST OF ALL THE THINGS LEGENDS CAME UP WITH. THINGS LEGENDS CAME UP WITH. HERE'S THE VISION EXPERIENCE HERE'S THE VISION EXPERIENCE ROCHESTER IS TRYING TO DELIVER.

ROCHESTER IS TRYING TO DELIVER. WHAT THINGS ALIGN?

Yeah, just a quick one. I noticed under performance and infrastructure, you have audio and lighting. And there have been at least two or three groups I have talked to have utilized that for musical events who said the acoustics are not professional and good there. So are we accounting for that in the types of events you're planning, that it really isn't going to be that quality musical? Or are you planning on the changes being enough that it will make it so?

Yeah, thank you, Mayor. Looking at doing improvements to make the acoustic serviceable for higher-end entertainment. So, yes, we have analyzed. There's different treatments that you can do. Problem is this is a historic building, so you can't just hang acoustic panels from the ceiling. But there are some spray applications that we've looked at, so that would be included in here to make the audio visual at all, you know.

And it won't ruin the historical integrity.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay, thanks.

So all this together ends up being a $6.2 million capital investment. We understand that's a large investment to make. And then there's obviously the ongoing operation and maintenance. We do feel that by having a sustainable operating partner and a long-term operating partner, that we can protect these investments now and well into the future. And I'd also just to reiterate, we do feel pretty good about the inputs that went into these estimates in terms of we could deliver the vision that Experience Rochester wants with this level of investment. I'm going to move to the next steps. Just to reiterate what Ryan said, you know, this council meeting today will hopefully put us on the approval trajectory for the next steps. So it's both, it's a, we need a yes here, and we need to work with the partners at DMC, go back to their board in September, or go to their board in September for preliminary input. We would like to, if it works out, if we're feeling good in October, look at having an operating agreement with Experience Rochester that will then, lead into december we'll go back to dmcc board for a full capital improvement request or some level of capital improvement request and then back to city council in january for cip approval to then go out for bids and start you know making improvements in early 2027. Final slide, here's the feedback that we're looking for is confirming the program and use priorities, provide direction on the operating partnership, and then the level of capital investment priorities that city council feels comfortable with. Thank you. Mayor Norton.

Just quickly as you're looking at this timeline One of the folks I've talked to and who's in the audience today was the Rochester Downtown Association RDA who had an interest in participating or at least being involved in this I don't see that as I don't know where I guess I don't know where that would fit in here and how you would build in that partnership if you're going to Is it for me mayor?

Thank you. Well, if it's CIP, the city certainly would work with them. I even mentioned RDA earlier. It may not have been written down in there, but no, this program can't really be done without them. I think that there's... You know, we've seen them move a little. There's capital intensive to do events. So they've they've shrunk down some of their investment in that. But I can't speak for Sean, but I would say that it does to have more things that are more sustainable and move forward. And can we can both work together? I think that on more of that. I mean, that's like I said earlier, that's that's a dedication to a position that. Their goal is to work with organizations. Their goal is to listen and say, how can we do that? And understand, like, when we are a tourism bureau, if you call it the other traditional stuff, we have many things that we promote that are not downtown. Because there's hotels that are not downtown. RDA's focus is downtown, and I think there can already be mixed messaging with people, and I think it's absolutely critical to work hand-in-hand, and not just them, but with DMC. I mean, I think we've... We've proven over time, whether it's the downtown task force or whatnot, to have good and open communication. But it could be better, I mean, for sure. For us, we were kind of told when we got here, like, focus on that building, get that under control, stop losing all that money. i think that we've done that a fair amount it's not perfect you know do we charge more than people would like sometimes yes are we perfect do we charge too much for soda maybe so um but we're proud to do it and we're proud to help you assist and i think in particular get some cost certainty around this there's there's i believe there's references to studies that were done that quite honestly i've listened to some of those and i i I think there's opportunity in them is the best thing I can say. And I think you're working with somebody who's in the team that has proven to try to be a city consultant. There's not a lot of, I mean, let's be honest, for us, it's not a lot of upside. There's no millions of dollars in this thing that's gonna come back. The opportunity is what comes back to this community from there and to see it activated. And I will say, it doesn't surprise me, the conversations that are around it, the impassioned feelings, Because there's one place or two places in every community where all that emotional energy goes into, and the Chateau is one of those, which is also why it's important. Council Member Wall.

What would you anticipate the city's share of the $6.2 million be? I'm going to look at it.

Yeah, so we are continuing to have conversations with our partners. Our anticipation is that we would go to the September board meeting and seek feedback on bringing the full 6.2 million request to our partners at Destination Medical Center, which of course would require city council and DMC approval to do that.

And the city's contribution would be the ongoing operation, maintenance, and about $500,000 a year of different funding sources.

Mm-hmm. Please don't hear this as trying to throw water on the current idea. But if I were a private investor and building a similar building, it obviously has no return on investment. We've paid the mortgage. We're paying for all the upkeep. We're paying some operational costs. before we even start to break even. So it's really not a great investment for the city, except in the way of continuing to activate the downtown, which has an unknown benefit. In the current contract, are there minimums for open community access and free events? And if that were the case, would that continue in the next iteration?

Yeah, I'll maybe go first and certainly invite our partners to chime in. I can't speak to the current contract as well. Our discussions around contracts specifically have not gone that far because we need to wait for the feedback from this body first. I will say from my perspective, I would envision some key performance indicators around those exact things to say, what is our expectation of community-led events? how are you performing on those? And that would maybe be what I would answer to the first part of your comment as well, is the question for you all to guide us on becomes what is worth it to the community for ensuring community events? Because you're right, if a private capital investment came in here, they're probably not focused on community events. They're focused on who's paying the most profit. And so 26 million was seen as too much 10 years ago. And so is 6 million in the right space is I think the question ahead of us.

And council member, well, I'm not sure exactly what you're asking, but the current contract, interim contract with threshold was 16 city days, if you will. Those are challenging. The current contract with threshold FOR OPERATION OF THE CIVIC CENTER WHICH IS VERY DIFFERENT, PROVIDES A SPECIFIC AMOUNT OF MONEY AND THEY HAVE TO MAKE ALL OF THE REST OF THE REVENUE. SO I THINK THIS CONVERSATION WOULD NOT BE AN EXTENSION OF, YOU WOULD HAVE A SEPARATE CONTRACT FOR THIS THAT RECOGNIZES THAT THE CHATEAU IS A DIFFERENT, IS A VALUE ON INVESTMENT. NOT NECESSARILY A RETURN ON INVESTMENT AND THAT THERE'S INTENT FOR IT TO BE COMMUNITY ACTIVATION. WHAT I'VE BEEN HEARING IS ACTIVATION AND HAVING people utilizing and able to use the building is more important than exactly what is happening there and that it pays for itself. I don't think you're going to have it be paying for itself if you're operating it as a community asset and community value.

I'm not sure I caught the whole gist of what you said, but the gist of what I'm probably saying is, as a city-owned and supported building, we certainly need to have it very accessible to our community, and many of those things ought to be, I think, probably free so that we can all enjoy a city asset.

THANK YOU, COUNCILMEMBER.

COUNCILMEMBER, DID YOU WANT A RESPONSE?

I'D ENJOY HIS RESPONSE.

GO AHEAD. KEEP IT BRIEF, JOE.

I'LL TRY. NO, I THINK, I MEAN, THAT'S REALLY IMPORTANT. WE TRY TO SAY KEEP THE CIVIC IN THE CIVIC CENTER, RIGHT? AND WE DO THAT AND COME BACK AND REPORT ON THAT AND WHAT WE DO EVERY YEAR. AND I JUST FEEL LIKE I want to just point out, we've laid that out. In many of the events I've talked about, whether I've used specific examples, there is not a lot of money in those. And this is why we looked at this and said, what else could it be? Because the investment really would look at like, man, there's not a lot coming back from a dollar figure here. What else can be done with that facility? And that's what energized us to come up with a different ideas. How can we use this to create and continue growth of vibrancy in Rochester? That's what I wanted to say. We, you know, we will, we'll follow your direction. If this is a direction you want to go, you want to stay 365 days a year, it's free events. Well, that number is probably going to change, but we'd be glad to do it. Um, and, uh, I've said before, and I'll say it a million times, we're not going to make our goals and our money on the backs of local folks. We're going to do that in different ways. We're going to meet our goals in a lot of different ways. So thank you for giving me the opportunity.

And to that point, as I said earlier, the pie chart would be very helpful because you're hearing a lot, we want community, but we also, just speaking for myself, the performer that you have has it We basically take out the capital, but you're covering your expenses. And so we need to know, OK, so if we had community events and they are all free, then how much do you need to come out of that private business piece of the pie? and any destination ticketed events. So that would help us have confidence in that proforma that, from my standpoint, I'd have more confidence in the proforma that you put out, that this is how we are going to ensure that we meet these objectives. So with that, I'm gonna go to, we have Council Member Fredericks and then we have Council Member Doering.

I haven't talked much this meeting, so I'm going to use all my time right now. All right.

You're not a promoter at all, are you, Joe? No, not at all.

And you mentioned your price on your beverages and stuff were high. I paid $7 for a bottle of water at a venue yesterday, so I don't think you're out of line over there. Appreciate what you're doing. The balance is unique because about the time you go heavy on local, civic, all of a sudden then in a year we're saying, how come you're not making any money? How come this is so upside down? So there's a unique balance there. To say you're not gonna make the money on the backs of local people, I hope you do, because I hope you have events I want to go to and I'm willing to pay for. And so are a lot of other people. So it is for local people to pay for and go to. You've done a great job of getting a wide variety of stuff across the street here, and I'm impressed by that. And I like small, intimate venues, so I really look forward to something being done with this theater. And this is more for the staff. We've done an RFP several times in this in the past or a few times. Haven't had a lot of luck. I like the idea of these folks running it. They're tried and true. And if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And I think with his enthusiasm alone, he can probably get some good things going. He seems to be able to motivate his team. They have the same enthusiasm when I go talk to him about various things myself. Let's do it right or not do it at all. We've had several... several small and sizable investments, small and sizable investments, and haven't had a great plan to this point. We have a plan in front of us now. Continuing to spend money without having a good plan and kicking the bigger decision down the road is not responsible to anybody in this community. If we are going to do this, let's make an investment needed to give it a legitimate shot. Then we at least have followed through on the original vision when we purchased it and have given it a real chance. The Chateau was purchased as part of an early partnership with the DMC with a vision for it, and we should see it through at this point. The city the city can step up and run this property well after it's done I'm in full support of asking the for the DMC to the DMC for the money to finish this capital project and because the ongoing burden is going to continue to be on the city and doing the right thing with it for many future years. And the, you know, we see just the improvement cost right now, which obviously we won't have to tuck point any of our lifetimes again if it's done right. But there will still be ongoing continuing, With these historic buildings, I own several myself. That's why I showed up today in grubs. I've been working on my historic buildings all day, and I ran out of time. So it never ends. It never ends. We love these things, and they are neat. But to get that nice shot in the arm, and I don't feel like $6 million is a huge ask from the DMC, being, like you said, it would be $30 million. it'd be the equivalent of 30 million today, which was 24, 23 million, what you said, in whatever, 2018. So I think it's a reasonable ask for what we're trying to do, and it's gonna supply that, like you say, space that we're kind of missing in that downtown. I actually go down there quite a few times during the week. I seem to see Miller every time I'm there. But anyway, it would provide that space that we do need down there to add some activity. Having two to 400 people, even 500 people filtering in out of there in that space during the week would really help that downtown corridor, and I'd like to see that.

Council Member Doering.

I'm going to try to be lean with my words. I appreciate the presentation today. I'm leaving much more confused and without any clarity going forward. I do not have a clear vision about what the space is going to be used for. I don't agree making a space I would argue that we need to purpose build the space, not make it a space where everything can happen. Because once you do that, you make no one happy. So I'm confused about that vision. I'm confused why, as we were coming forward, we haven't talked more robustly with our local arts communities about what they're looking for. We've heard an outcry, or I've heard an outcry from this community about local music venues being shut down due to construction. This is a great opportunity to pursue something like this. I haven't seen that conversation represented in the presentation today. I have no problem asking for money to renovate the building, but I would like much more clarity about the operational model, who the intended audience is, how things are going to be programmed, and to ensure that our local artistic community has a viable city space to share their art with. So I don't know if that's the feedback you wanted, but that's what you requested.

Councilmember Miller.

Yeah, thank you. I'll be brief. I think this was out of order. I wish that we could do the capital improvements and then go out for an RFP. I hear your vision, Joe, and it feels very much like the tourism promotion mission of the Civic Center, fill hotels, focus on the weekend. What I don't hear is an alternate proposal that focuses on local arts, music, community access that is then attracted to visitors. And I do see a missing piece of how we're bringing and elevating local voices, supporting the local arts community. And I've heard over and over how expensive the space can be at MCC. I appreciate that that's changing somewhat, but I don't want this space to also be less accessible to people and startup organizations because I've heard over and over how much Threshold has prioritized that access and this is why I would like to see an RFP. I get a clear vision from you and this is not a criticism of you, this is a criticism perhaps of the way the process has happened with us and how it's come back to us because this came to us quite many months ago And I feel like, again, staff are presenting a fully formed vision of what they want us to just approve. And I don't feel like we've gotten the chance to weigh in between. And maybe that's unfair. But, again, maybe you didn't get full support of the council to look at an RFP. But I had hoped for a list of improvements and then how we do an RFP.

And we have a, I just for clarity, we have an existing operator whose contract ends at the end of the year. And if the council is comfortable with that building being dark for any amount of time, that's fine. We're here to get your feedback, all of your feedback. And so when we get dominating voices, it's difficult for us to have the entire council's feedback to know what we should do. And I'll tell you, since I've arrived and probably long before the Chateau has almost never had like consistent, WE'RE BEHIND SOMETHING AND I THINK THAT WILL BE CHALLENGING IN ORDER TO GET THE FUNDING FROM OUR FUNDING PARTNER TO BE ABLE TO FINISH THE CAPITAL INVESTMENT. SO WE'RE REACTING TO THE FEEDBACK WE DO AND DO NOT GET FROM THE WHOLE BODY AND TRYING TO CONTINUE TO MOVE SOMETHING FORWARD IN A WAY THAT ALSO ALIGNS being able to achieve the capital investment that's necessary for anything.

If I can just add on that really quickly. Again, in 2025 or 4 or whatever it was when we did the HVAC improvement, the direction to us was very clear that We should not be asking for additional capital improvement until we have a vision to go with it. So I agree with what you're, I hear what you're saying. I'm just saying that that differs from the direction that we had previously been set on to very clearly solidify the vision before asking for additional capital.

Councilmember Keene yeah, I'm struggling here provide input because I don't want to I mean I think it is a hard place We're at and I don't want to be critical of you know what we're coming forward with But you know just going back to the timeline the public purchase you know of a private building without a set plan And that's 12 years ago, and we're still struggling with that. I do think what? Deputy Administrator Ryan said about DMC. That's what's really driving this. DMC said no more investment until you have this plan. But that in itself bothers me. That's what I think led us towards the point of saying, you know, having this study that wasn't very professionally done and then giving us little guidance, but then we worked off of that and went towards Experience Rochester, which, I mean... Part of what I'm hearing here, I can support this plan because they're in this business, but I certainly would not support this other part of this 300,000 making a decision based on how we spend our hospitality as if, like, we'll do this if you do this. That just seems wrong. So I wouldn't support that aspect of it. Whether that goes forward through another venue, I'm fine with, but as part of this deal, I wouldn't support it. I still think that Chateau, going back to that early, you know, through threshold, I think they were doing, THE JOB OF ACTIVATING IT FOR THE LOCAL GROUPS THAT I HEAR SOME OF MY PEERS SAYING IS REALLY THE REASON FOR THE BUILDING AND IT IS A GOOD ACTIVATION FOR IT. THE PROBLEM WITH THAT WAS THAT A DMC ORGANIZATION CONTROLLING THE INVESTMENT WOULD SAY NO MORE INVESTMENT UNTIL WE HAVE A MORE professional or structured running of this. And that's what I think the staff has worked on to get us to this point. But I, yeah, so those are the key things is that, I mean, the DMC thing, I think we're actually working, this whole plan isn't to come back to this council. It's to go back to the DMC board to get them to come up with investing in the Chateau. That's what I feel. Thank you, Council Member. I just wanted to respond to it.

It is challenging when you have a yes and yes model and not everyone agree. It's also, we've never had clear, like I don't think we've ever had a everybody loves it conversation about the Chateau since I've been here just with the council. So it's a challenging, very emotionally charged topic and we're just trying to move something forward. I mean there's a third option that says you don't worry about DMC money, figure out how you want to operate it and tell us how you want to fund it and put all the capital into it. it's probably, no matter what you do, they're not gonna be less than $6 million based on how we whittled it to get to this point. So I'm comfortable doing whatever there's support for, but I'm not sure that we're gonna be in a different place to have support to activate it. And I do think what I heard Mr. Ward saying, whether you support moving forward, and I think I'm hearing general support to keep moving forward, doesn't mean that you're gonna say yes in the end, is that they didn't want to get ahead of their skis and talk to all of these different organizations when they're not sure if you wanted us to move forward with continuing to proceed to work with them. So, which I think I'm hearing general support to keep doing that.

Let me, I haven't weighed in, I don't think truly. I'm going to be very transparent as well. On paper, WHETHER WE DO MANAGEMENT AND OPERATION, CAPITAL, SWITCH THEM OUT, TO ME IT DOESN'T MAKE THAT MUCH DIFFERENCE, BUT TO COUNCILMEMBER KEENE'S POINT, YES, THE DMC HAS MADE IT VERY CLEAR AS THE MAYOR AND I ARE ON THE DMC BOARD that they want projects from the city that have been scoped out by the city, very similar to the Aquatic Center at Soldiers Field. And so on paper, that's what I was looking at. And I commend the staff of getting it down to $6 million, and it's much more comfortable than $20, $25. You are working at a... A BASE THAT SAYS 400 SEATS. A QUESTION THAT WE HAVEN'T HAD AN ANSWER TO IS, IS IT FLEXIBLE THAT IF THIS MODEL WORKS IN A DECADE, IS IT EXPANDABLE TO 500, 600 SEATS? THAT'S JUST AN ASIDE QUESTION. BUT I HAVE TO BE HONEST AND I HAVE TO AGREE WITH COUNCILMEMBER DORING, I DON'T THINK you've done a good job of presenting the management and operations and with the level of confidence that I was looking for, for me to be able to go to the DMC and sell it. And you do have to talk about the partnerships. You do have to talk about how much RDA is going to be a part of that. HOW YOU ARE GOING TO REPLICATE THE COMMUNITY ASPECT THAT THE THRESHOLD ARTS HAS BUILT OVER THE LAST FOUR YEARS AND THEN YOU HAVE TO BE HONEST ABOUT IN ORDER TO MEET that operating model, we're gonna have to pull in some business or private events to fill that gap. And then we're doing this to stretch, to pull in that destination piece. And Mr. Ward, I feel like I don't see a passion from you about this. venue. And there is a passion in this community about the Chateau. And I think the Chateau, if you go back and Mayor Norton was a part of the legislative team that pushed for the Destination Medical Center, and it was all about taking what was the feel inside the clinic and bringing it outside and you can't find a better location that is close to the clinic that has its unique neat atmosphere and it's right there close to current restaurants hopefully future restaurants as well. So my advice is really pull that together that management operations and We need a little more detail on where those performance fit. And I think we're going to need that at the DMC. I think you have the framework here. I just think that it's not tight enough from my standpoint. So with that, other questions? Thank you. Oh, Mayor.

Yeah, I just want to say, I understand everything you've said. I appreciate the comments. I'll just say, if Joe has a passion for activating the Chateau, I just... His excitement and his willingness to step forward and do this, I really appreciate it. I love that he wants to include the community in it. I would like to see maybe something a little more firmer, because I'm kind of...

I believe he does have the passion. I just need to see...

I think he does, and I think he's excited about it. But I'm feeling like we need a firmer idea on the programming. Who are we programming for? What kinds of things are we going to do? Who are your partners? That would just be helpful, I think, where I think we're just feeling a little loose. on that component, so I would just add that.

Thank you, Mayor, for softening my terms. Council Member Frederick.

I'd like to make one comment. You did preface right in the beginning that you didn't get way in the weeds because you don't know for sure where we're going yet.

That's absolutely correct, Councilmember.

Yeah, I did hear you say that.

And I'll just say, yeah, I mean, I'm leaving here also potentially more confused than I came because I'm also hearing provide more detail, but I'm also hearing don't produce too much detail without checking in to make sure we're on the right track. So I'm not sure, based on the comments that I heard, if I'm supposed to be bringing this forward to the Destination Medical Center Board or not. So I guess I'm looking for you all to provide some sort of consensus on where you would like us to go. Should we continue spending time on this, or is this the wrong idea?

I would like to hear more from my colleagues. I mean, obviously the mayor and I are there, and from my standpoint, I am able to try to sell it to them. I'm just thinking stronger management and operations, tighter information and on the partnership and where those pieces are. That's just from my standpoint.

Right. And I appreciate that from your perspective, Council President, because you do have to present it, and you can't just come in there sloppy and looking like we're just throwing something together. I appreciate that. I do think there's a lot of unknowns here, and to me, a lot of things boil down to trust, and sometimes you've got to trust your partners, and you've proven that we can trust you, and Mr. Yetzer, Josh Defrang, you're not Defrang, is it Josh?

I always confuse those two as well.

Right, I know, sorry about that. I know the difference, I know the difference. Mr. Defrang's a little quieter. Anyway, back on track. I trust, all three of you have proven we can trust you. That's the way I feel about it. And we need to make, we can sit and argue about what we wanna do with this forever, but the reality is, we gotta do something with it. And this, to me at this point, is the best plan that I've heard. So I'm a yes, yes, and yes guy.

Council Member Doering. For me, it's not a question about trust. It's about listening to my constituents. So I am completely on the fence on whether to move forward or not based on what I've heard from the public.

Council Member Keene. A question with this sort of contract, the way we perceive it right now, is it like a three-year renewable or what kind of would we be doing between now and the year end? with Experience Rochester, with their board.

Councilmember, I think we would probably want to align it to a degree with their existing contract in the Civic Center, which currently they're in a three-year renewal that expires December 31st, 2027. AND THE CITY AT ITS SOLE OPTION CAN EXTEND FOR THREE YEAR PERIODS GOING INTO THE FUTURE. SO I THINK YOU WOULD WANT TO DO A TWO AND THEN I DON'T KNOW IF YOU WANT A 333, SOMETHING LIKE THAT.

I'M TRYING TO SEE WHAT WE'RE MAKING A LONGER TERM COMMITMENT.

AND YOU WOULD BUILD IN SOME SORT OF RENEWAL Usually with something like this, it's sort of at our sole discretion. We tell them and we have to give them a lot of lead time and ourselves, which we don't have here with the Chateau, unfortunately. So, yeah, I think I also think that it will be important in order to say yes and yes about investments, that there's confidence that it's not going to change every two, three, five years. So.

Yeah, I still am. BOTHERED BY THE FACT THAT OUR PARTNER DMC IS REALLY DRIVING US TO SAY TO DO A CERTAIN THING. IT DOESN'T FEEL LIKE A PARTNERSHIP BUT CONSIDERING WHERE WE ARE IN THE TIMELINE, CONSIDERING WE HAVE A PUBLIC PROPERTY THAT WHETHER WE SHOULD OWN IT OR SHOULD BE PRIVATE, IT IS WHAT IT IS THAT I WOULD SUPPORT THIS GOING TO DMC AND TRYING TO MOVE FORWARD WITH THIS PLAN THIS YEAR.

COUNCIL MEMBER WALL.

Mr. Keene probably said about what I would say to while I'm close to the fence I'm more on the side of the fence of let's see if we can get the 6.2 million and care for an asset Otherwise, you know you have this car aging car. You can either fix it or you can put it up on cinder blocks and We could choose to put it up on cinder blocks on January 1st, and I don't think that's going to be good for the community Councilmember Miller

I'll just say, I think that a proposal like this can work. What I'm missing from it is the community focus that is distinctly different than the Mayo Civic Center focus. And what I've heard from constituents, local musicians, other partners, arts and culture organizations, is that the experience of working with the current operator at the Chateau is much more affordable, available, and accessible to community use. And in this proposal as presented, I hear really an external focus to regional tourism, which makes total sense. That's your day-to-day job. So I'm just curious how the partnership, and maybe that brings RDA in as a named partner, maybe that's some other model of saying like how are you building out the connections in the local community to prioritize those free low low-cost community organization non-profit elements that i continue to hear is a challenge at the mayo civic center all right um mr yetzer you got your answers do you all right we're going to move on thank you

Mr. Passion, Joe Ward, and team. We do have a seasonal parking restrictions update. Is that a necessity for today? Who is our lead, Tyler? What?

It wouldn't, I don't know, I'd defer to.

We do have a closed session after this. It is 6.39 now. Can we slip these? Is there a motion? Do folks want to hear the half hour presentation?

I just know that Council Member Palmer has also asked that this come back and is not here today. So if we have time in the study session upcoming, I would support holding it.

How do others feel? I'm not going to take a vote. I am open to what Council Member Miller and the Mayor suggested. Others?

Are you good? I know the schedule is really full, but we could work to try and find a spot.

But you don't have any need for answers from us? Yeah. And it's getting closer to snow.

We would like to get some direction before this fall, before we go in to see parking restrictions.

Can we do it in five, ten minutes?

It's really up to you for that part, too.

Okay, so we're going to ask the administrator to put it on one of the next three or four.

And just be aware you might go long on one of those. And I would say, and this is,

Yes, yeah, yeah. And I would say also, and Councilmember Miller did point this out to me before we even sat down today, that, you know, some of these times were not very realistic. The better public meetings that took, you know, more than 45 minutes. Diversity, equity and inclusion and accessibility, you know, we had 45 minutes down. It did run longer. we knew Chateau would take a long time so I think we do our best yeah you do do that you do do your best what I would say is to city staff and trim your presentations so that there is time for Q&A from Council Members because Council Members and the Mayor are going to focus on those areas that they have issues with or concerns or support greatly. Council Member Fredericks.

Trimming it sounds great, but we have several people that always ask for more detail. So it's kind of a catch-22.

I JUST SAY WE CAN GO OVER. WE HAVE A CLOSED SESSION TODAY. THE THREE HOURS IS THE GOAL.

WE ARE MAKING A DECISION TO DO THAT.

I JUST WANT TO ADD. WE ARE DOING THIS STARTING AT 3.30 AND WE ARE NOT HAVING ANY MEAL BREAK IN HERE. IF WE ARE GOING TO GO UNTIL 7.30 THAT IS A LONG TIME TO HAVE WITH NO MEAL IF PEOPLE HAVEN'T PLANNED FOR IT. I JUST THINK PART OF THE ISSUE IS MEALS. You can't eat your lunch at, your dinner at three.

We are going to have a 10 minute break between now and our executive session if you.

No, just start now and let's get it over with.

Well, we do have to walk over there. Anything on study session schedule, it's there, look at it. Good. Mr. Spindler-Craig, can you preview our extent, EXECUTIVE SESSION, PLEASE.

YES, MR. PRESIDENT. JUST TO PUT ON THE RECORD, WE WOULD BE MOVING INTO CLOSED SESSION. WE DON'T NEED A MOTION, BUT IT'S MOVING INTO CLOSED PURSUANT TO MINNESOTA STATUTE 13D.05, SUBDIVISION 3B ON AN ACTIVE LITIGATION MATTER, CHRISTOPHER CLARKSON VERSUS CITY OF ROCHESTER. WE WILL BE IN ROOM 320. LET'S MEET IN ROOM 320 IN TEN MINUTES.