City Council - Regular Meeting

That's a good thing. All right, everyone.

Good evening. Welcome. To our city council regular meeting number 2026-17, Tuesday, June 9th, 2026 at 5 p.m. Boy, we have a real overload on one side here tonight. Heavy, heavy. It is heavy. Well, welcome everyone to our meeting tonight. We have a rather short regular meeting and then we are going to jump in to our work agenda tonight. So we'll start things off. Julie, can you give us roll call, please?

Steve Muntean. Here. Gail Gary. Here. John Agosta.

Here.

Dave Barnes.

Here.

Michael Pacino.

Here.

Amy Dixon. Here. And Brian Swinton-Tech is absent.

Okay, thank you. And we will do the Pledge of Allegiance. If everybody would rise, there's a flag in the back, a flag up front. I pledge allegiance to the flag, the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. All right.

We're not yet.

We're going to start off here. I just want to mention that public comment will be taken tonight and it will be somewhere around 6 p.m. tonight. We will take public comment before we jump into our work session. Right now, I'd like to move into recognizing participants in this year's City 101 program. And what I'm going to do is read off everyone's name. And if you're here, why not come on down and kind of make a semicircle here. And then I have a few words to say. And then we're going to open up for those of you who would like to speak tonight. All right.

So.

Here are this year's City 101 class. In the City Employee category, we have Carolyn Gibson, Colleen Norling, and pardon me if I mispronounce your name, Doug Wilson, Ian Satterfield, Jacob Ganelli, Justin Barker, Kate Glitzgard, Mackenzie Carroll, Myra Perez, Mitchell Lewin, Josh Schroeder, Patrick Campion, Sarah Briones, Josh Coley, Kaylee McCarthy, Landra Brown, Eli White. And from the community, we have Andrew Berlaccus, Davin Bodker, Karen Stinger, Patrick Keough, Laura Karsh, Jake Cruz, Ashley Dean, Bo Cahill, Garrett Smith, Christopher Belinsky, Monica Bershank, Arlene Carlin, Matthew Roshan, Bill Thomas, and Lisa Cominetti.

Oh, congratulations.

City 101 is a six-month in-depth insight into Steamboat Springs City operation with goals to create a shared understanding of the city's mission and purpose, increase community and employee understanding of the city and all of its operations, and to enhance community member and employee ability to serve as an ambassador for the city. We as the Steamboat Springs City Council thank you for your interest and dedication in learning more about the diverse aspects of our operations, for your investment of time and energy into understanding the organization, and in your willingness to engage in understanding the complex nature and broad reach of local government operations and to share this understanding with your family members, friends, and coworkers. Thank you for being a member of City 101 and congratulations on completing this program. We'll give you another hand. And with that, I'll open it up to the floor for some comments. Ginger?

Hi, I'm Ginger Scott. I am the Grants and Project Management Specialist for the city. And I have the privilege of helping to administer the City 101 program. So lucky me, it's one of my favorite things that I do. So we had a really great group this year. We had 32 participants, 17 are city employees and 15 are community members. It's our 10th year of City 101. We did eight day-long sessions that included info from 10 city departments and all the divisions within. We visited 10 facilities, learned a lot, had some great hands-on activities. And this class was super engaged, involved, asked great questions, and were flexible when we had to switch things up. I also wanted to do a huge thank you to all the departments and staff. They put in a ton of time, effort, and planning for our group. And just wanted to say thank you to all the participants for taking part in this program. And if anyone here wants to say anything, then you're welcome to come up. But thank you very much.

Did anyone drive the Zamboni?

Oh, yeah.

it's going to be short and sweet ginger you're awesome thanks for everything all right

Bill Thomas, really appreciation to Tom Leeson as our city manager, obviously to the city council and to Ginger. You did a fabulous job. And it's so appreciative to give us this peek behind the doors, especially since some of us don't work for the city. So I appreciate the commitment that everyone gave to us and realizing there's a cost behind this program. And it's a great program.

Thank you.

Come on. Don't be shy. You're fine. You're fine.

As I mentioned to Ginger, when I first walked in, I feel like I need to thank you guys for allowing the opportunity. I'm really grateful for it. I can send an email with all the details, but for the sake of time here, thank you very much for allowing the opportunity.

You got it.

You're good, Tom.

as an employee of the city i'd like to say thank you for letting me do this and it was really an education um and thank you ginger it was really great so as you guys are doing this is anyone motivated to run for city council come on this was a prerequisite no you have some time to think about it till about next summer

openings, right? We've got a couple some boards and commissions, so definitely take a look there.

This is kind of why I hope we do this, but to get people to understand a lot about city governance.

Well, thank you. Is there anybody else who'd like to comment? Okay, good.

So Josh Schroeder is not able to be here. Our airport manager, he and his wife are about to have a baby any minute. So he is with her. But he wrote a letter that I'm going to read from him. Council members, I would like to express my appreciation for the opportunity to attend City 101. What a great program. Not only did we learn about the wide range of services provided by the City of Steamboat Springs, but we also had a chance to participate in many fun activities, including heavy equipment and truck operations, welding, bumper cars, Zamboni driving at the ice arena, and of course, an in-depth tour of the wastewater treatment plant. As a relatively new employee at the city, this program gave me a much clearer understanding of the many services Steamboat Springs provides to the community. It helped me better understand my role within the broader scope of city operations and how my division contributes to the overall success of Steamboat Springs. City 101 is a tremendous benefit to the community, offering not only employees, but any residents the chance to gain deeper insight into the city's many services and resources. A big thank you to council for supporting this valuable program. Please continue to support it in the years ahead. Another big thank you goes out to all the departments and division heads and staff members who pause their daily operations to offer tours and lead activities that made these sessions so enjoyable. They invested significant time and effort to share their knowledge and provide meaningful, informative experiences. Lastly, I want to extend a heartfelt thank you to Ginger Scott. In addition to her daily responsibilities as a grant administrator, she took on the enormous task of coordinating this program. I can only imagine the hours of emails, phone calls, scheduling, catering orders, weather monitoring, last minute adjustments, transportation logistics, and reminders to bring our coats that she managed behind the scenes. Her passion for the program is evident in every detail. Thank you, Ginger. Keep up the great work from Josh.

Right.

I just want to add in and echo what everybody else said. I had the fun, dual pleasure of being both a participant of the program and also I get to work with Ginger every day. So I get to see behind the scenes all of that work that she does put in. And it is tremendous. And she does it with such care. And it's a lot of work, you guys. So thank you, Ginger. And I am really excited to get to do this with you next year. So... So I get that great pleasure too. It was a lot of fun. And I think I can see for myself that everyone, I learned so much that even as a city staff member, I don't know that I would have learned a lot of what we got out of this. So thank you for making it possible and thank all of you for making it possible and all of you for making it possible. And that's all I got. Anyone else?

Thank you. All right, thanks again, Ginger and all of you. Congratulations.

I would like to add that I'm a graduate of Steamboat 101. And, you know, what I took out of it is, you know, really you gain appreciation for what each of the components within the city do and how they're all interconnected and answering the why, you know, why we do this and what, you know, and that really helps you. And I encourage everyone you know, everybody out there in the community to actually take this, you know, free course. I think it would really help you understand and, you know, provide valuable feedback based upon what you're learning. So I fully support this program.

Great. All right.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Applications are good till August for city council.

That's in 2027. 2027. 2027. All right.

Start now.

We will move on in our agenda and we're going to the consent calendar. And items on the consent calendar may be reviewed and commented upon in the same manner as other agenda items. Any member of council or the public may request withdrawal of any item from the consent calendar for further discussion at any time prior to approval. If items are not removed, they may be approved with a single motion. We have two items on here tonight. The first is a resolution adopting the City Council goals for 26 and 27. And the second one is a resolution adopting the 2026 City of Steamboat Springs strategic plan. And I would ask, would we like to pull these two items? Yes, on both. Okay. So, Councillor Agosta has... Pulled both items. So with that, we will start with the first item, which is a resolution adopting the City Council goals for 26-27. Tom?

Thank you, President Muntin. And this is really more of a housekeeping item than anything. When we were going through the strategic plan and incorporating the council goals into the strategic plan, we realized that there were a couple basically bullet items that had been inadvertently left off. The main categories were there, but just there were some of the details that we wanted to make sure that we were being consistent with what you adopted as your goals and what was within the strategic plan. So that included under diverse housing options, the third bullet, it says position the city to benefit from state funding opportunities for affordable. Those three bullets under that were not in the original one. So those are incorporated now to be specific in terms of what we meant. And then under environmental sustainability, there was a bullet point that says implement the decarbonization roadmap for city facilities. And then there's a number, I think five bullets under that, that was very specific projects that we are undertaking this year and next year. And we just wanted to make sure that those were incorporated. So that's the extent of the changes. And it's more of a clarification.

Okay.

Thank you, Tom.

Does anybody have any questions or comments for Tom?

So I want to open up discussion a little bit on the sustainability piece, bullet three, about the Codify. By the way, is it Codify or Codify? I want to say Codify.

You say tomato, I say tomato.

Okay.

Nico?

All right. So, so bullet three says, you know, codify the dimensions and developments standard recommendations to the downtown plan to ensure continued economic viability or vibrancy to the downtown seaboard area. um we had discussion um on that and it was devoted three you know three or four four to three to keep that in there, but there was also an action item associated with that that we would you know continue that discussion. In a work session for the downtown in around the downtown plan now that work session is happening. after this regular session. So I feel like they are, we've flipped this. I feel like I'd want to have that discussion with the, in the work session before we approve this. But I don't think that's, my understanding is that's probably in a process why it's not possible. Is that correct?

I, Dan?

Is it?

Well, and we have, yeah, I mean, what we agreed to in March, in the March 3rd meeting, what we agreed to is that we'd have a follow-up, you know, a follow-up meeting to discuss this and drill down in the downtown plan as a group. And then from that, we were going to help, you know, with the help of the RECA, help identify what is the right plan. GOAL FOR THIS SESSION. AND THAT DID NOT HAPPEN, BUT IT'S GOING TO HAPPEN IN AN HOUR. SO I FEEL LIKE I WOULD LIKE TO HAVE THE DISCUSSION ABOUT THIS RESOLUTION TO ADOPT THE COUNCIL GOALS, I WOULD LIKE TO HAVE THAT AFTER THE WORK SESSION THAT TALKS ABOUT THE DOWNTOWN PLAN.

And if I might clarify, if you recall the conversation did come up under your city council goals as to whether you wanted to include this specific language about codifying the dimensional standards. You went back and forth as a council and you decided four to three to include that language. We also said, Sounds like we need a primer on the overall downtown plan so everybody fully understands what's in there and look at it holistically. It was not the intent to have that work session plan as part of a decision-making process for you to decide whether or not that should be included in your goals. It was sort of additive planning. you decided to include this language in your goals, and we agreed that we would hold a work session so you all fully understood what was in the downtown plan. Now, you can certainly change your mind, but that was sort of the sequence of events that occurred.

And I would add one thing to that, is that was predicated off of the work session of examining the broader code. not just the downtown plan in regards to one or two specific areas. It was a broader look, as I recall.

I was going to say, I did go back and listen to the hearing today. We went back and listened to the 3-3 just to try to get clarification on that. And yeah.

So does language still allow us the latitude of what we're going to codify? It's just a goal to codify. It doesn't say how we're going to codify it or what the exact codification is going to look like.

That's kind of how I interpret it. It's more like, hey, group, as a goal, we're going to focus on this development, the dimensional standards and development standards, something we need to look at where we haven't had that as a goal. So specifically setting it out there like, okay, we want to achieve it. We don't know if we're going to be able to codify it. We don't even know where we are. We're going to have a conversation later on. So I think part of my was keeping it in there is because I want to address it. I want to be able to bring it up and have the conversation. It doesn't say we're going to codify it or nothing. It's just a goal. It's just a suggestion. I hope we can get to this goal. I know that as counsel for six years, there's goals that we did not achieve. So I don't know if it's necessary to what you're bringing it up for. I'm more curious on you, John, is what's your intention of the question? Did you want to take it out or do you want to add more to it?

I certainly would like to take it out as is, or we can expand upon what it's going to cover. So here's my biggest concern about the dimensions thing, is I feel like we've peeled out dimensions, but dimensions impact the whole environment holistically. So, for example, on page 12 of the historic plan, it says, preserve views of Halston Hill sleeping giant in the ski area and have historic you know, integration with, you know, historical integration with the buildings. But page 20, which is LUZ1, talks about increasing dimensions. But how do you increase dimensions without looking at holistically in terms of the impact of increasing those dimensions? And why are you increasing dimensions? Are you... When you do that, are you going to ensure that we have first floor commercial to ensure the vibrancy of downtown? Ultimately, that's the goal, is increase the vibrancy and increase our sales tax revenue with local businesses. Because all the studies show that we are way behind all the other... resorts, mountain towns, in terms of the downtown businesses. So I understand we want to expand that. So how does increasing the dimensions impact that? And how do you do that without impacting, you know, one of the number one goals is that it does not impact the views of Harrison Hill, Sleeping Giant, and the ski area.

But don't you think we should, as a goal, keep it on here the way it is? With the word dimensions in there? Just the way it says.

It doesn't say increase or decrease.

It doesn't say any of that.

It just says let's consider it.

It says codified dimensions. Right, which we'll have a conversation in a work session, which is non-binding. And then the staff will come back, as we'll talk about today, a proposed change to the code. And it's really at that time that we can look at this and say, we'll look at those dimensions, whether we increase or decrease. And then to me, at the end of that, we'll be able to say, okay, let's codify this then. At that point, we could say, did we achieve the goal? Yes, we achieved it because we have a goal and we went ahead and said, let's make it a goal to look at these dimensional standards. But I don't see why keeping that in there makes it, I would be remiss to take it out.

I'll just say one more comment and then I'll let it, you know, let other people talk or, you know, let it, you know, move on. And that is, for me, it's not about increasing the dimensions of the downtown area. It's about increasing the vibrancy and increasing the commercial businesses in the downtown area. Those are the things I want to make sure that we are... If we're going to work on something, it's going to be... increasing vibrancy and increasing, you know, commercial businesses in, in downtown area. And so, but we're leading with dimensions that what's the, what's, you know, so maybe there's something in dimensions that, that help it out, but it's, you know, it's, it's standing by itself. And so I'll pause there.

And I'll just underscore that. I mean, this is the same conversation that we had, right? I mean, and on a four, three vote decided to keep the word codify. I believe that I had suggested let's review. And again, my, you know, and I was gonna, I mean, I object to this, to this goal. I'm certainly not gonna object to all of our goals because of this, but I absolutely wanna go on record that I don't agree with the goal to codify specifically to pull out the dimensional and development standards from the downtown plan. I think one of the whole thoughts was that we were gonna look at the downtown plan because there are a lot of different recommendations in the downtown plan that I think need to be taken into our discussion in a whole, right? I mean, we've got a lot of issues that we are confronting.

So if I understand you correctly, I mean, to me, it seems like a discussion in semantics because as a group, we want to look at the design and development standards that continually come up in variances in their code. Is the word codify the problem? I mean, if you want to change that to something else, as long as we get to review it and as a group talk about it, that's the goal that I'm looking for. For me, it's the word dimension. Is that the same thing for you, Gail, dimension?

Well, no, I mean, I suggested the word review as a compromise. I don't agree with the goal. I've just read that. I mean, I don't agree with this goal at all in terms of focusing staff time on, you know.

Remain in contrary opinion to the CDC.

I want to have the work session and have, based on the work session, just identify what are some of the things we can pull out.

First of all, one of the reasons this has come up is because it's been sitting there since 2019. 2019. 2019, we've kicked the can down the road. And I know that if we look at the entire downtown plan, we cannot change the entire thing all at once. We don't have the resources to do that. So we started with this. And then we also said, OK, we'll look at what else we can possibly get into there, whether it's transportation or whatever it is. But I think that in any goal that we have, you know, we can change that goal. if the majority of council wants to change that goal. We can do that. And I think if we go through the work session and we listen to what's there, we can come out of that on the other side. And if we wanna revisit this discussion, we can. Correct, Tom? So if we want to come out of this and we feel strongly as a group that codify is not the right word or dimension is not the right word, we can come back and talk about it after we have the presentation.

What I fail to understand is how your perspective makes this goal so concrete and unchangeable that we can't just keep it as a nebulous goal that we're going to try to achieve some things. I still haven't understood your guys' comment on why is this... I mean, explain to me a little bit why it's that big. I mean, it's just a goal, guys.

Me, if you just left, if you got rid of dimensions and you left development, because development is so broad, because dimensions can fit in development.

That's what I'm saying. You guys are being nitpicky. It doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter. In my opinion, I mean, if you want to change and get rid of the whole thing, I'm just saying as a community, we're trying to focus on these issues that are coming up. Someone decided to make it a goal, and now we're fighting over the semantics of it. This is not concrete. Is it concrete in your eyes?

For me, it's not semantics. For me, I hear what Council President Muntean is saying in terms of we have this plan in place. It's been in place since 2019. There are a lot of components in the downtown plan, which we'll learn about more this evening. And the perspective would be that I think we... as a council, need to look at the downtown area plan and identify what components in the downtown area plan support the goals that we have set forth. So they're broader than just the dimensional and development standards. There's a lot of different actions in the downtown area plan, so my thought would be we need to be a little more precise and strategic about which ones we pull out and focus our resources on. And that's I think the position that I took.

specific because you were pointing it just that I'm just trying to understand where you're coming from of the whole downtown development plan. We pointed out this one aspect and you're like, but there's more to it than that. Could we just be a little broader? Is that kind of what you're saying? Because someone picked out the development and dimensional standards, and it's like, well, that's too specific, that's too concrete. I'd like to look at other things that affect it. Is that kind of where you're coming from?

Yes. How did you get there? Yeah, no, yes. I mean, in the sense of when we, you know, and I think that's, Tom, probably why you made that suggestion, that we all need to take time and look at the downtown area plan, and what we need to do is identify in there what specific areas measures are specific, you know, support the goals that we have set forth in terms of the larger categories.

Okay, evaluate and codify the downtown plan.

It's the codify, for sure. When we look at the staff report for the work session, I mean, it literally says, if the direction is to move forward with the council's goal, staff would draft code language and hold a planning session or a work session with planning commission. So that codify is directing staff. to bring forward changes to this one specific part of a larger plan. That's the issue we raised March 3rd. And I also went back and watched it. We had this exact same conversation. So I'm not interested in like revisiting this conversation because it was a 4-3. And so we were on the losing end of it, losing.

The three side.

The three side.

Thank you.

So I also, I still don't support it, but I won't come out and vote no for all of our goals. But in the future, we cannot do goal setting ad hoc during council meetings. And that's what happens.

Are you, if we change the word codify or codify, Review and revise as appropriate.

At this point, I don't...

I'm just trying to move this along. I don't care. I don't want to get hung up on this right now.

I agree. I think we should move along because we have a presentation that staff's put together based on the March 3rd.

We can come back after that presentation and we can discuss it further, which I'm sure we will, and we can make changes to that. This isn't like, you know, as a result of this, you know, this is what's going to be done. We can change this at any point in time, including in an hour from now. So, I mean, I think we need to move on, though.

We can move on. If I can get my fellow council members to agree, I would love to get rid of the term dimensions, you know, because development is pretty broad, because this is dimensions slash development, development is pretty broad. It doesn't lock us down, but dimensions, I feel, locks us down too much.

We can also vote to move this to our next council meeting. Well, yeah.

Well, we can't because we don't have time.

I just wanted to get this Whether it's 4.3 or 3.3 or 6.7, I don't care. The point is that we have a development plan that was adopted, but it was never codified in the code. That's all we're trying to do. We're not trying to force anything down anybody or do anything. We're just trying to say, hey, are we as a goal going to look at it? So maybe it needs to be rewritten in that sense. I'm fine with taking it out at this point because we're already to have the conversation. So as far as I'm concerned, strike that from the thing. Let's pass this and make the resolution go through.

That ship sailed, so I just move on.

I think we move on.

We can move on.

I do have one other thing to point out, really, just as I was thinking, as I was looking about this in terms of the build environment, right?

Where are you at?

Well, so on the environmental sustainability, the... Second big bullet point, build environmental sustainability into systems and decision makings, and specifically criteria at the bottom subject to funding constraints. All of our decisions are subject to funding constraints, aren't they? Yeah. So why would we call that out here? I mean, it calls into question that if we're only saying funding constraints for one instance, I would say that all of our decisions are based on funding constraints. Just a point.

I don't know why we would throw it in there unless that somebody has a good reason for it. I'm fine with dropping the last few words. Anybody have any concern? Just dropping it with design criteria?

Sure, Ed. Okay, then so is that, are you done with your comments on that? Yes. Okay, so then to move this along, then I would make a motion to approve the council goals with the modification of removing subject to funding constraints under our environmental sustainability.

Okay, we have a motion from Councillor Dixon.

I'll second that.

I have a second from Councilor Pacino. Any other discussion?

And while I made the motion, I'm still opposed to the one. We just need to move this along.

Okay. All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Opposed? All right. Resolution passes 6-0.

We'll get there. We will. We'll have a good, robust conversation.

We will.

Hold you to that. We will. We're being recorded.

The second item is a resolution adopting the 2026 City of Steamboat Springs strategic plan.

Name.

Ellie. End.

All right. Good evening, council members. Kelly Romero-Haney, your deputy city manager. With me tonight is?

Kate Klitgaard, programs and grants manager.

And so Kate and I led the strategic plan committee, your internal staff strategic plan committee. Kate did a ton of work on this process, and so we were excited to have her co-present with me tonight. So staff are pleased to present the 2026 strategic plan to city council with a request for your formal adoption. You may recall the presentation that I gave to you all back in December when we went through the process, the outcome areas and objectives, and that was all ahead of your council goal setting session in December. Rather than repeat all of that tonight, we'll do a quick refresh and then move on to the initiatives. So our vision, mission, and values, they should drive who we are, where we're headed as an organization, but without a strategy to operationalize them. The city's commitment to proudly serving our community with excellence and distinction is nothing more than an inspirational quote on a poster in your council chambers. We aim to be a, quote, innovative and inclusive organization strategically providing outstanding municipal services. Realizing this vision requires strong values, service, integrity, respect, teamwork, well-being, compassion. These are the glue that hold our operations together. And a shared strategy is what drives our work forward. So I went to the Northwest COG meeting in Silverthorne for you all a month or so ago. And they had reported out on a study they commissioned of how municipalities in the region are navigating the significant uncertainty confronting local governments. No surprise, the top three issues, housing and affordability, infrastructure strain, and environmental risk, and long-term economic stability of mountain towns, like top three issues. However, this study also revealed a growing mismatch between what communities want, what they can afford, and what our systems are built to support. It also demonstrated that local governments in the region understand these issues. You all know this. And that we don't lack for great ideas or plans for tackling them. What we lack is the capacity to execute. All those great ideas, for example, the city has made a host of commitments in the steamboat springs Community plan and a variety of master plans. Those that you see here on the screen. But if all these commitments are just floating in the air, it can be tougher staff to know where to apply our limited time and resources and it's hard for you all to know where to apply your political capital. Given these execution capacity constraints, we need to focus on what we can actually deliver and not just on what is needed. So today, that's what we're delivering to you, a strategy to be tackled over the next two to three years that clarifies what we can do to operationalize the city's mission. And if there's one thing that we learned since our 2023 strategic plan is that we had way too many strategic objectives, 88 of them. Now we're calling them initiatives and we have 42 of them and 18 of those are your city council goals. So maybe by the next version, we'll have what, 21 of them, who knows? I just want to make a quick note on our day-to-day operations. A strategic plan is not a comprehensive operations plan that calls off the often thankless day-to-day work that your hardworking staff delivers to the community. But that doesn't make that work any less vital to realizing the city's vision. In fact, our daily operations are what floats this boat. Strategic plan is just what charts the path. I like that.

All right, it's my turn now. So the timeline you see up here, it should look a little bit familiar, although it's a little bit of a different structure. So this is going to be the bulk of what I'm going to talk about. So this is your only visual, and you'll have to just bear with the sound of my voice for a couple minutes. So taking us back to the fall of 2025, at that time we were in the gathering inputs phase. And before getting too far into the nitty gritty, I really want to emphasize throughout the process that that we were really intentional about the collaborative nature of how we wanted this to work. Besides mission, vision, values, community priorities, your goals, staff input, were also guideposts throughout the whole process. And in order to keep us on point with that, we really wanted to make sure that as we were learning things and coming up with new ideas and drafts that we were continuing to bring it back to collaborative spaces to get feedback and doing that again and again throughout. So I think you'll see that as we go through the flow of how this process unfolded. So going back to the beginning of this timeline, where we were then was in the process of gathering issues forms from our staff teams. So in their departments, department directors were getting forms from their teams that were identifying opportunities for improvement, issues, challenges, and they were collecting all of those. We ended up getting about 60 internal forms. Simultaneously, we were reaching out for input from six key community partners that were giving us the same information. And then all of that information was analyzed and synthesized. And our strategic initiative group, our strategic plan group, came up with themes that they drew out from all of that. There ended up being eight thematic areas that they pulled out of those forms. A lot of other inputs, inputs like the city's previous strategic plan, the community survey, previously adopted plans, a number of the plans that Kelly just referenced, departmental plans, master plans, all of those were then utilized for the development of our outcome areas and objectives. And we'll remind you on the next slide, sort of the triangle graphic that you've seen a number of times, the sort of tiered structure of how our plan is formed. The outcome area is on top. and then the objectives below as we're sort of cascading down into more detail. But the strategic plan committee at that time used that information to like really define the outcome areas and objectives. Through that process, we did come up with a new outcome area that connected an engaged community, which Kelly will talk about a little bit more when we get there, but that was exciting. And so that kind of took us through the fall and into the winter. And then as we moved into 2026, that's when we really moved into the planned development phase. At the beginning of that time is when you all met to start to define your council goals for 2026 and 2027. Hopefully you'll see that these are all reflected in the plan. We worked really intentionally to make sure they were all in there. If you can't find them, we can point you to them, but they are all there. At the same time, our strategic plan subcommittee also launched our outcome area work groups, which is what we called them. And those work groups consisted of a team leader from the subcommittee and a group of sort of subject area experts from departments. And they were tasked with sort of two things. The first was creating an opportunity statement, which was essentially a problem statement with a nicer name. Those are in the strategic plan under the opportunity heading. and also coming up with initiatives within their outcome area. So they went through a good deal of work over many weeks to workshop those and then bring them back to the larger group And then in the next weeks after that, those initiatives went through a lot of filters and a lot of analysis and a lot of conversation to ensure alignment with goals, go through impact versus effort analyses, and really truth check that we were on point with the direction we were trying to go. Concurrently to that process, teams were also working to develop metrics for all of those objectives. Those are also in the plan under the outcome areas. So those metrics are what we're proposing for the first iteration of the data dashboard, which we will also talk more about as we're tracking our progress towards meeting those goals. So after a final review of all of that, leadership team then gave the thumbs up and the plan went to communications to work their magic. And just a note on that, the final version that you have in your packet, a lot of thought was gone into the format of that. The packet as you see it is sort of one version of it, but the thought was that each outcome area is a sort of double-sided page that could be plucked out as a one-pager that could each sort of live on its own. So that's sort of a neat, different way to sort of think about that this time. And just wanted to give a huge personal thanks to everyone that was involved and had their hands in this, which in some ways feels like everyone at the city in some capacity and some individuals in a massive capacity. And that's really where we'll kind of wrap up the part of the timeline, like up till now, and then just briefly looking forward. So that kind of takes us to June. And then as we're looking, the couple things that are on here sort of coming down the road, near term, what comes next, we're looking at staff training and retraining for CIP. Those presentations are coming up at the end of July. Departments are, as you'd imagine, knee deep in budgeting and planning. for next year, keeping both the new initiatives in mind and also the projects and priorities that they're currently working on. Looking down the road a little bit further, we do plan to have a staff debrief with our subcommittee i was not involved in the last strategic plan process so i can't speak to that but it feels like some some big good leaps were made and so excited about that also always some lessons learned we're excited that version 3.0 will be even better and have fewer initiatives but Yeah, that's sort of where we are right now. I think that there will be a lot of other related projects coming up soon. I will have a lot of involvement in those. So you'll be sick of seeing me pretty soon. But stay tuned. And with that, let's pop to the next slide. So this graphic you've seen a number of times, I know, just a refresher of what we're looking at here. We've talked about a number of these with our outcome areas at the very top, the what in the broad terms, objectives, getting into a little bit more of the specific, those you've seen already, what we're really gonna dig into today, that initiative level is where we're getting a bit more granular. And then down at the bottom of the pyramid are metrics that we have tied to the objectives at this point. And then what we're not gonna talk about now because they're not included in this plan because they live elsewhere, the tactics and action plans, those really live within the departments and the divisions and the implementers. So those are the things that are being worked on right now. by the individuals that are really taking the ownership of those projects. So that's all happening elsewhere, but not in this document. And that's that. And then we're going to just skip through these next two slides because they are definitions that you have in your packet. If you'd like to reference them, you've seen them many times. We've talked through them. If you have any questions or anything you'd like to talk about, we certainly can. But otherwise, I think we could scoot through and I'll hand the baton back to Kelly to get into the fun stuff.

Thanks, Kate. All right. So in the next seven minutes, I'm going to go through the 42 initiatives. Asked. I saw the look on your face. And it's a piece. All right. No. This is what I want you to do. I want you to imagine a steamboat where all community members experience a high quality of life in a resilient local economy with access to affordable and attainable housing and diverse recreational opportunities.

Sign me up.

Yeah, right? We all want to be signed up for that.

Well positioned.

How do we get there? So obviously, housing is the big one here. And initiatives 1.1 through 1.6 reflect your council goals. So I'm not going to go into detail here. However, I will note that equitable access to diverse cultural and recreational opportunities or excuse me, amenities is also part of a thriving community. So we included the Bear River Park development as an initiative, as well as the Slate Creek Park acquisition and development strategy. All right. Imagine if you will. I don't know why it's not... For some reason, the format's a little odd on the screen. I'm not sure why. So my apologies for that. I'm going to read it though. All right. So imagine that the community is connected, inclusive, and informed. Community members feel a sense of belonging and pride and celebrate our preserved history and rich cultural diversity. As Kate noted, this is a new outcome area for our 2026 plan aimed at tackling the declining public trust and civic engagement while bolstering that sense of community that makes Steamboat so great to live in. So developing a communications engagement strategy, already a council goal. I'm excited we're actually kicking that project off tomorrow with our consultants, late communications, you all will be engaged in development of that plan. Other initiatives include One City, Many Voices, Community and Partner Celebrations. This is what we like to call the party initiative. Civic engagement is more than just giving a three-minute public comment at council or posting to social media. It's gathering. It's shared celebrations. We've got some great examples of this from Touch a Truck over at the fire station to the Bear Dance a couple weeks ago. So we want to do more of that. historic preservation, a plan implementation, hey, we have a plan, let's implement it. Best place to start is to start tackling our CDC updates. And then finally, a lot of communities like ours are developing and implementing tribal engagement framework frameworks to establish respectful, consistent and culturally informed government government relations. So there will be more to come on that. Again, I'm so sorry about the format here. So imagine, if you will, the natural environment is stewarded by taking bold climate action, restoring and protecting river ecosystems, and conserving the natural landscapes, forests, and wildlife that define our community. These are some of the things that make Steamboat great. Initiatives 3.4, 3.6, through 3.6 are already council goals. I just want to highlight the forestry program initiative that recognizes the need to care for our urban canopy as well as the forest on our city open space that surround our community. All right, imagine if you will. Excellent public services are delivered through a fiscally sustainable model and empowered and engaged workforce in a culture that prioritizes innovation, employee well-being, safety, and transparent customer service delivery. This is our high performing government outcome area. It's kind of the back of house outcome area for us.

And it includes objectives around continuous improvement, accountable and transparent service, fiscal sustainability, employee well-being, and engagement.

There's a lot to unpack here, but I'll just hit on a few. One, the data strategy management solution. So Kate mentioned that external data dashboard that we're working on. But that's really just the tip of the iceberg. The bulk of that work is really getting our hands around data governance and how we use that data, how we collect that data, analyze that data, and apply it to improve our operations. Also, initial initiative 4.3. This is a big one on your plate as well. fiscal sustainability. If we can't crack the code on revenue stability, diversification, and in figuring out how our community wants to pay for increased services, it'll be tough for us to maintain the high quality services that we've been delivering. And then finally, initiative 4.7. I think this is an important one because it was highlighted by our fire department, police department, and public works. And that's workforce sustainability strategy. Recruitment, retention, as well as succession planning are key for all of our departments. However, these emergency and critical services are particularly vulnerable given the high cost of living here as well as national trends. All right, safe community. The safety and well-being of all community members is prioritized by mitigating natural hazards, strengthening emergency preparedness and response systems, and fostering a culture of trust and collaboration in public safety. Public safety is a big reason why local government exists. We've got a few key highlights that I'll just, excuse me, initiatives I'll highlight here. 5.1, 5.6, they both tackle the wildfire risk that we're facing by implementing a wildfire mitigation program on our own property, our open space property, while advancing a fire-resistant community by implementing the Wildfire Resiliency Code. And then finally, initiative 5.8. So that's something we like to talk about. But technology integration into special events and emergency response are both our PD and fire department feel like this is really important for us to focus on. So we can enhance security for these gatherings or emergencies. All right, I'm almost done, I promise. Reliable and resilient infrastructure. The city's infrastructure systems are planned, designed, and maintained to be safe, sustainable, and resilient, and to effectively support current and future community needs. So I referenced that Northwest COG study. And again, aging and inadequate infrastructure are posing major risks to all of our communities. So that's why one of our key initiatives is creating a new asset management system so that we can collect and apply data to protect our assets. an efficient and systematic way of deferred maintenance is expensive. So we want to prevent that. And also a big one we'll be talking about more is the public works facility design and construction. There, you know, obviously more demand on our public works services, but we have outgrown our facility. All right, I'm gonna wrap this up. That was a lot. We tried to save time for questions and discussion, but I just wanna close by saying, I think the strategic plan would really help us as staff, as an organization work together, especially across departments. I think it'll also help us tell our story You've already seen us start to bake that into the city manager report in the city newsletter. And then finally, I think it gives us a playbook on how staff and council partner together so that we can deliver outstanding municipal services. So I'll end there. I'll see if Tom wants to add anything that we missed or answer all of your hard questions.

Well, thank you, Kelly and Kate. This is a tremendous amount of work. Tremendous amount of work. So thank you for all the energy, effort, and results here. This is great. I think we want to just very quickly segue to public comment and see if there's any public comment, and then we'll jump right back in, okay? So if there's anybody in the room or anyone online, please raise your hand who would like to make a public comment on anything not on the agenda tonight. Please come on down, state your name and address, and you have three minutes. Come on down.

Stay here.

So City 101 participant, I did talk to several of the council members. I'm sorry, my name's Matthew Rochon. I live at 1500 Fish Creek Falls Road. It's part of why I'm here to comment. So there used to be a bus line. My neighbor's, Bart Kowalski, used to be on City Council. The bus used to run up there since he has left council many, many years ago. That bus no longer runs. There is no access to public transportation for folks that live, and there's been a lot of infill in that area in the past 10 years or so, right? So there's been a lot of development. So people on Highland Circle, people on Valverdean Circle, and people on Hardwick Circle, they don't have access to public transit. It's especially concerning with the resort going to charge $15 a day for parking for a purpose-built lot that then keeps traffic out. So what are we all going to do? We're all going to drive down, and we're going to park at the bank, and we're going to take public transit from there. Right. So I do think they are looking at and so having been in city one, I want to understand that part of the reason they don't want to do it is because they don't want to break their 10 minute response time. And we're a little bit further up the road. I think that's a ridiculous reason. So if it's 11 minutes and we get service, I'm not that concerned about it. But the other thing is, I think a bus actually because it's still not it's still not more convenient to ride a yellow line to a bus stop. and then go into the resort. That doesn't actually change me just driving down to the bank. But putting the bus back there actually does, right? And I think if you look at the population density there compared to what it was when they stopped running the bus, it's different now. And so I would just like the council to consider, you know, every time I buy a snowblower, I pay city taxes on that snowblower to help fund the city. And so I would really like to take the benefit. And I would love to ride... public transit versus having to drive somewhere to take advantage of the other resort. So that's my comment.

Thank you. We appreciate your comments. Come on down, Kelly.

Grab it right.

Afternoon, Kelly Phillips, 62 East Logan. I'm here today because of the recent constraints analysis has finally proven what many citizens have said from the beginning. We were told that a Brown Ranch agreement estimated a new water treatment plant at 40 to 58 million and triggered at 800 EQRs. We know now that's completely unrealistic. The reality we face today is a water treatment plant will take five to seven years to build, costs in excess of $100 million, and we don't even own the site yet for it. This is a massive gap between previous estimates and current projections. Worse, it's only the addresses of water infrastructure, not accounting for all the other city services. If leadership had listened to the community, started with a smaller, more manageable phase, like 400 units, residents could already be living in homes there today. Instead, the focus remained on a massive 2,246-unit plan that faced significant infrastructure hurdles. Fortunately, the community is finally being heard in some areas. I want to specifically highlight the recent update to the Intergovernmental Agreement implementing term limits for YVHA board members, which I thought was a great move. Under the new IGA structure, it's a necessary step. The YVHA board needs new blood at the top. They need leadership that understands its limitations and stays in its lane. It is time to respectfully say thank you for your service, but individuals embedded in the financial flaws of the initial 2,246 units cannot continue to steer our housing future unchallenged. Council Pro Tem Gary, the responsibility to listen to the community fell heavily on you as the council president. Community raised valid concerns about infrastructure scaling and financial reality. But those warnings were set aside. This represents a failure to align project goals with actual constraints of our city resources. For the community to move forward and rebuild trust, we need leaders who recognize past operational failures, and it is time for a new perspective at the top. Along with the changes to the YVHA board and leadership, I ask you that you step down from the Slate Creek Steering Committee and allow fresh leadership to guide the process into a realistic and transparent phase. Thanks, guys.

Thank you. Is there anybody online who would like to make a public comment? Please raise your hand. If not, we'll close public comment. And I wanna just address the comments before you run out there regarding bus service. I'm gonna be talking a little bit about some discussions we've been having around transit and around mitigation strategies, et cetera, for the winter parking program that SSRC is putting in place. And we had a meeting today. We're still working on that, but I will talk a little bit about it. And we are looking at some potential options that might address some of those areas that you're talking about. I can't really get more specific than that right now, but that is something that we're definitely concerned about and looking at seriously. So in the next couple weeks, we should have a lot more to discuss about that potentially. so just wanted to let you know about that okay any comment you would like to make regarding mr phillips comment before we move on um You don't have to.

No. No, I mean, no, I don't have any additional comment. If anybody would like to, I would certainly offer up that if there's anybody in the public that has any sort of questions or anybody, you know, in the community that has questions, I am absolutely open to having one-on-one conversations with them in terms of kind of the comments that, you know, were made. So...

I think one comment that I would just make is that part of the reasons that we, well, a main reason why we did this analysis in the first place was to understand what are the realistic things we can do out there now, given the fact that a number of years have gone by and conditions have changed. You know, things have been built. Interest rates have changed. A lot of things have changed. So I think what we're doing now is taking a realistic look at what can be accomplished, given the constraints and given the situation today, which was not at all the same situation five or six years ago.

No, and I would like to add that council has full confidence in our fellow Councillor Gary on the Slate Creek. We discussed it and all of us said, yes, Councillor Gary should be on that committee. So you have our full support and confidence. I appreciate that.

Councillor Dixon, well said. Okay, Tom, did you have anything you wanted to add to what Kelly...

mentioned or yeah we just had three points first point is just a huge thank you to both Kelly and Kate they came on board without really much strategic planning experience and I said here you go here's a new project for you and they fully embraced it and did a really really excellent job so kudos to them I have, as you know, been a strong advocate of strategic planning from the moment I arrived. I just think it's imperative as an organization, particularly a resource-constrained organization, that we are very clear on our priorities. It's imperative that we be very intentional with how we spend our resources, and this is the tool, the primary tool in which organizations can do that. And so... I just think it's a great effort. And I also want to say that it's really important that we do this internally. You know, when I first arrived, we had a lot of pushback about we should have a consultant do this, we should farm it out. But to me, the strategic planning process is just as important or even if more important than the actual plan itself, because it really forces us to look internally and it forces us to be a learning organization, which is really important to me. So I think it's a great effort. I gave kudos to Kelly and Gabe, but it's a huge team effort. A lot of people were involved in that, in this effort. So I just wanna say thanks to everybody that participated. Yeah, for sure. And it's never ending either.

Okay.

Questions? I have some comments. So first of all, I love the outcome statements. They were right on. I really feel like they set the vision of where we want to go, and it allows us to, as we have new initiatives, it allows us to test those new initiatives against those visions. And if that new initiative is not mapped in that vision, then we're probably off track. um so it it sounded it kind of sets the course and i and in addition as we're talking to the community i feel like that you know provides that other tool to basically you know help the community understand what their taxes are are paying for these are the services that you know that you're you're paying for as you're moving forward and you know, challenge, you know, folks who say, hey, I want to reduce our taxes. Well, if you want to reduce taxes, what are the which are these services? Do you want to reduce? And so that's how I, you know, plan to look at this, you know, moving forward. So thank you very much for doing this.

Okay.

Excellent work. This is a great, great strategic plan. And these are really hard to put together, and I can tell a lot of time and thought and energy went into it, so kudos to all of you. My one comment, we don't need to discuss it. It's more a word of caution. When we talk about... Sorry, of course I like close the document. Okay, for safe community, 5.8, technology integration. I don't know what that means and you don't have to explain it, like that's totally fine. Just a word of caution if at any point, any of these areas start looking at AI. Special events emergency responses I would highly recommend you all look at the Colorado Sun article. I think it was today that communities across the country in Colorado are grappling with AI uses and our is going through it right now. And so I would highly recommend you look at that article and just a word of caution as we look at technology to help us become more efficient.

Great feedback, thanks.

Other comments? I just have to say, yeah, going through this, reading it over the weekend, and just recognizing, Tom, that you brought this strategic plan to fruition, and not knowing that this was a project for you guys to just get jumped into the fire, refined by the fire, how shall we say. So I just, I really like how we're putting this together. I think for me, More importantly, as my tenure will end and new council will come sit here, is that we have an attention of our staff and the council to some of these details to running the government. And it's just like sometimes you just can't just willy-nilly go and everyone does their responsibility, but we have a strategic plan, just like what it says. And so I really have been watching you bring this on, and then having you guys bring this today, it's really allowing me to sit there and say, okay, we're really building the city of Steamboat Springs to a higher level of expectation for the community, but also that someone's eye is on the ball. And any one of us can change our role,

like we won't be here but we have a strategic plan for the for our city of steamboat springs and that to me gives me a lot of confidence going now so thank you thank you tom yeah i'd just like to say thank you and um you know the report is uh easy enough for even me to understand it so i feel like that's representative of the community as well and i appreciate that it's in in terms that you know, the general public and people like me can understand. And not having a consultant do it, this speaks to it because you have, you know, the intimacy with being inside the government and understanding all the nuances that no outside consultant could ever have. So appreciate the hard work.

great the only the only thing i wanted to mention it really doesn't relate to this as specific as i was looking at the metrics and whatnot and when we talk about a thriving community and we talk about a metric maybe around sales tax collections and i think about that and i say you know our sales tax collections with all the development at the mountain at the base and everything else that will dramatically impact sales tax collections My only concern is that we also understand the impact on our wages and that we're not creating more and more lower wage jobs because I don't think that is really part of a thriving community if we do that. So it really doesn't get answered here and I don't expect it to, but I just think we need to think about that and how we impact wage growth and get some of these lower paying jobs up the scale a bit. but you know i love what you've done here it's great all right if there's no other comments then i would ask if somebody would like to uh make a motion to approve this resolution adopting the 2026 city of steamboat springs strategic plan i move to approve resolution three Okay.

I'll second.

We have a motion by Councilor Agosta, second by Councilor Gary. All those in favor, say aye.

Aye.

Opposed? Resolution passes 6-0. Thank you. Before we move on to our work session, I just wanted to also provide a little update on the paid parking. We had a paid parking meeting today. It seems like our meetings run the same day, which is kind of nice. And we met today with SSRC and moved forward on some of these mitigation strategies for the winter parking program. And I want to say that we're making progress on a number of fronts. including one in which is SSRC has committed to making a meaningful funding contribution to our transit service. which could help us in adding some some transit routes or the yellow zone or whatever and um so we're going to be hammering out the details of that in the next couple weeks we have another meeting next week to really work on that um and there's some other things in there too but i'll save that until we get the the whole package together so that council can look at and we can get your input as to where you feel. The other piece is that the city and SSRC also committed to starting up a strategic partnership process to focus on the longer term, to focus on the direction of the city and SSRC, to better ensure alignment where possible, and to create more win-win solutions as we move forward. And so we have total agreement from SSRC. And so we're gonna start that process up as well and bring that to council. I think both of these things we can bring to you at the retreat next month and really have a long discussion about both of those things. So that's where we are. All right.

Are we going to have council updates? If not, I have an update on the RTA.

If you want to, go ahead. I mean, we're not really doing council reports tonight, but if you have something important that you'd like to share, feel free.

Yeah, I think it would just be useful, since we haven't chatted about that in a while, is basically we have a number of RFPs out that we're hoping to have closure on by the end of the June. So we have an RFP for Executive Director Search Firm, We have an RFP out for marketing assistance for the RTA because we feel like we need to create and get a brand out there. Because actually one of the buses that's doing the regional transportation between Craig and Steamboat right now is actually out, is up for refurbing. And it's going to, you know, and we have the opportunity to actually you know, paint it and make it look like, you know, our RTA service versus SSD service. And hopefully, you know, some of us like the idea of ride the Yeti and get, you know, see how that falls. And then we also have an RFP for polling. We want to basically, you know, poll the community around different service priorities and different options for how we may actually fund those services. And so that polling we're actually targeting to actually have done in July timeframe. So basically approve a poller by end of the month and then have that work done in July. So that's, those are three, you know, really big things that we're, you know, working on right now and to help us get moving. Also, the RTA chair, Sonia Macy's and the finance director of Randy Looper, I myself attended transit, VIA's transit tech. So VIA is a provider of on-demand transit solutions. You may not know VIA, but actually VIA is actually who does and runs the yellow line for Steamboat. And so it was, you know, so it was their, they brought in a lot of their municipalities that are actually using their services. It's pretty broad and wide, and they have a lot of software tools associated with that. And one of the ones that kind of stuck up is basically they are doing a lot of data analysis on their routes. And so when we were talking about potentially expanding a service network, to other areas of Steamboat within their current service, they have the tools to sort of map that out and be able to show us what that looks like. And so, you know, half it, we have to be careful, half it was a sales presentation, but the other half is just understanding what their tools are. and where opportunities lie for us, especially since we are using that service today. And so when Matt came up here and talked about, hey, we'd love to expand it, they could help us understand pretty quickly, I'd say pretty quickly, within a week, I think, based on their tools, of what that would look like and some of the costs and impacts. So that's just a quick update. made some good progress and we're moving forward.

Thank you.

So any questions for me about the RTA?

Did you say you're doing an RFP to hire staff?

Executive director? Help us find an executive director. So executive director search firm?

Okay, so it's not to hire, it's for a search firm. That makes more sense. I thought you were...

And the polling is an RFP for a polling.

Okay, it's all for firms. Okay, thanks. I didn't catch that part.

Great. Well, thanks for the update. Is there any other updates that we need tonight? Okay. With that, then we'll move on to our work session. And first up tonight on the work session is we have the Housing Needs Assessment. Brad? Brad?

President Montini, do you need to adjourn the regular meeting?

Oh, I'm sorry. Yes. Can we have a motion to adjourn the regular meeting and reconvene in our work session? Thank you. Okay. So we have a motion from Councilor Gary. Second from Councilor Dixon. All those in favor?

Aye.

Opposed? Thank you, Tom.

Brad. And now you're ready. Brad Calvert. I'm in the planning department here with the city. I am hopefully doing light work tonight. I am simply setting up our talented consultant team from Economic and Planning Systems to describe the housing needs assessment, which is in your packet. They also have a lot of slides to cover all manner of data. I'll do a little bit of just sort of orientation to the group quickly before turning it over to Brian and his colleague, Carlin. I feel like every other time I'm standing in front of this body, I'm describing to you I'm here because there's a new state requirement that we have to be in compliance with. So that is happening again, bless you, tonight. This is related to the housing needs assessment, which you can see even on the slide, is a requirement of Senate Bill 24-174. Brian and Carlin will describe a little bit about those requirements. I won't get into the details there. The thing that I wanted to just mention is the state requirements do not require council to adopt requirements the housing needs assessment that you're gonna hear about this evening, but there is a base expectation that it informs the housing action plan that will be kind of the next product that we work on. I sort of note this in the memo, really think of this as a springboard into that conversation, as much as it is sort of a review of the housing needs assessment, that plan was developed or what you're seeing tonight, that assessment was built based on Pretty prescriptive methods and expectations from the state. So you're seeing tonight relatively rote and by-the-book analysis as required by the state, obviously with a little bit of local flavor as well. Also, you'll see in the presentation there are recommendations related to housing strategy and tactics. Please know those are even above 30,000 feet. They're really just the starting point for a deeper dive that will happen over the next few months during that housing action plan conversation. Council and the community will dig into those a little bit more. And so finally, again, think of this as equal parts delivery of information via the housing needs assessment and discussion or questions you all have may find their way more likely into a future conversation related to the housing action plan. So I appreciate you all hanging in there. And I assume you all are going to sort of tag team it up here. That tends to be, and Brian, hopefully you're on the Zoom. It looks like you are. I will obviously be here and be a resource to help out with the conversation.

We're back. We were in front of you a few weeks ago talking about linkage fees. So we appreciate the opportunity to come back and work with you some more. So, yeah, I'm going to lay out. We're going to try to be... We have a lot of material. We're going to try to move through it efficiently. And if there's anything you would like us to go into in more detail, we're happy to. So just some... Let's get into the, I'm gonna speak about some sort of requirements and caveats of this a little bit first. Brad covered it, I'm gonna cover it again. to be for redundancy here. So SB 24174 requires most communities in Colorado to do housing needs assessments, unless you're really small or not growing, you're exempt. So I'm going to talk about the requirements. We're going to go into the data. You know, the next steps, the council has to accept this. It's not an adopted plan, but the the city has to accept it, and then we submit it to DOLA with any comments. So it's really, this is really more informative. So the law, it's really, it's a planning statute. It's really looking for communities to be considering smart growth principles kind of thing, making smart land use decisions and considering housing and housing affordability in their land use planning. So there's a lot of emphasis on jobs, housing balance, which shows up in the methodology of how we're allocating and estimating housing needs. AS BRAD SAID, WE'RE DOING IT BY THE BOOK HERE. BY THE BOOK HERE. AND THERE ARE GUIDELINES AND THERE ARE GUIDELINES PUBLISHED BY THE DEPARTMENT OF PUBLISHED BY THE DEPARTMENT OF LOCAL AFFAIRS THAT DEFINE HOW TO DO LOCAL AFFAIRS THAT DEFINE HOW TO DO THESE THINGS. THESE THINGS. AND THEY ALSO DEFINE SOME OF THE AND THEY ALSO DEFINE SOME OF THE ELEMENTS OF COMPREHENSIVE PLANS ELEMENTS OF COMPREHENSIVE PLANS THAT NEED TO BE ADDRESSED. THAT NEED TO BE ADDRESSED. SO THERE'S A LOT OF COMPLIANCE I already said that. They specify several required outputs in the housing needs assessment which we have in the full report listed here. But as Brad said, it's really to tee this up for the action plan that's gonna be a pretty in-depth discussion with stakeholders and with you all on really setting the city's course on what to do. So we've got a lot of information on what the problem is, and I'm sure you've heard a lot about what the problem is and want to know what to do. So we'll get there. That's in our contract to be working on that in 2026. So yeah, this is the process. We do the work, we present it to you, and then we get any comments back and submit it to DOA within 60 days. It does serve some important purposes under the law. So Proposition 123 is a separate bill that creates some funding sources for affordable housing development and some lending, some financing sources. So in order to qualify for those sources, you have to have a compliant housing needs assessment. So this positions us for that. Now, those funding sources are limited to 60% AMI housing for rental and 100% AMI for ownership. And as you are well aware, and as we'll show here, the needs in mountain communities, including yours, span the full spectrum, from zero to over 200% of AMI. So there's a process within Prop 123 to do what's called a rural resort petition, say that five times fast, where you can petition them to allow you to set your income limits higher based on local conditions. And the needs assessment is part of the process in doing that. So this is important for that purpose as well. And it's going to inform the policy strategies and actions that we'll be working on later in the year. This is not, as Brad said, a legally binding commitment to build the amount of housing defined in this housing need assessment or to build it in locations shown in this housing needs assessment. This does not come with housing development money. It is not a market study. So for specific projects, those projects are going to do their own market studies to figure out what works on those sites in addition to more detailed site planning to you know, to understand the context and the adjacencies and all that. So with all of those caveats, I'm going to do the definitions and then hand it over to Carlin, who I forgot to introduce, which I will. So affordable, the working definition, pretty standard in housing practice is that affordable housing is housing that costs no more than 30% of your income. So So 30% of your income towards rent, and the for sale definition is principal, interest, taxes, and insurance. And that's the definition we'll be using here. A household that's cost burdened is paying more than 30% of their income towards housing. Extremely cost burdened, which we'll hear about, pays more than half of their income towards housing. A household is one or more people living in one occupied housing unit. So if I live alone in a home, I'm a one-person household. If I live with three roommates, we are a household. So it's just a group of people related or unrelated in one housing unit. An occupied housing unit is numerically equivalent to a household. Then getting into the weeds a little bit, we're gonna talk about AMI and median household income. Those are related but different terms. Median household income is a demographic statistic produced by the American Community Survey. Area median income is a programmatic income definition used for administering housing and social assistance programs. It so happens that the median household income in Route County is pretty close to the two-person definition for AMI. And so a lot of our analysis is sort of pegged to the median household income in the county. So if that's of interest to you, there you go. A couple of big trends that we talked about, I think, in the YVHA work, and these are trends that we're seeing all over Colorado. Mountain towns are getting older. The over 65 population is the fastest growing age group. They are also getting more affluent. And households without children are the fastest growing type of households. So that points to a couple of things on different sides of the spectrum. There's definitely more need for senior housing as people age. That's older adult housing as people are aging in place and need different options. And the other piece of that is that the more affluent retiree type population that's moving in is creating a lot of affordable housing demand through job creation and continued pressure on the housing supply. And that is certainly things that are certainly present here in Steamboat. So we'll start getting into the data. Introduce my colleague Carlin Russell Carlson as an associate with us and take it away.

Thank you, Ryan. So we're going to start to get into some of the meat of the HNA now. There's going to be a lot of data in the next few slides, so we'll try and get through it in as efficient a manner as possible. So you want to start, this whole HNA is really based in jobs, especially the keep up kind of forward-looking portion of this assessment. So we want to start by calling out some of the largest industries here in Steamboat. This data table here is for Route County overall. Steamboat has 81% of all jobs in Route County. and a higher concentration specifically of jobs that have lower annual wages. So you can see here, accommodation, food services, retail, construction, things like that. We're looking at a range of about 50% to 80% AMI. These are some of the largest sectors. So this is what someone who's working here is making that, you know, that's the kind of housing that they're going to be looking for. We've also, you know, SEMA plays a huge role as the economic hub for Northwestern Colorado. So you've got more professional, higher wage jobs as well. It's not just purely this kind of tourism sector. So you've got different ends of the spectrum that are going to need to be balanced when talking about housing needs. So you want to start with looking at the affordability gap. This is for sale. And a lot of these, again, are similar to the YBHA numbers that have been previously talked about last year. Looking backwards at 2025, the median home price was $1.3 million. That is a lot of money. The typical two-person household earning that median household income of $106,000 per year can afford a $390,000 home. So you're looking at a gap of about $900,000. That is... absolutely enormous and that's a big reason that's driving a lot of the housing needs that we're seeing. Similarly, if you think about this in terms of the entire market, we're seeing 70% of sales are over 200% AMI. So a household making twice the median income, these homes are affordable even beyond that level. That leaves very little inventory elsewhere on the housing spectrum. That kind of gets into the Prop 123 position that we were talking about earlier as well, where, you know, needs don't just stop at 100% AMI. We're really seeing it all the way up across the entire spectrum. On the rental side, it's a little bit more affordable. So you can see here, the blue is what's affordable for a typical household at the one or two person household income. Yellow is what that gap is. And actually, if you're a two person household, a one bedroom could be affordable to you if you're making 100% of AMI. This really speaks to some of the efforts that have already gone on in Steamboat to address the housing crisis. However, you have to keep your foot on the gas in order to continue to produce that supply of housing. So you can see here there are 1,200 units of what the state defines as regulated housing, which includes units provided by employers for employees, as well as kind of the typical LIHTC housing voucher, et cetera. So you've got about a third, a third, a third of YBHA units, employee units, and workforce units. That makes up about 11% of the overall stock of housing units. However, if you take out all of the unoccupied units, it comes to about 20% of all households in Steamboat are living in these regulated units. And you can see here,

Just wanted to note that we were pretty impressed by the stat. Like you guys have made a lot of progress in the last 10, 15 years.

I was going to say, that's actually exactly as soon as, if you look at the table here, you can see a lot of that growth has been since the year 2000. So you've seen about 600 units come online over the past 20 years, plus those 380 other workforce units. There's not exact dates because there's a wide variety of those. You can guess about most of those have been since 2000 as well. And so about 1,000 units of regulated housing that have been added in the past 20 years, which going back to here, it goes pretty far to making sure that rent hasn't quite gotten away as dramatically as ownership has. So there's a section in the HNA which is required by the DOLA guidelines to go through housing problems. And so this is a wide variety of different things that citizens might be struggling with in terms of finding housing. The first is renters. We all know renters are more vulnerable to displacement, that you can get evicted, your landlord can change your property over into a vacation rental, something like that. And so a larger population of renters means that more folks are vulnerable and might be having housing problems. One third of households in Steamboat are renters, which is a little bit higher than Rock County overall. And the fully 60% of renter households are low income, which is officially designated as making less than 80% AMI. And if you think back to what we had seen in the wages, you know, you can kind of imagine the types of jobs that those folks have, maybe in the food accommodation services, retail, things like that. 40% of renters have moved unwillingly in the past five years. That was a finding from the YBHA study. So that's another big indicator of vulnerability and displacement risk. And again, some of the factors that we talked about that are leading to that is eviction, changing over to vacation rentals, rent increases, and other things of that nature. So cost burden, as we defined, that's spending over 30% of your income on housing costs. So 41% of all households in Steamboat are cost burdened, of which about half and half cost burdened. So they're in the 30% to 50% of income on housing. 20% are severely cost burdened. So you're spending over half of your income on housing. Among renter households, that number is much higher. 60% of renter households are cost burdened, and half of those, so 32%, are extremely cost burdened. spending over half their income on housing. Thinking back to the other vulnerability factors that we just talked about with renters, you can see again, there's a big need here. We also took a look at this through the impact of the economy and thinking about the effect that housing issues might have for employers. So in the YVHA study, a survey was conducted and every employer that was talked to reported difficulty in hiring because of housing costs and supply, which is a really big impact on the local economy and the ability to grow your business. Two-thirds of respondents in a survey of young professionals feared that housing costs would cause them to become displaced. And there were 105 jobs in a survey of nonprofits that were unfilled due to housing costs. Obviously, nonprofits, that's a small slice. So if you expand that to include all other types of businesses, that's a lot of unfilled jobs because of housing issues. Lastly, some other displacement risk factors. Renters, we just discussed. The Hispanic and Latino population is also specifically at risk for displacement. You tend to have a larger household size and smaller units. There might be some overcrowding factors. More likely to be cost burden, as is found in the YVHA report. People are having longer commutes and possible limited English proficiency could lead to issues in the landlord disputes, understanding resources and things like that. Mobile home parks have a lot of vulnerability as well because you own the trailer, you don't own the land underneath, so that land can be sold. You can have an increase in lot rent, which both can displace people. There are some YVHA-owned parks that really helps mitigate the risk. And kind of later when we talk about strategies and the housing action plan, that can be something else to look at. The second home market is a huge factor, driving displacement risk. Obviously, if there's external money, external sources of income coming in, that's going to put a lot of pressure on the housing market as external buyers are competing for the exact same supply as what locals are competing for. And then lastly, we're going to talk about commuting more in just a second, but commuting, the increased number of commuters and longer commute distances points to people that already are being displaced, where people are getting pushed out to Moffett County, further out in Route County, and having them to commute into Steamboat for work. All right, so now it's the headline news, the housing needs and demand.

So this is how we did it. It's a pretty busy slide, but there's two, the headlines are there's two components of it. There's what we call catch-up. So there's housing issues and housing needs addressed with the current conditions, the current housing stock, the current population. And within that, there's four components that we looked at. We looked at overcrowding, looked at cost burden renters, cost burden owners, and then in commuters. So that's the backlog of issues of housing needs. And the other half of that is what we call keep up. And that is the 10 year projected demand based on job growth. And there's a series of steps you go through to, you know, project out jobs. You can convert jobs to wages and household income and get some estimates by income level. From that one, you add them both up and get a number. There are a ton of numbers in this stuff. It's complicated. There's a lot of estimates. It's kind of hard to do. And I just want to give a little contents on how to think about these numbers. It's definitely not an exact science. We view this kind of analysis as giving you sort of an order of magnitude assessment of where are the biggest housing gaps. And that can help communities inform how they wanna place, where they wanna put their resources or the types of policies they wanna develop to address those needs. So we really encourage people not to focus on the total numbers, but to look at the patterns, where are the biggest chunks of need? And it's tricky here because the housing needs in Steamboat, I mean, we really find that they're all over the spectrum. You know, I mean, these are the income categories that I think we found that kind of the biggest chunks of need. There's always need below 50 and below 30% AMI. So I don't want to sound like we're dismissing that. It's hugely critical. In terms of like sort of the core workforce need, we think it's really the 50 to 140 is kind of the core workforce need here. And that's a mix probably weighted a little heavier to rental and then towards for sale as you get in the upper incomes. And, you know, if... If you're trying to think about how many units a year to build, I might offer that the keep up numbers are maybe a little better gauge of how much should we try to build in a year. But again, it's not a market study. So these are the totals. So we've got catch up of about 1,500 units, keep up of 767, what does that add up to, Carlin?

2,340 is the total.

Yep, is the total need. You could spread that over 10 years and think about it as about, what, 2,100, 230 units a year or so. And this is the income distribution of where it is, right? The biggest one is 50 to 80% AMI, right? That's rights really solidly in your sort of core workforce. And there are also large needs above 140. Above 140 is a little tricky to look at because the income distribution data stops there. And so we don't have as granular of analysis above those income ranges. So I would take that one with a little bit of grain of salt. But definitely a strong cross-section of need across a lot of job types and income ranges. Let's see. More caveats, Brian, right? Yeah, so we may be underestimating need below 50% AMI. A lot of vulnerable people are not well represented in the Census Bureau data. We just know that. And I already mentioned this about the upper income issues. Karlyn, do you want to go into details on how we did it?

I would absolutely love to. All right. So again, you've got the two components here that you saw in the graphic at the beginning. So you've got catch-up need and keep-up need. About two-thirds of the calculated need is in catch-up. However, as Brian said, keep-up is probably what's going to provide a better guideline for what you want to think about in the future. So you can see here, catch-up is composed of kind of four elements. Overcrowded units, so that is defined as more than one person per room, not bedroom, room, which that data is extremely, extremely hard to measure. It says 54. We know that there are more, but the census data can only be so granular at this level. I'll make the rest of this quick.

Yeah, you're fine.

The cost burden owners and cost burden renters make up the next two categories. As we talked about earlier, 40% of the households are cost burdens. This is a huge number. What we've done here, you can see in that middle column, is the capture rates. That's an assumption about how do you change the total number of cost burden households into who might actually be demanding a new unit. Based on the YVHA report, we found about 66% of people might be interested in moving if a unit were available and affordable to them. We've done half of that for owners because if you own your home, you're a lot more invested. It's a lot more difficult to move. Transaction costs, we assume about half. So applying those capture rates, you get from the larger number to about 840 and 930 units demanded from cost burden people. The next section is for commuters. So what we've done to calculate the need of folks that are commuting into Steamboat, we looked at everyone that's commuting more than 45 minutes. So if you think about where a 45-minute commute shed is, that does not include, so people from Oak Creek, Yampa, that's less than 45 minutes. Hayden. Hayden. We're looking at people who are basically Moffett County, really outlying parts of Routt Do you want to talk about the county plan?

That area kind of aligns well with the growth centers and the county's master plan. So it sort of implies here that there's room for other areas of the county, other growth centers, to accommodate some of this need. And these capture rates, we're assuming that fewer of the owner households would want to move because you've made a pretty substantial investment in your home already and moving is a pain and it's expensive. And all of that has to get allocated to Steamboat. We'll try to wrap it because I think we're getting on time here. Yeah, maybe just cruise through this one.

Yeah, so I just mentioned at the beginning, Steamboat has 81% of the jobs in Route County. So what you do is you take that number in the first column that was calculated on the last slide, you apply 81%. For commuters, you apply 100% because this is just people that want to live where they work, which is here. And you get to a total estimated demand of 1,573 units, the vast majority of which is due to cost burden to owners and renters.

I think we can, this is the process for the keep up. I've kind of described it already. It's a job projection. We use the state demographer's growth rate of 0.8% per year, convert that through all the steps to get to housing units, and we end up with 766 units of keep up demand. These are the, we can come back to these if we need to. These are required outputs in the housing needs assessment to allocate it by owner and renter and by income level. And there's a couple different ways to slice that that you need to show in the HNA. This is the same. It's just a recap of what we showed earlier. Yeah, so that's that. We can, you know, really the next steps, you know, The HNA requires us to include some initial strategies and recommendations. These are just there as sort of a starter for the housing action plan. We can talk about these if you'd like. I think we may just leave them on the screen and if there's anything in the slides or in the report that strikes you as something we should eliminate, then we can certainly consider that for moving forward. But that is kind of the nuts and bolts of it. We did do a little side-by-side comparison of these numbers compared to the YVHA demand study. These are lower because we're looking at, there's a number of complicated factors why. Lower job growth rate is used in this analysis. We're looking at the commute shed differently to apply this to Steamboat rather than the entire county, which was the focus of the YVHA work. And just, I know we've mentioned that work a bit. I might sound a bit self-serving because we did work on that project with them, but there is some very rich survey data that was done as part of that that we think is pretty valuable and really sheds a lot of light on the housing issues among non-English speakers and the renter population. That's a good reference to go back to. I think that's what we have. Happy to take questions and discussions. Sorry we went a little bit over time.

No, that's okay. Thank you. Very informative. What questions do we have?

I have one. Will these studies be tied to funding either through the state or federal in the future? Do we know that or...

The way I have approached this every time I'm in front of you all to talk about a state requirement is the picture that's today in terms of how it is impacting our eligibility, our priority for funding is the picture today. It may not be the picture in the future. I believe this state is beginning to build some scaffolding to make compliance with state requirements a pretty critical role in determining eligibility and priority. But as Brian mentioned, it's a base eligibility for Prop 123 funding that you have a compliant eligibility housing needs assessment. And so for the city of Steamboat Springs, that is like one of a couple of things that we need to do. We have already met our current three-year commitment. So that sets us up to be eligible for the next three-year cycle. We have completed and the state has signed off on our expedited review. process so when we get the hna in place really the only step remaining for us is to submit that next three-year commitment for years 2027 through 2029 so again that's a base eligibility to be able to receive those funds is there any feeling that having these numbers could mandate us into something in the future um i mean i know that we're speculative it's a speculative question but

I don't think so. This is a planning statute. It's just, they want people to be thoughtful about housing and how it relates to their land use planning.

That's funny, I'll go the other way. I'll go the provocative. Okay. The only thing that comes to mind to me, Councilor Barnes, as I think about this is, and I'll go back a little bit. I've been a practicing planner in Colorado since 2010. Arriving in the state, I was a little surprised how what I would call light the growth management legislation, the way in which the state was directing or incenting planning and housing conversations was, but the state, to borrow this term, is playing a very rapid game of catch-up to create a whole suite of new legislation that, in my estimation, tends to track the California's, Oregon's, and Washington states of the world, and if you follow that to its logical end 10 years from now, we could be in a different paradigm. To Brian's point, it would probably require additional legislation, but we are tracking in that direction, and it will really kind of be up to the legislature to decide, do we go a step further and a step further and a step further, and what might those requirements look like? So there's a lot of this that feels like California and their regional housing needs work that you have to do that actually does have real commitments that have to be made by local governments, lately has created opportunities for developers. If a community is not making their commitment, they can essentially walk in the door with a proposal that frankly has to be approved if it helps that community meet their local commitment. I don't know all the details, but I mean, there is a pathway towards something like that. We are in the very early stages of that. Yeah.

That's something.

I'm assuming you don't have these numbers, but what I said on the RTA board, and so I look at these numbers of 1573 for catch-up and 767 for keep-up and wonder if we had a full functioning RTA of a bus every 30 minutes from Craig to Steamboat and every 30 minutes from Yampa to Steamboat, How would those numbers of demands change? That's such an awesome question.

Do you want to go for it?

I was going to say, I think that this gets to a couple different aspects of the catch-up calculation. So I know we mentioned – let's go back a couple slides here. So the commuters, you can see we've got this large number of people that are commuting in from over 45 minutes away. So kind of part A is – if the RTA, you know, if it can make that commute more comfortable and more fast, I think people, you know, there's less pain there. They're more willing then to continue living far away. It lowers the desire for them to move closer to their job because now, you know, you can do work on the bus. You can have, you know, more reliable transportation to get into steamboats and maybe you're happy to stay where you live now.

And, and I think, by select, we're only including greater than 45 minute commutes in this. So, you know, Hayden, is still kind of within this commute shed. So people commuting from Hayden aren't really in this. So this kind of builds in some flexibility for, it's really nuanced, but it sort of creates an allowance for some of these communities that are growing on their, that are becoming their own thing, like Hayden, to continue to grow and be its own thing, its own community. And the RTA will just further, I think, increase quality of life for people commuting in.

I think the last point here is that commuting does make up a very small portion of the catch-up need right now, with the largest portion being from cost burden. And I know this isn't the official definition, but transportation costs are a large part of households overall, you know, cost of living. And so lowering that might take off some of the pressure. However, reducing kind of the number of commuters in doesn't do too much to take down catch-up the way that these numbers have been calculated.

I was going to say, I think that might be a great question for your RTA survey. I mean, really from the perspective that I think it's also when you have something to do with lifestyle, right? I mean, in the sense of just asking those questions, right? As opposed to making assumptions.

And I'll add, I mean, the big driver for that is, I mean, a lot of that is about choice riders, and it's choice riders that are commuters. And you heard in this presentation, and it was sort of discussed in the previous item, we have a lot of industries and sectors that have employees that are not working eight to five, eight to six. And so does the service meet the needs of someone who's working 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. or midnight? That's the sort of open-ended stuff that really the service matters a lot in terms of the ability for folks to essentially convert from auto trips to transit trips.

Other questions?

I had a little, I mean, maybe not so much about the data. Again, really appreciate what you've done. I think this is great work. I think it absolutely augments what was done in terms of YBHA and research that has been done and certainly refreshes a lot of the information as well as digs a little bit deeper. My question to you, Brad, is that we have the strategic, the housing strategic action plan. And so, you know, when I look at kind of the recommendations, I mean, it seems like we've got a plan, right? I mean, in terms of you laid, we've laid out and we've talked about these various different options. So to me, it doesn't seem like it. And what we need to focus on is what the work that's already been done and fill in the slots. So the question there is how do those, how does that, you know, what's the crossover or how does that integrate into the next steps?

Sure. So my job is to make sure the city of Steamboat Springs is compliant with the emerging and evolving set of state requirements. And to your point, we have a head start. We have a housing market and demand report that EPS and the Housing Authority worked on that, to Brian's point, like gave us like really valid and good information that otherwise we would not have been able to bring into this, the survey being a real sort of value proposition there because we could actually sort of think about capture rates, like thinking about potential movers without data is a total crapshoot. But to have an actual survey that was statistically valid really helps with that. So that allowed us to really do this for, You know efficiently and similarly and in many ways it actually worked out pretty well the housing strategy that you're referring to was adopted by Council in 2024 it kind of had a two year sort of viewpoint both the housing needs assessment and the upcoming housing action plan have a six year. plan horizon. So it actually works out relatively well that we will be sort of at the end of like the expected life of that existing housing strategy and roll into a new six-year version that meets state requirements. So in many ways, like it's actually been relatively efficient and it will be a continuation of the work that we've done already. And in fact, I I think the six-year window may be really helpful to think about what can we accomplish in years one and two, but also set pretty aspirational types of activities and tactics that maybe are those out years. Because right now we're really focused on what could you do in two years. I think noting some pretty novel things in the future, I think, for the purposes of continuing to adjust to what the data is revealing will be helpful in this community.

There'll be a lot of work to integrate the process previous housing strategic plan, all the policy development you're working on now, we're going to make it all dovetail, not reinvent the wheel.

And a quick follow-up related question is, where are we on our housing dashboard?

We are getting ready to launch. We've accepted the tool. Literally, you're writing like the web page that creates the external link. My expectation is that will be live next week. Great.

Thank you.

Okay. Hi. Thank you for the information. It's always a pleasure having both of you join us. So thanks for being here. This slide, so thanks, Council Gary, because I had a question on this slide. I don't remember what that bullet point consider additional financial incentives for development. Have we talked about that? And can you give me some examples of what we have talked about? Because I'm not remembering.

I'm going to preface this a little bit. These are intentionally broad right now for this document because we want to be careful not to put anything in this document we're going to submit to DOLA that we're going to have to backpedal on later. So we've put some really broad, pretty typical recommendations in this.

And so your question is about specific examples of financial... Yeah, whenever I say we're an incentivized development, I think we're an incentivized developer. So what does this mean?

I'll take it. So we're talking about... making it easier to build affordable, attainable housing. And so, you know, there's a range of ways to do that with making it easy to do it by right under zoning so that it's an administrative approval, right? Yep. I'm not a zoning person. So that you can pull a permit and build your project without having to go through a bunch of layers of discretionary review. So that's one way to incentivize it. Our world, we think a lot about financial incentives, so gap financing, or reducing the cost, so fee waivers and rebates, so paying impact fees on affordable units when there's an affordability gain guarantee. Having a funding source like your STR fund to use as gap financing. So it's a combination of process, zoning code, money.

Okay.

And I'll just add, I mean, to Brian's point, like that is... as written, like the standard way that these things are described to essentially lower the cost to the developer with sort of the thinking that that then lowers the rent or the sales price to the eventual tenant or owner. We have traditionally here, as we've talked about this over the last couple of years, really not contemplated a waiver where there is no fee collected. It's been more on the rebate. So someone walks in the door requesting STR tax funds, make a number up, it's one and a half million dollars at their request. I would suspect we're in some ways agnostic where that flows into their pro forma. If it helps them cover their building permit fees that they owe, So be it, as long as it yields the affordability outcome that we're looking for. If they take that to build infrastructure on site, totally fine with us, as long as, again, it yields the affordability outcome that we're looking for. So we have generally thought about it as rebates, that there would not be a waiver fee. We would just be essentially using a third pot of money potentially to pay or rebate the developer for those fees. That's how most communities do it.

Okay. Okay. I'm all about it. If it truly is just for affordable housing, I just worry with it being vague, which I appreciate and completely understand and don't want to go into detail. But just for council, I worry that you open the door to a developer coming in and trying to go through a loophole where they're building all market rate units. Oh, but I have one. basement apartment, I want to qualify for this. So I really want to avoid that scenario.

Yeah. I have a question for you. And I don't know if it's convoluted or what logic, but you're saying that to keep up, we have 760 odd units. What time span is that? 10 years. 10 years. So right now, if we did 70 units a year for 10 years, we would hit that number. Yes. Yes. Okay, and then as far as the keep up of 1,900 or so units, would the assumption be if we build 70 units a year, what percentage of those units would go to those people who are cost burdened now? Because it would seem to me that we would end up with a situation where we couldn't bring any new employees into town because those units would come from existing employees.

Yeah, this is vague stuff. Like it's, you know, you build a new unit, who's going in there? Someone who already lives here or someone that's, you know, new moving to the community? I think we get worried about communities feeling like intimidated by the sheer numbers that housing needs produce. And like the reality is... like no community builds enough housing to fully address its affordable housing needs. So I think we're just trying to sort of temper it a little bit, you know. But your thinking is right, right? If we're just building enough to address the keep up, we're not digging out of the hole we're already in, right? So great observation.

Well, and it helps a little bit that we have someone, a donor who happens to help us in that process. catch-up stage a bit, yeah.

I have a couple of questions. First of all, I just need to clarify again, the catch-up number and the keep-up numbers, is that across all demographics, or is that just for workforce housing?

Yeah, so you can see in this very large table here, it sets across all demographics, and you can see the upper income greater than 140 is just kind of this very large bucket, and that's because

Thank you.

Lost my train of thought there. The income data, they don't capture a high enough range to be able to understand need more precisely above 140. And so you can see that there is some portion, you know, 578 catch-up units, 78 keep-up units that would not be qualified as workforce, but we don't know exactly what that looks like.

The catch-up... is more encompassing of like the entire cross section of the population. The keep up is really tied to growth and jobs.

Okay. Yeah.

So the question, I guess more to council is like, I mean, even if we had the money to build all this, where would we build it? I mean, we can only build 400 units West of...

It kind of connects to the constraint analysis and stuff.

But I think more... Yeah, I'm thinking back to the constraint analysis and I'm thinking, where do we put those, even if we wanted to put those?

Yeah, and to me, when I look at that, and I see this from a regulatory with DOLA, wanting to have the Senate bill really requires us this needs assessment. So we put that there. We've now checked that box, and we're really going to go forward with it. Because there is some funding opportunities that may come in the future, this is one of those checkboxes that if it's not checkbox, don't even apply for the funding. So I looked at this from that lens. Right. Try not to dig too deep into the details of like, how do we accomplish this? More looking at it from the aspect of like, OK, what I loved about this is that it really identified, you know, where are. where our housing needs are. But it still has a lot of gaping holes in the fact that we didn't talk about Hayden, right? Hayden and the RTA and what Hayden's doing with their housing. You know, we've talked about our housing assessments in a county-wide sense of like, what is Hayden doing for Route County? Right. And we have a lot of developers doing some stuff and it's not in our purview. Right. But we know that that's going to take a burden off of a lot of the people locally. And we just we just don't know. But so to me, when I was looking at this, I wasn't burdened with trying to solve this problem. with this data. The data was a little overwhelming with some of those numbers. And we saw those numbers, uh, back in 2017, 16, when we, um, when the housing authority got the mill levy, because it talked about how many we were behind. It was like 1600 units. We're still about that same mark, you know, even though we built a lot, because what we built is a lot of the, um, uh, keep not the keep up but the keep up right because people move in the Population grows we need more housing and we kind of been doing that but the catch-up is really kind of where we really need to focus on so To me, I mean, I don't want to get too much in the burden of like solving this. And to me, it was just respecting the fact that we now have this on the shelf. We can definitely go back to it. And we need to use it with the DOLA to really maximize our STR funds that we have because we're really blessed to be able to say if anybody wants to have any matching funds, and DOLA has some kind of opportunity, and we've done this Senate bill housing assessment, and we're like, okay, we can give some money, and they give a big chunk of money, and then we can do something at the Campbell property. you know, for example. So I don't know what the future holds, but to me, it was just solidifying what we've been following for the last nine years. And we really haven't gone far because the population keeps growing and the need keeps growing. The one thing that was interesting at the farmer's market this weekend is there was a guy that's been there for 47 years, right? And so he He and I asked him the question and we were talking about housing and not doing the Brown Ranch or the Slate Creek and not doing some things. And I'm like, well, when you moved here 47 years ago, where'd you live? You know, couch surfing. I mean, in this ski town and a mountain town, I've talked to people throughout this last six years on council, and it's funny how when people moved here, not a lot has changed. It's very hard to live in this town. And so the one thing I circled on this assessment to me was the 30%. which is where we standard say it should all be. And I just don't know many people at all that live in this town that can afford 30% of their income for their housing. I mean, this entire town is almost cost burdened, unless you're wealthy and you have a house that's paid for or something like that. So to me, it was like we've seen this cycle for 30 or 40 years, that it's just an expensive town to live up in the mountains. And yet we keep using that as a, we want to achieve that 30%. And one thing I wrote in here is I just don't think it's achievable. I mean, it can be, but to make that a goal, admirable. But the reality is, like, it just costs a little bit more. You know, more that 35% to 40%, in my opinion. But I love the work that you guys did.

Thank you. To answer your question, Councillor Agosta, I think what you're doing around the RTA is a regional transportation strategy. We have to do the same thing with housing. It's a regional housing strategy. We can't just look at Steamboat as being able to address this issue by itself. It was a loaded question.

Thank you.

But the RTA is part of the solution to this. It really is. It absolutely is.

Absolutely. And I'll just quickly, because on that topic, communities in Colorado subject to this requirement can do a regional housing needs assessment. The reality for me, again, wearing my thou shall comply was the clock is ticking. We can more expeditiously get to a state-accepted housing needs assessment if we go it on our own, but let's not put our blinders on. So there are things in here that you're seeing that are about understanding that we are talking about a regional housing ecosystem because that is the reality of housing. frankly, any labor shed in the housing ecosystems designed to sort of feed that labor shed. I would just encourage this community to sort of think about like, do we want to more formally think about how we do housing related planning at the regional scale? between now and the next time that we have to at least from the state requirement standpoint do this six years from now and i really think that is really uh for elected leaders and community leaders in this and this community to to arrive at that that feels like the pathway to pursue uh next time

I would just say I'm gonna ground the conversation a little bit in the sense that we hear repetitively from our community members that one of the major concerns is that they're concerned about our small town culture, right? And so, again, that means something different to everybody, but it certainly means knowing your neighbors, right? And having a diverse community and the people who work here, being able to live here so that when we go to the grocery store, when we go to the post office, we're running into people that we know. So I'm going to beg a little bit, I'm going to beg to differ on, you know, looking at this from a, I mean, I think looking at it from a regional perspective, but I do feel the obligation that if someone works in this community and wants to live here, we need to make that happen.

And we really have the best opportunity. I mean, land. Land in the STR fund that we have from city governance. As you work with CAST, when you look at Telluride, Box Canyon, no land. Basically, they have to build back out outside the community. And that's just more commuting and more everything else. So we're really blessed right now. So we have a lot of good opportunities.

Is there an accept action here?

A what?

let's next step action.

Brad, do you have what you need from us? I mean, you're going to take this forward by the end of the year.

Correct. As Brian sort of alluded to, like this is very much an awareness conversation. Our job is to button this up, reflect anything that we heard tonight, make sure it obviously meets. The state requirements, you know, there's now a 60-day clock ticking that our job is to submit to DOLA via their portal. I feel like we're in good shape on that. And to the other part of the conversation, we'll now transition to the housing strategy work.

I think I'd just offer if you have any major comments you'd like to put in writing and get to Brad, we can look at incorporating them or at least they can go along with our submittal. Thank you.

Thank you for your time. Thank you.

We really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.

Okay, before we take a break, is there anybody in the room or anyone online? Please raise your hand if you're online who'd like to make a public comment tonight. Okay, seeing none in the room and no one online, we'll close public comment and we will take a 10-minute break. Oh, we have a raised hand online. Oh, we do. Catherine, unmute. What about your cat? You have three minutes, Catherine. Go ahead.

Okay. Thank you, Councilman Tien. My name is Catherine Carson. As I always say, I'm involved in various organizations. But of course, speaking on behalf of tonight of my blind cat and my newly added little doggy. So first, I really want to thank the consulting team. This is an excellent needs study. And I really wanted to take this opportunity to thank Brad. Brad has been such an asset and has made so many contributions to our community. So you've made a really big difference, Brad, and thank you very, very much. And I did want to add to sort of one wonky comment regarding the study. It's excellent, as I said, great needs assessment. You know, 30% has sort of been the standard metric for many years in the housing world. But what our high-cost mountain communities are seeing is that particularly for the lower-income AMIs, that 30% no longer works. Even if you look at communities that are more mature on housing than we are, such as Aspen, they've actually developed their own metrics for computing rents. such as for 50% AMI, instead of 30%, it's more like 25%. And if you think about it, it's really a mathematical formula. If you make just tossing a high number out, like $200,000 a year, yeah, you can have 30, 35% of your income on housing and still thrive. But if you're making in that lower number, and people in our community do make 30 to 40,000 a year, even lower than 30,000, then you are truly cost burdened. And with our high cost of living, you just can't survive with that even at 30%. So moving forward, think about that. That is something I think the mountain communities are looking at. And I appreciated the reminder in the study of just how disconnected our AMIs are becoming to wages. With our wealth coming into the community, that average and medium income, just doesn't always work. So I do think we're going to have to, you know, look like with the Aspen model and start having our own calculations. But once again, thank you, City Council, for your passion on moving forward on housing. And thank you for a great needs assessment. And once again, Brad, thank you for your many and valuable contributions to our community. Thanks, guys.

Okay, thank you, Catherine. Okay, is there anybody else online? Please raise your hand. Seeing none, we'll close public comment, and we will take a 10-minute break and be back here around 727 and move on into our community design standards update.

Thank you.

Thank you.

topic community design standards update that's right over there of course we're excited to be here uh thank you council for having us tonight uh jeremy planner bob keenan principal planner uh we also have some consultants here that'll uh speak and give the bulk of the presentation in a second but i'll just uh tee this up really quickly for you i know A lot of this started before when I first got here in 2022, before even a number of you were sitting where you are today. So if we go all the way back to 2022, when Brad wrapped up our mountain area master plan, that gave the planning department some fairly explicit direction that we should be revisiting, in particular, our design standards. We heard some feedback that they were difficult to interpret, maybe not in alignment. with some of the comprehensive plan goals. That would have been our old comprehensive plan. And they were cumbersome to use. I mean, as you guys know, all of our, this section of the code, if you can't comply with it, if you can't do something, no matter what it is, it kicks its way all the way to city council, to you guys, whether that be a glazing variance or a roof pitch variance or colors or any number of building orientations, all those things are embedded in our design standards. So from that, the planning department sought funding, secured funding. We contracted with Code Studio, who is here tonight, virtually to speak with you, present to you. We looked at TN, we made contracts for TND, for our landscape code, which we just passed, and in the works that whole time, and sort of our Third go at it is the design standards, which is what we're here to just sort of present and frame up for you today. Then, so this all started in 22. In 2025, obviously, when we adopted our latest community plan, That reinforced those initiatives where giving further explicit direction that says we should revisit these every few years because we know design changes, aesthetics change, and these sorts of things. Obviously, with our historic preservation, our new planner, Caitlin, came on about four years ago. There's a stronger emphasis toward making sure that we're referencing our cultural heritage, and we're sort of blending seamlessly our development of the past with our development of the future. So with that, I'll introduce Simon Hart and Lee Einsweiler from Code Studio, who will take over and give you a brief presentation about the process that we've been undergoing, where we're at now, where we're headed to the future, so that you feel like you have a little orientation to the process.

Thanks, Jeremy.

Can you hear me?

We got you. Is it easier if I just share my screen and it'll pop up? You should be able to, yeah. Let's see if this works. Can you all see that?

We gotcha. All right.

Okay. Good evening, council members. My name is Simon Hart, and I am an associate planner with Code Studio. I just want to apologize in advance. I am recovering from a little bit of a lingering cold. So if you hear me cough or if my voice starts to sound a little bit strange, just bear with me. I'm fine. Trust me. But we have been contracted by the City of Sinema Springs to review and revise the design guidelines and standards, which reside in Article 4, Section 2. of the community development code. The overall goal of this project is to modernize and improve the design standards with the help of city staff and the input of stakeholders from many different professional backgrounds, including architecture, engineering, development, and along with input from the public. The design standards apply to specific types of development, including duplexes, multifamily, commercial, and mixed-use projects. They also apply to development located in specific parts of Steamboat Springs, including the base area, commercial oak, commercial yampa, and commercial in the Old Town. More specifically, besides clarifying and simplifying language, We will be looking at addressing some of the issues with variances, updating language that better reflects market trends, and the community vision set out in the adopted comprehensive plan. And we will be looking at opportunities to revise some of the language to be more cognizant of some of the issues that relate to housing affordability in Steamboat Springs. In the scope of the project, city staff have outlined several tasks to keep the project going. Currently, we are at task four, which is the diagnostic. This document will provide us with a clear path forward for how we will approach changes to the design guidelines. And there will be opportunities for the public to provide input along with continued input from stakeholders and planning commission. Over the last few months, we've had the opportunity to have a site visit and tour your city, and we've had the opportunity to discuss some of the challenges related to the design guidelines with stakeholders. Some stakeholders felt that the standards could be updated to better reflect current architecture and design trends, and there were some specific issues related to technical issues like roof pitches, materials, entryways, and furnishes. Some stakeholders found that the outcomes from the variance process can be unpredictable, which makes building and developing in-sea boat springs, in their view, risky, time consuming, and potentially costly. In this regard, we'll be working with staff to kind of find the best path forward that helps reduce the number of applications that end up needing variances and hopefully in the long term reducing overall issues with this specific variance problem that you all are having in the future. Other stakeholders found that there is what they described as a duplex barrier. Meaning that once you build anything over above a single family home, there are many more requirements that need to be met. And this is even though many of the new single family homes being built today are just as large, if not larger than duplexes with a similar aesthetic and architectural impact on the surrounding area. So we will be looking at ways that we can potentially streamline some of these requirements for duplexes and other missing middle housing types going forward to help encourage more affordability and different housing options in what actually gets built in Steamboat Springs. There were some issues mostly from the engineering community about some technical issues related to retaining walls and snow storage. which is related to this other kind of larger issue, which is that most easy-to-develop parcels in Seymour Springs have already been developed. So what's left most of the time is either redevelopment opportunities or development of parcels that have issues and constraints that older parcels didn't have. So while some of these issues are not explicitly covered in Article 2, Section 4 of the Code, which is where the design standards live, we will work with staff to see if there's a path forward on any of these other issues within the scope or if these get tackled at a later point in time. Finally, there was a general consensus that a lot of the language could be cleaned up specifically related to what our guidelines versus what the actual design standards are. Some of the top issues from city staff relate back to what we heard from stakeholders, notably the variance issues, the difficulty staff sometimes has of pushing back when the standards are gray or soft, inconsistency in the application of standards just due to their sheer complexity, and being cognizant of the cost of certain standards when affordability can often be one of the goals of a development project. Generally confusing definitions in other language has been an issue and confusion around geographically centered standards versus standards based on building or development types. I just wanted to provide this refresher. on the original purpose and intent of the design standards, which is generally to direct the overall scale and character of new development in Seamote Springs and to help ensure that what does get built is of a high quality and it reflects the sustainability goals of the community. This is just also a quick reminder that our goal here is not to change the original intent of the design standards, but rather to just improve and build on what has already been done already. And I did want to show you all this map of Steamboat Springs from your adopted comprehensive plan, which I'm sure you've seen before. It's the Future Land Use Map. Because while we have not figured out everything about our approach yet, we have landed on a consensus that the updated design standards will better reflect the unique areas listed in the Future Land Use Map, which will hopefully provide greater consistency between the code and the comp plan going forward. Finally, I'd like to conclude with the current project timeline, which shows this continuing forward with the task outline in the scope with a recommended adoption of the proposed changes, hopefully by the end of the year, along with opportunity for more input from planning commission and from the public, which we are proposing to take the format of district meetings. And I'll hand it off to Jeremy to kind of explain what those district meetings are going to be like in greater detail. But thank you for your time this evening. And we're looking forward to updating these standards for you all.

Thanks, Simon. Yeah, you heard Simon mention this idea of district meetings. It was a sort of brainchild in the planning department. And we will pitch it for you tonight and accept any sort of input you guys want to share on how this model may or may not work for this particular project. Classically, we would look at doing a community-wide meeting at some point in this project, sort of an all-call to people to show up and participate. We've gone through a process now where we've had stakeholders, kind of a focus group. We've had individual interviews with different people. Once we assemble some of these and we're doing things with staff as well, we'd like to make some sort of presentation of the public. And this idea of using our city council districts, having three meetings, would be a different way that we could engage with the public. We think that has some benefits over one large community meeting. One, breaking down the size a little bit. Two, there's some possibility to be somewhat more geographic. Obviously, we have a small town. It's not a large hindrance for people to come. We could have one out in the community center on the west end of town. We could have one here in City Hall. Perhaps we can find one up more toward the mountain area. But when we break into these districts, we realize those people have, particularly with design standards, they might have more hot button issues that they have concerns with, whether it be with the intensity of development up in our sort of condo land is a whole lot different than our constituents in historic old town and what the design standards mean to them. versus as we look to the west side of town, which is sort of the new frontier and may or may not have more relaxed standards about it as we move forward. So that was a way to break them down and a potential way for you guys to engage and be participatory in that process and sort of when we get to you, the ultimate plan is when we get to adoption, you've been there, you've seen, heard and been able to interact. Obviously it's a big ask for you guys to come to another public meeting, but you would just be going to one of them, your respective council district, and that the intent, I guess, in this model, and we can carry this as far as you think and you guys can discuss amongst yourselves, would be that we could present any relevant sort of like district topics and be a little bit more engaging. It doesn't just have to be, in fact, I would... encourage that if we're going through the effort of advertising and getting people there, that we don't just hinge on just design standards. That would be a piece of it. For all intents and purposes, they could talk about this is a planning side, big development review projects going on there. It may be a model, if we pilot it, that could be a relief valve for people wanting to be more engaged and interacting with rather than just having their three minutes at the podium. Obviously, we would facilitate this to make sure it's not grandstanding, it's an informal activity. But that's an idea we have that I present to you today. It may be something interesting. It may not be, so we'll accept feedback on that. We'll accept any broad questions about the design standards. Obviously, this was more of just an awareness campaign. We're not here to solicit any particular comment. Our goal is to collect that public input and present it to you as what the public in our particular professional development community thinks is right. So with that, I will stop talking and turn it over.

Okay, thank you. Councillor Agosta, why don't you start?

Prize or prize? I'm assuming you'll have this, but when you put together the Community Design Diagnostics and Review, or I guess by June 22nd when you do the Planning Commission Review, will you have a highlighted version of your changes and your proposed changes at that point?

Probably not by the planning commission. And even what will be sort of hesitant or withdraw, we've been working with Code Studio on this, is to make sure that even by the time we get to the public, this is obviously very important, that we don't have decisions made. So sometimes, even if we think we're trending toward ideas, it's really important to keep those close to the vest. Otherwise, it's... For real reasons and perceived reasons, it's not a true public process if we start putting out there where we think it's heading. We really do want to solicit that public input and make sure it gets woven into the discussion. In my public facilitation experience, you show up and you sort of give them the draft of what you're thinking. It's disingenuous to the process and doesn't build a lot of public faith in what you're doing.

I call it taming the design. We've already tamed it before they even had a chance to, you know, see what else could be out there outside the box.

Yeah. So we're actively collecting that information and I'm not saying we will withhold it in a disingenuous fashion, but yeah, putting it out there before it's done would lend some sort of credibility that an idea may or may not deserve. That's great.

Other questions? Just following up on that, though, then how does this, I mean, to the extent that, number one, you've already spoken with stakeholders, right? So number one, who are the stakeholders that you have spoken with, right? And then kind of to your point of trying to maintain a blank slate, we still have commentary in here that is not a blank slate. i.e., you know, roof pitches, front edges, you know.

Yeah, so I think the idea of talking to people in preparation is to understand what our highest hot-button sort of issues are. You know, when we talk to our... stakeholders or like our focus group that we pulled together on at the highest level, I'll tell you, you know, we have planning commission, HPC, we pulled a few architects that we did not interview. So we had these separate interviews of what, would otherwise be our power users, some architects and some engineers, that got a little more face time and depth. Then we had this group that came together, representative of, again, architects, Main Street Steamboat, Planning Commission, Historic Preservation, Development Community, so that they could all be in a roundtable fashion and help solve problems collaboratively. Because if one person says, I really hate this, and the other... HPC person says, well, this is really important to our historic character of the community. That roundtable environment is very important. So through that process, what you see is I understand you're feeling some things have baked in or come out. What has come out, though, is We haven't set a roof pitch. We haven't set glazing. But this community who are power users of it have brought it in and said, these are things, here's why it doesn't work for us. Here's why building codes have changed and we can't get always what you're asking for, how it limits our design capacity. We get to the more sort of layperson into the public perspective. They've never heard of the design standards. They couldn't tell you the difference between if they think 20% glazing or 25% glazing is going to be good. So we have to tee up that meeting to some degree and say... We hear that this glazing thing is a problem. Here's some imagery that you can look at. And is this offensive to you? Is this better to you? And have some sort of framework for decision making or we'll just never make much headway in a public meeting. Mm-hmm.

So, I mean, and just to clarify, so at this point, right, the stakeholders really have been more, as you say, whether it's planning commission, developers, architects, engineers, and historic preservation, planning commission, so you get maybe, well, but not necessarily any community, standard community members.

That's right. And we had this discussion internally. Actually, Bob and I brainstormed over this. One of the ideas, a lot of times you get issues, whether it's, let's say, affordable housing. And when you have an affordable housing issue, you can go out into the community and find a representative community member that might be able to speak toward difficulties with affordable housing. under the current circumstances of design standards, there was no reason to pick out any one person from another that would have particular input. They would just bring their own sort of personal opinion and bias to the table that didn't otherwise have for lack of better conversation, particular value to that discussion. They may be a design professional, they may be an art person, they may not be, but just to show up and think that they are, if you bring in a lay person, you want to think that they're speaking on the behalf of some person group of persons, so in the housing scenario they're speaking on some group of people that have struggled with affordable housing. Anyone in this kind of design review process wouldn't necessarily be speaking on behalf of any group in particular, so we opted to leave them out of this first iteration of discussion.

And that's why this next phase is very important to engage the rest of the community. So yeah, this is just data gathering right now and getting input. And yeah, I think Jeremy summed it up well. Those folks that touch this community development code and these design standards on a daily basis can give us some really meaningful impact that can help the consultants come up with this diagnostic. Like, all right, these are the rubs. This is what we heard. We also fully realize that they have special interests that they're representing, so we need to hear from the broader community. What's the look and feel of Steamboat to you? Is the base area... you know, that Mount architecture feel is that, you know, is that, that we've, we've had in the code, is that the direction we still want to go, right? Is this, you know, what, what buildings in town, like that, you know, or new development that you didn't care for, or, you know, so we'll have like these, these boards and, you know, do the dot thing. And the consultant team's really good at setting these up. staff will run it but they'll give us all the materials for it um yeah and so this district is just an idea to support the council goals that you guys have and it can you know we just thought we'd throw it out there um as an idea so yeah i mean i like that i like the the idea of the district i mean in terms of i mean certainly you know it's a way to hopefully facilitate some input

And Councilor Barnes, you could go to all of them.

No, it's interesting, because as we look at the mountain area plan that we passed a few years ago, and there was a lot of discussion to the design standards that were up on the mountain that were changing. And a good example was like this sharp pitched roof of some of the Black Hawk town homes, you know, and they were cinder block and kind of modern, but they were forced to do this pitched roof. And then, you know, through the variances and through just with the market share, they wanted, you know, flat roofs. And we're starting to see this attractiveness to the flat roofs and how it lets light in and stuff. And so are you, the CDC that we're talking about in your conversation that you could have with the community is to bring up all of these design standards in the different zones as well as just the whole CDC, correct?

Correct. So the way our design standards work right now, we break it down to we have commercial, we have mixed use. So what's interesting is I haven't touched on, but if you're not familiar, it may have gone quickly over your head. We do it by building types, and then we also do it by zone district. So it's a mixed bag. At some points we talk about Yampa Street, we talk about Oak Street, we talk about downtown. But then we also talk about, again, the building types, what type of building is. And there's provisions in there. So if you're building a residential building, multifamily building on Oak Street, which one takes precedent? So it's a little mixed up, but we are reviewing all of that. We're also, where appropriate, it bleeds outside of this is mostly contained. Article 4 would be our design standards. We know it touches into dimensional standards. The code is intertwined. We have the unenviable job of Bob and I figuring out where those boundaries and guardrails are, but we want to make sure the code... speaks to each other if we have to step out of the lane to grab dimensional standards, which come from other articles and talk about how high or what plate heights are. We will explore that as relevant to make sure that we're taking advantage of this code rewrite to actually move the bar forward.

Yeah, and I think everyone's familiar with scope. And as you pull one thread, it's just like you can never like stop, you know. So those items that come up that feel like they're kind of out of bounds for this project, we will park and we will make them part of the presentation. And like we've heard these things, they were out of scope, but we can prioritize them in a next code amendment as needed. So we'll certainly track those, even if we can't actually make those with this project.

I have a question on that. One of the top issues that you, as city staff, raised was the clarification needed on standards versus guidelines.

Yeah.

So as you move this forward, what is your thinking around guidelines? Are you more inclined to move away from guidelines to more standards, or what is your thinking about that?

So the feedback we've heard, and I'm going to answer you without fully answering you, I'll tell you why, is the feedback was that people are confused by these two things, right? Our standards are our standards are our standards. The guidelines are by definition supposed to help us if we're reviewing variances to those. The odd part and what people point out quite often is that our guidelines don't always directly support standards and maybe sometimes you want some guidelines to be standards or vice versa. We aren't at this time. I won't offer my personal opinion. I can honestly say there's not a broad staff opinion that I could even give you a hint of. But we are exploring what that looks like. We're asking our stakeholders. We're going to ask the public. And when we get sort of the end result of... We got to develop the finish line and then pull back and help. And I say we in Code Studio figure out how we get there most appropriately and most clearly. But it has been a point of contention that we have this one sort of concrete, one very fuzzy one that bleeds in and out. Again, even if the language is concrete, even if it tells us to use them for variances, it still can become quite confusing based on how they've been written and how they interact with each other.

So the goal would be to get rid of some of that confusion, I would hope.

That is the primary goal of this project is, if I could come up with a phrase, is to alleviate confusion amongst applicants and staff reviewing projects as well.

You know, it's interesting, being here now for quite a few years, the variance process is such a crucial part of any CDC. But there's been the consistent ones that have come up for 10 years that I've been involved. And this is finally the time, this is why I'm excited about this, is that we're finally going to address maybe the height ratio downtown to 14 foot. It seems like it's always an issue. And yet, we don't really know the best solution, right? So it's a variance, and it's in the code that you have to have 14 foot in the first floor, and yet... People are always coming to us asking for that variance. And most of the time, we give it to them, right? Because common sense, what they're saying, makes sense. But I think that giving this opportunity to finally go through with Code Studio and our staff in the community to kind of look at those ones that were blatantly glazing, blatantly in people's eyes always. It was always coming up as a variance. but now we can really think about it and change it and say, okay, we still need to have it, but let's kind of look what other avenues that we can make it so it's not always a variance, right? And I think that to me, I would like to see some of these consistent variances be withdrawn because our code is now up to date.

Yeah, I think that's a large part of why you've seen so much development review as city council, Because once you have a variance, then you're kicked into the city council process. And talking with Code Studio, and they're a great resource for us. They do this work all over the country. They know the calibration of the standards, what's working well in other places. They've seen these things in other places. And one of the things they brought up is, well, do these need to go to council? This isn't a building height variance that has an impact, like a real impact to a neighboring property, right? Like to change the color from brown to gray, and then like, so maybe there's a way to kind of treat them differently, you know, and perhaps they're not in the same bucket as floor area ratio and building setbacks, right? a lot coverage and those more impactful type variances. So those are things we're excited to explore as staff, right? You know, it's tough to see the developers bang up against this, but it's also just, it bogs down the whole process, you know.

And the really cool part is we've had a decade or two of these consistently coming up. And they're now the low fruit on the tree. Like, let's address these. And then in that process, the conversation of your district, I think that's a great way to go. I'm supportive of that. That you're going to come up with people of different perspectives which we explain that and they may say well What about this variance in that one? So I'm really encouraged that we're we're finally getting this to going so thank you for carving out the time Tom and staff to really look at the CDC So that's my two cents does everybody support their process around getting district input and

Yes, I support that. I think that's a great idea. I love it. Okay, and did you have something else? I have questions, yeah. So when I first read this, it definitely came across as very much developer focused. And so, but I'm hearing also your perspective as well from a staff side, but it really seems very developer focused. And when I look at the code and what I'm looking at for, the commercial and mixed-use buildings design standards. I just, like, was scrolling through it. I mean, we are talking about massing in here. And then hearing you say there is overlap with the CDC. So I'm just... I just don't know where this is, and knowing it's coming from developers, a push, I'm just really concerned about significant changes to code around this. I hear you're going to do public outreach and all of that.

If I can summarize, your concern is that it may result in a developer-led product. Is that the fear?

Very much.

One of the things and one of the intentions of the public process right now, if I can be reassuring to some degree, when we do pull out the engineers and the architects, we did not interview developers. The idea being that in the best sense of our licensed professionals, they're interested in doing the best design. In that interview they get the opportunity to speak in a vacuum. They're not beholden or at the behest of their developer. They get bundled in that way sometimes because the developer is the client for their product. But we do find that our professional designers do have the best of intentions and great input. And it is something that rather than us taking on this project as an in-house project to outsource to Code Studio as well, who's our consultant, And understanding again as to what Bob said, what people are doing around the country. They're also the ones helping us establish this design language. Taking the input from our community, but also knowing what makes great communities. So what we want from, we're melding the input from an architect who says, look at the vernacular of buildings around here and And Code Studio helping facilitate and say what makes Steamboat, asking the right questions, what makes Steamboat's architecture special? A good point that Simon and Lee brought up to us on our first visit, they said, you know, everybody says mountain vernacular, mountain architecture, that's what you're going for. I could tell you 20 different styles of architecture that meet mountain that someone would call mountain you know but around here picking out details and this isn't some of the the diagnostic i'm stealing some of simon's thunder but looking at our some of the lines limestone detailing through downtown and how that's pretty unique to steamboat from our limestone quarry you know is that going to be mountain architecture down in taos new mexico no not really but what is it about our architecture and they're the ones to help us facilitate that once we get this data collection. So I can assure you that we are doing all we can to eliminate that bias. We are well aware that developers have very different intentions. Our focus group had two developers out of 10 people. So we had a lot of voices in there in opposition to just... And I don't think that developers come from a poor place. I don't mean to speak negatively toward them. They just have a different intention than maybe other stakeholders. So if we get all the intentions represented, we'll come out with the best product.

Okay, thanks for that. And then just two other quick things. Again, I think this goes back to my, this is driven by developers. When you, this slide, I don't know if it has a number on it, five, what we heard from stakeholders, it had five topics. And the third, number three, was barriers to density and affordable housing. And to me, those are two separate statements. If we would have said barriers for affordable housing or acquiring, but right now, lumping those together is almost misleading because those with the and in between are different. I'm reading as two different things. I just want to throw that out there. You don't need to... But please respond if you want to.

No, that's excellent input. We'll definitely be thinking about how we phrase and articulate that message to the public.

Because barriers to density, I see developers going down that road. There's lots of barriers. And we also, I think you all have done a great job of addressing how can we make it easier for developers to build affordable housing. I think we have done some really, you all have done some really great stuff. So separating those to be really clear on what are we trying to get at. And then the number four, I just have to say it, site and engineering constraints. not all lots can be built to what the developer wants to see. And we have to be okay with that. We've seen some projects come through and we've actually talked about it. So I want to be careful on that one. And then my last comment about the districts, I love that idea about going out. I will be there and I will support it. I love it. Because the general public does not understand this. we get phone calls and someone, how many times at Farmer's Market have people come up and said, oh my God, that new Riverview knew, but Riverview is so tall. And I think that's within code. People called me and said, that hotel by City Market now, that's awful. That's so big. How can the city, how can we approve such big projects? So it's just like for context, like, They don't understand, and people do feel a bit steamrolled, not by you all, I'm not saying you. I think from, it's our code, and so they're seeing developments come up, and they just don't understand. Not everyone, but anyway, I wanted to put that out there.

Oh, that's great. Thanks for the input.

And I think that's the marketing that we need to do as councilmen, is that this may be one thing that we can really help you guys, our staff, to really market our district and really get our constituents to come out with us. And I'm going to be there. I'd like you guys to be there. I'm going to be there. I'd like you guys to be there. And then kind of spur this conversation as we go to this next quarter. And I think we'll get some of those people and educate them. And then if we need to change the code accordingly, then that's kind of what our process is.

Yeah, so I'll go ahead and make up an agenda for those proposed meetings. I'll send out some invitations to like a poll so you guys can help select a date that's most available to yourselves.

Yeah, we'll probably work with communications a little bit on helping facilitate that. And I think we'd also like, we want to probably piggyback a couple of, themes right for those so it's just they can take a couple birds with one stone kind of thing yeah think about anything else that you would like to touch on we'll need to do some follow-up with you all on that we'll be in time we'll get the framework on that and i think i just i think to comment and simon you could jump into on this the barriers to density and affordable housing yeah that was relating to the the duplex barrier where we treat duplex like so we have some like pretty robust standards for duplex that may be hindering the development of duplexes which can be a more affordable housing type and and as well as that there's the um you know if you were to do a triplex there's even more requirements for process so that once you get into three or more units in a single building, that becomes multifamily, that needs to go through a development plan versus a single family and a duplex or a building permit application. There's no planning review. We do the planning review at time of building permit. And so there was some discussion, well, maybe we could get some more duplex, triplex type housing if we looked at process a little bit and standards. So it was in that context, if that helps.

Okay, that does. I would say duplex and triplexes nowadays are no longer even affordable. And developers are all about... Good for them making as much money as possible. That's like I got it If we went down that road, I would say we allow that only for Duplexes and triplexes that are all for bill housing and not market rate ones that anyway. I

I just wanted to follow up on a comment that you made, Jeremy, too. Specifically, I think when we look at that, what we've heard from stakeholders and the outdated design standards. I certainly appreciated your comment about the rock from the quarry. But when I look at the recommendation, it talks about regulating mass and form rather than architecture and materials. So

This is a higher concentration. We'll still be looking at materials and colors for sure.

Yeah, that's part of the design.

So I think, yeah, just there's a lot of words in here that are trigger words.

Okay. That's great input. Okay. All right.

I want to follow up back on my original question and it wasn't a more, I think it was taken as superseding the community input. It was more about the city had listed the top issues of the current plan and Councilor Pacino talked about variances and the challenges, we always have these variances. So it's more about looking back, where in your process are you looking back at things like the past variances that we automatically always approve and highlighting those things. You talk about confusing definitions and confusing language and there's gray areas of the code. So I think there's our due diligence of just taking what we have as our own data of what we know there are challenges and making sure that we bring those to the forefront.

Absolutely. We have a number of staff meetings as well to pull out that kind of stuff. So that's another leg of our tripod of input.

And just one more question. I mean, I think this is really more to you, Tom. I mean, what we're hearing is this is, I mean, there is a lot of staff time that's being dedicated to this. And to the extent that we know we've got staff capacity problems and we need to be myopically focused on housing. How do we stay, how do we balance that?

Well, I mean, I think it's a great question. This has been listed as a project for several years, and I think you know, I think as stated, there are some conflicts with what we're seeing in the development and the design and variances and what's coming to you, which also takes significant amount of staff time, right. So evaluate those and do the staff report. So I think the hope is that ultimately this makes the whole process a little bit more efficient and will ultimately save time. I, you know, It comes down to priorities. I get that. And we're trying to continue to move these projects forward that have been on the list for many years. So this is one of them.

Yeah, I totally understand that. Just looking out at what we've got ahead, right, in terms of Slate Creek as well as Campbell.

When we talk about our capacity and we're looking ahead, we're also thinking about the projects that are in the queue and what we have in our work plan. We're looking at all of that.

All right. Thank you, Jeremy. Thank you, Bob. Appreciate your time counselors. Yeah. All right. Yeah. If there's anyone in the room or more specifically online, please raise your hand. If you'd like to make a public comment. See none. None. We will close public comment and move on to our final work session topic, Steamboat Springs Downtown Plan Review. Rebecca, thank you.

right let the screen catch up okay good evening rebecca bessie planning director um big topic i got a little nervous at the beginning of the meeting but we'll get into this i'm excited to be here tonight to present to you an overview of the adopted downtown plan So tonight we're just gonna review the plan, sort of high level. Just noting here, this does align with your goal to look at the dimensional and development standard recommendations that are in the downtown plan to ensure continued economic vibrancy in downtown Steamboat Springs. I was sort of chuckling in the back of the room at the beginning of your meeting earlier when we, We were talking a lot about codifying standards because I was looking at this slide thinking to myself, oh, I got that wrong. I didn't word their goal correctly. But for fun, and I hope you think this is fun, I added a new slide. So assuming that I understand the phonetic symbols in the dictionary, it is pronounced codify, rhymes with modify, and it means to arrange rules and laws into an organized systemic code, organized fashion. So all of our regulations are codified into our municipal code. Obviously the downtown plan contains a lot of recommended strategies, some of which the logical way to implement those strategies would be to make amendments to our community development code. Most of the recommendations in the downtown plan would not involve code amendments. So I think the word codify is a little awkward. No one knows how to pronounce it. I think what we're really talking about is implementing the downtown plan, trying to identify which of those recommended strategies we want to target moving, you know, sort of first and what we can fit within our established work plan. That's also another consideration that I don't want us to lose sight of. But we're really just talking about implementing recommendations, some of which will be potentially adapted into code. And of course, then they are codified into our municipal code. So back to the original slides. Several years ago, the council at the time had an adopted goal to adopt a downtown master plan. We hadn't had a comprehensive downtown plan since 1999. So we went through the process to create and adopt a downtown master plan. And the objectives of that project were to define and synthesize the complex issues and often competing issues that occur in our downtown and influence our downtown and then to provide guidance for how we would implement and prioritize the plan strategies. So that downtown plan was adopted by city council in March of 2019. As with all of our long range planning documents, the role of that plan is to provide that long range view, document the vision for the future. It identifies challenges, opportunities, provides options for how we can address the issues. Plans are advisory, they're not regulatory. And it provides an action plan or a guide for how we would take some steps to implement the plan. The plan boundary is shown here on this slide. It's what we all think of as our downtown generally from the Hot Springs as you enter from the south over to West Lincoln Park, the library, 13th Street. And then from the river, both sides of Yampa Street, from the river up to the alley between Oak and Pine Street. So it encompasses our commercial Yampa Zone District, CY1 and 2, our CO Zone District, which is primarily Lincoln Avenue, as well as our commercial Oak 1 and 2 districts, which are both sides of Oak Street. The process involved quite a bit of public engagement. We had a consultant firm that led the project that was design workshop. We had a citizens working group that met regularly throughout the project and provided feedback and recommendations. We held a number of public workshops. There was a survey, some public open houses, and then of course, meetings with planning commission to review the draft and go through the formal adoption process and then also city council review and adoption. The overall sort of theme or vision of the plan is to preserve the downtown character. And the plan recognizes that people influence character. I think somebody, one of you all touched on that earlier today, but people influence our character just as much as the built environment does. And so the plan speaks to both sort of the historic fabric of the downtown, that built environment, as well as the desire for opportunities for locals to experience the downtown, whether that's living there, shopping, dining, working in the downtown. The plan is organized into four topic areas or major categories and tries to balance the priorities of those different topic areas. So we have land use and zoning, connectivity, parking and mobility, art, culture and heritage, and character of the built environment. So I'm gonna walk through these four topic areas. I'm gonna try really hard not to just read the slides verbatim, because this is a pretty text-heavy presentation. But I did provide you all with a copy of the downtown plan in the packet, and the specific strategies that fall under each of these topic areas and the goals that we'll talk about start on page 54. Well, they show up earlier in the plan in the individual chapters, but there's a nice listing and summary of them and the action plan that starts on page 54. So starting with land use and zoning, the plan is set up that for each of the four topic areas, there's this really big sort of lofty aspirational statement. Not gonna read it to you, but for land use and zoning, you can see it speaks heavily about diversity of land uses in our downtown and ensuring that the downtown supports locals and visitors into the future. What we heard through stakeholder and public engagement and what some of the focus of the recommendations in the land use and zoning component of the plan revolve heavily around development economics in the downtown. And so it speaks to the need to balance economic growth with affordability and community character. That's a super easy thing to do. Obviously not. But it talks about land and construction costs being barriers. We're competing with other communities. Our development code standards are challenging. They add cost. I want to be clear that the code doesn't necessarily indicate that's a bad thing. It's just a reality that standards do add cost. Development can generate more residential units and the code speaks to the desire for a variety of residential uses in our downtown because it can activate our downtown and diversify the businesses so that we don't have a downtown that's only serving our visitors but can actually serve locals as well. There are six goals that fall under this category. You can see those here on the screen. Again, it talks about land uses that contribute to street level vibrancy, maintaining a critical retail core. The code, I'm sorry, the plan identifies the downtown core as being the area between Fifth Street and Ninth Street. recognizing that the downtown is larger, but perhaps there's some recommendations about how perhaps sort of maintaining those retail uses in that core area and allowing some flexibility on the fringes. Again, encouraging a diversity of land uses, supporting existing and potential local downtown retailers. experiential retail, housing diversity, and increased lodging opportunities. I know we've all brought to you this discussion before about lodging in the downtown, but that was a really... highly talked about and debated topic through the downtown planning process was there's a desire to increase lodging opportunities downtown. And by lodging opportunities, the plan is speaking more about like traditional hotel uses rather than short-term rentals that are taking up residential units. The next topic is connectivity, parking, and mobility. Here's the aspirational statement in the plan. You can see it's really speaking just to multimodal transportation options through and around downtown. The focus there again, multimodal, so transit, parking, bicycle, and pedestrian infrastructure that serves residents and visitors alike. And the five goals talk about supporting mobility decisions based on our local and regional transportation plan, supporting our transit services, improving parking experience downtown, that's another super easy one that I know we can tackle, improving our bike routes and facilities and just improving overall comfort and safety for pedestrians. Next, we have art, culture, and heritage. This was a really, I think, important part of the plan was to recognize that our downtown is sort of that art and cultural hub of the community. And it does provide a sense of identity and pride for our local community. It also attracts visitors. And as our downtown continues to change, we wanted, the plan speaks to sort of the importance celebrating that our culture, our heritage and that spirit of the arts. The focus here was on ensuring strong, recognizable elements in our downtown that sort of set it apart from other parts of the town, ensure cultural assets are available and enhanced for future generations. Four goals related to art, culture, and heritage. The first is to preserve and protect the existing historic structures in downtown, strengthen our downtown as a historic district, support, promote, and manage events in the downtown, and support, enhance, and diversify public art. And then the fourth topic area is character of the built environment. This is a little bit longer aspirational statement, but just really speaks to the value of the built environment in terms of community character, ensuring that we are being sensitive to our historic structures, allowing for new context sensitive design in the downtown as the downtown changes and redevelops. And then also recognizing the public realm and its contribution to our downtown. And I think, I'm not sure if I've already passed the slide, but there is actually a statement in the plan that speaks to the public realm being all those spaces in between our buildings that really knit together the downtown as a whole. Oh, here we go, I just stole my own thunder. So the idea here is that the downtown is really a unique part of our community. It does have a distinct look and feel and it should have a distinct look and feel into the future. It should offer experiences appropriate to locals and visitors. Our new buildings should integrate well with the historic character and structures and that we want to ensure we have pedestrian activity at the street level to sort of foster that vibrancy that we're all looking for. Six goals related to the built environment. The first was to strengthen the arrival to downtown, celebrate the proximity to the Yampa River, integrate redevelopment to adjacent historic structures through context-sensitive design, and I know Bob and Jeremy spoke to that earlier, that that will also be considered in the design standards update as appropriate. There was a goal to create a central gathering space, create a cohesive look and feel of the downtown public realm, and improve operations and maintenance in downtown, including alleys. There's a number of recommendations surrounding the alleys and their opportunity to become more public spaces. The plan includes a pretty detailed action plan. I actually really appreciate the way the plan lays out the specific strategies. It starts with a couple of what were called top 10 lists. And so it takes all of the strategies that fall under all of those goals that we just looked at and it identifies the top 10 that should be implemented soon. There's a top 10 list for those that are really important but require direct investment, so we'd have to do some budgeting for those. And then there's a top 10 for those that would require staff time, where it doesn't really take a lot of budget, we think it's something we can do in-house. There are also summary tables for each of those four topic areas that provide the detailed strategies under each goal, provides timing, costs, funding sources, responsible parties. I know you can't read what's on the screen, but it's in your packet. The yellow highlighting in these tables denotes what was identified by the working group as their top priorities, so It's interesting because this plan doesn't say like these are the first things you should do and this is the order of priority. It sort of slices it in a number of different ways. You have those top 10 lists, then you also have all of those that were identified by the working group. And so I think there's a lot of opportunity here to say what is the priority right now, what makes sense to bite off. So I think I heard someone say once that this plan was adopted in 2019 and we haven't done anything with it yet. So I just wanted to make sure that we all know that we actually have done, we've made some progress. These are several of the specific strategies that fall under the goals in those four categories that we have completed. So of course we have the new city hall across the street. There was a specific strategy identified in the downtown plan that was to maintain the city's presence in downtown. We also completed the public restroom on 7th Street, so that was also another specific recommendation in the plan. We provide incentives by allowing flexibility in exchange for workforce and affordable housing, so I think that's something that we've done well. public works, make sure that our bike lanes are plowed in the winter. We've compiled a summary list of historic preservation benefits and incentives. I think most importantly on this list, perhaps one of the things I'm most proud of, is that we have completed an update to our historic preservation guidelines. And we have, in addition to that, adapted our first ever historic preservation plan just last year. And... preservation for obvious reasons was a very big topic in the downtown planning process and you see it mentioned throughout the document, preserving our character, preserving our historic structure. So the work we're doing to implement the historic preservation plan is really key and sort of doubles upon our efforts to implement the downtown plan. And then of course we have our special event approval process which helps manage some of the impacts of special events. There's also a number of other strategies that are in progress. So obviously we engaged in, the downtown plan specifically spoke to public and private partnerships to provide attainable housing opportunities on city-owned parcels. As you all know, we just acquired the Stockbridge property. It's not technically within the downtown boundary, but I think all of the work that we're doing to deploy short-term rental tax funds all work towards implementing this specific strategy. We did bring to you an amendment to potentially... change hotels to a use by right or limited use in those downtown zone districts. There's a red X there because I didn't pass before you, but that was an effort to implement the downtown plan. We also, of course, enforced speed limits, enforced private snow plowing on public sidewalks, Again, here it talks about strengthening that historic preservation program for downtown. I already mentioned the design guidelines update and the adoption of the historic preservation plan, but I also wanted to note that we have engaged Logan Simpson, our preservation consultants, to do what's called a National Register Historic District Update. And we're almost complete with that. I think we're probably about 95% complete with that work. But what that does is it... It's called a continuation sheet is what I understand. It takes the initial historic, National Historic Designation District. It re-looks at all of those properties inside the boundary of the district as well as outside and determines documents changes, determines if any of the what used to be non-contributing properties might now be contributing or vice versa. Some contributing properties maybe have been changed over the last number of years and would no longer be contributing. That's all based on national criteria for the historic district. But so we are actually taking steps to evaluate that national historic district. I think we have a hope or a desire that maybe one day we'll be able to adopt a local historic district for our downtown, which would put that into a regulatory framework rather than honorary, which is what the national district is. And then lastly, I've added this strategy on the slide to refine the CDC's requirement for upper floor building setbacks. So that is actually something that falls within those design standards that Jeremy and Bob just presented to you all on. So there is a specific strategy in the downtown plan that speaks to that, to the extent that that can be reviewed through that design standards project and potentially evaluate whether changes need to be made. We'll tick that off in that project. So that brings us to what I have labeled the targeted strategies. So with that council goal that you all have adopted, the idea being that it was specific to the, it was targeted to very specific strategies in the downtown plan. And those are the two that are listed here. And those are to take a look at, potentially modify, the plan recommends that they be modified, but how they're modified is still yet, obviously we have to go through that process. But the plan recommends that we modify the CDC to allow the same building height for lodging uses as we already allow for residential on the uppermost floor downtown. And that we also modify the CDC to exempt above grade structured parking from the FAR calculation. Those are very specific strategies. They will take some work to see how we would sort of calibrate them to fit within our downtown. They would have to go through planning commission review, public hearing, city council first and second reading. And like we saw in that earlier lodging, potential lodging amendment, it didn't pass council. So I make no presumption that by going forward with your goal, I mean, there's no predetermined outcome here. I think the public process will have to go through and bring forward some sort of an amendment for council's consideration. One of the reasons, so there's a number, as you'll see if you looked at the strategies in the plan, there's a number of strategies that speak to diversity of uses. housing incentives and things like that in the downtown. The reason why you don't see more on here is because we have to make sure we have the capacity to do this. We have a lot of goals that are impacting our workload. And so we were trying to find and look to the plan to say, what could we do? What's achievable? What's doable? And what do we also think might make a difference? And these were two very specific strategies in the plan that the working group and the public input that we received indicated through the process that they would make a positive difference in our downtown. So these are the two strategies that we're talking about that we think fall within your council goal. And our question for you tonight is, do we wanna move forward with this? And if yes, we'll move forward drafting some code language. It'll take a little bit of time, like I said, to sort of calibrate it, make sure we get it right for our downtown, potentially looking at the different zone districts that we have and run that through Planning Commission until they're happy with it and have a public hearing recommendation to you all and then bring it to you for first and second reading consideration. Happy to answer any questions.

Thank you. Okay, before we jump into answering this question, do we have questions for Rebecca? Of course.

Rebecca, can you explain why is the residential and commercial building heights different?

That's a great question. So I don't know exactly when the code was written. I'd have to do a little research on when that standard was introduced to the code my understanding though is that it is an it's intended to incentivize residential in the downtown so if you if you add residential use to the uppermost story of the building then you get an additional story is really what it comes down to okay um

change gears here a little bit. Thinking about the FAR, the floor area ratio aspect, what that does is that encourages first floor parking. Would that encourage first floor parking in terms of if you remove parking from that?

I think it would encourage structured parking. Absolutely, yes. I think that What we see downtown, I think parking is a challenge for redevelopment. If you look at our existing develop, like the historic structures, many of them are constructed from lot line to lot line. They don't provide any parking. If they do, it might be a couple of spaces off the alley. They certainly don't meet our current code. But when we see redevelopment, we say you have to park your use 100% per the code. And that is a challenge. And so what a lot of communities do is that if you wrap it with some other use, it can be excluded from the floor area ratio. Because otherwise that counts against you. Like there's sort of this push pull between parking the use, but also providing adequate space for viable businesses and uses in the downtown.

Yeah, so everything's interconnected here. And when I look at the FAR and the fact of, you know, we encourage in-structure parking, you know, for the FAR, what you're doing there is you're also taking away commercial space at that level. And between, you know, 5th Street and 9th Street, we want to encourage... commercial spaces. So if we are actually saying, hey, it's a benefit for you to put in structure parking, then we're encouraging them to take away commercial space. and it's all related to what we don't have is a park downtown parking plan um you know if we had a down downtown parking plan that we you know investigated you know then then we can better understand you know whether you know the the fires you know it makes sense for the fires to be modified um and not included but the way i look at it right now it'd be difficult for me to encourage that because I want to encourage more commercial.

Well, I would suggest the commercial per the code would have, has to provide parking. So either that parking is going to be a surface lot and you're going to have less building. Hmm. or you're gonna have to go underground, which is very costly. And we don't see much of that here. So I think, I wouldn't necessarily say that it takes away from the commercial, it just allows for an alternative to requiring that the parking be underground, because otherwise it's just gonna be a surface lot.

It all comes down to a parking plan. What's our parking strategy going forward is the way I look at that. Because right now we're saying we have to apply parking and then it encourages... more work, more vehicle traffic is what that does. And, and, you know, I was in Cherry, you know, for, for the, you know, the transit tech, I was in Cherry Creek last week and, you know, it was $45 for parking for the parking structure. The hotel didn't have parking and it was next, it was next door in the parking structure and it was $4, $45 a night. That, that, and that drives a, a way, a use of the people going to that hotel and, go there outside of their own personal cars. That's a strategy that they're using. And so when I look at this one and saying, hey, we should move forward with codifying the CDC for above ground parking structures, that defines a parking use model.

And that's where I would challenge us to think differently, right. And that's kind of my issue with picking out pieces of the downtown plan. I mean, in the sense of if you look right, there's a section on connectivity, parking and mobility, right and support the Steamboat Springs Transit Service within that, you know, downtown. So I mean, there are alternatives to parking. And finances are a big part of that. Right. And again, it has strategies in here focused on that that I think need to be taken into consideration when we're looking at the other possible strategies as well. As you say, they're all interrelated.

So what's the plan? What's the next step? for this discussion. If we're gonna, you know, we've got this downtown development plan, we'd kind of look at it again. You've picked out a couple of items that we wanna look at. Is this gonna be more internal work with the planning commission and your staff and a little bit of outreach or what is the goal to adopt something and then get some of these downtown plans into the CDC or what are we trying to do?

You tell me. You all set a goal. That goal was very targeted. So I know there was a lot of lively discussion about like, let's implement the whole downtown plan. I mean, there's a lot in the plan. Absolutely correct. It's a lot of it is interrelated. Obviously, if we can improve transit, if we have better overall downtown parking, perhaps our individual use parking requirements could be lesser. I mean, there's a lot of ways to look at that. The council goal that you all set was to look at the development and dimensional standards. We reviewed the downtown plan, looked at all of the things that had to do that would potentially relate to the CDC, and then pulled out those that were specific enough that we felt we could accomplish them within our current work plan. I think that there are some that are broad, you know, they're, for example, let me, um, There's one strategy, for example, that I think we are in the planning department really interested in. We think it would be really impactful. It's the one that talks about allowing greater flexibility sort of on the fringes of downtown in terms of land uses. However, the plan's not really specific about what that means. And we feel like that probably deserves more community engagement. to understand what that would look like, what standards in the code would have to change to make that palatable or workable or desirable to the community. So that's why you're not seeing that one on that targeted list, because frankly, I just don't think we have the bandwidth to take that on right now. I would love to do it. Like I said, it's of great interest, I think, to the planning department as a whole. But the two strategies that I identified are ones where the plan was so specific. It's like literally sort of telling us what to do. That yes, there needs to be a public process, but I don't think it needs to be extended public engagement. We can have some, community outreach on it. We can take public comment. We'll have a number of public meetings where we can hear the public. We can have a work session at Planning Commission and run it through a more typical code amendment process.

Is this duplicative of the previous presentation?

That was going to be my next question, Councilor Riccino, is we just heard a lengthy presentation from Bob, Jeremy, and the consultants in terms of looking at the community design standards. So why would we, what's the benefit? Why would we carve? How is this not duplicative of what is being handled throughout that process?

We have it as a goal. No, I can answer that. So you heard Bob talk about scope creep and I know you all don't like read the CDC for fun and you don't have the table of contents memorized like we do. The design standards, So we have what we call dimensional standards. That's like your setbacks, your building height, primarily, FAR, lot coverage. Those are dimensional standards. They live in Article II. They're specific to certain zone districts. Then we have development standards. Those are things like landscaping, snow storage, the design of parking, not the number of spaces, that kind of thing. And then we have design standards. That's where we talk about glazing. building orientation, how the building, where the entrances are, all of those really fuzzy standards that we bring to you, all those variances requests on, those are the design standards. So the project that Jeremy and Bob are working on, we have to try to keep that scope. We need to try to keep that work within the scope of the project and budget. As Bob mentioned, everything is interconnected. There is going to be things that we identify that if we change something in the design standards, we are gonna have to address it somewhere else in the code. So we'll do that if it's absolutely required, but there will probably be other things that just generate that list that Bob mentioned where it's like this is the next step where we would address some other things. So the short answer is building height is a dimensional standard. It doesn't live in the design standards. FAR is a dimensional standard. It does not live in the design standards. So I know that probably doesn't sound like it's logical, but that's kind of the way it works.

Ideally, you would like to look at the downtown development plan code holistically. If you had all the resources, would you look at that in total and look at the interdependencies and how they offset each other and Would you do that if you had all the resources necessary?

If I had all the resources necessary, absolutely. We would be looking at our downtown plan, our mountain area plan. Okay, we'll stick with the downtown. And our community plan, and we would identify all of the strategies, because they all, they interrelate and they overlap.

Okay, but we can't do that right now under any circumstance. So the question is, what's the best use of your time? And you're saying, are you saying that the best use of your time is to pull out two that, and address those two? Or is the best use of your time to wait till we do have the resources or plan it out for years from now when we have the resources to look at the whole thing? Or are there other things in the development plan that maybe are even more important? I'm just trying to determine, are these two things, are they like areas that we have the most issues with, challenges with, variances with? And that's why we should address those specific two.

So to answer the first part of your question, I don't think waiting till we have all the resources in the world to do it the best way, you know, to do the greatest, best job possible makes any sense. We have to, we're never gonna be in that situation. We need to tick off things as we can. Priority shift. over time, that's okay. So what might make sense to do now, maybe didn't make sense to do a year ago, or maybe won't make sense to do next year. But I think that, like I said already, these particular recommendations were very specific. A lot of the other recommendations, if you read them, they're broader, they're gonna take some work to figure out how to achieve them, but these were so specific. I don't actually see it as being that big of a lift. Now, I'm gonna probably kick myself for saying that, because when you think something's easy, it's not. But from a staff's perspective, writing the code for these is not that difficult. you all are gonna have the hard job to decide if you wanna put it, you wanna adopt it or not. So I don't think this is a huge lift from the staff's perspective. But if it's not your, if you think there are other things that are higher priority, we would need to know that.

They I step in the building height if we're looking at adding that in for lodging uses and make it a comparable to residential it's going to help the downtown vision of promoting more lodging right yep. And similar with the FAR, I mean, if we have to 100% park every project that's done, then you'd rather have it wrapped and be internal. It can't take away from the commercial because that's still a requirement for the development to go through anyways is a certain amount of commercial, right?

Yeah, I mean, that's definitely the feedback we got through the process.

It's not fair to say that it would take away from commercial. You're just going to wrap it and not look at the cars that are parked there and take it away from the far. Take it out of that far calculation. Ms. Dixon. I'm in support of moving forward.

Councillor Dixon.

So to be super clear, the reason why Rebecca is presenting us with those two options is because of that new goal. Right? This is why. And if you look at the work that Rebecca and her team have done, they have been chipping away holistically on the plan. Now we're directing Rebecca and team to only focus on dimensions.

Well, and I was going to suggest, besides those two, what else could we do? Yes, I'm not done, though.

No, no, I want you to stay. So we have just created a problem for Rebecca and team because now their direction is to review these dimensions when we look at the downtown plan. So that's on us, and that's why we have these two recommendations in front of us tonight. That was the direction we gave Rebecca. So Rebecca, question for you. When I look at the downtown plan, I see tension with the different areas. And so how, so specifically when we talk about LUZ 6.3, which is on your recommendation for the building height, What happens if that is in conflict with CB 2.2, which is celebrate the proximity of the Yampa River to downtown, open views to the Yampa River across city parks. So that's just one example. But how, so now we're directing you to come up with very specific dimensional changes without possibly considering impacts to other areas of the plan.

Well, I think the reason, the idea behind LUZ 6.3 is not, we already allow a certain building height for residential in the downtown. This would just extend that same allowable building height to a hotel use. So I don't think it's, we're not talking about increasing building height across the board for all uses. That's what, like I said, this was a very specifically written recommendation because I think that it was considered, there wasn't consensus you know, we heard from some stakeholders in the process, we should go taller. We hear from many others that want it to stay exactly the same. And we have a lot of properties that are only one story in our downtown and the code already allows if they do residential, they can go three. So I think that that was sort of through the planning process that was vetted out a little bit like, well, if we already allow it for residential, and that was intended to incentivize residential uses downtown and now we want to incentivize hotels that's probably palatable um right what activates the community more a lodging use or drbo condos

Well, I mean, I mean, I think, you know, if we go back to 2019, I mean, you know, housing was a lot different than right. I mean, in the sense of where we have a housing crisis. Right. So I'm not sure that I'm willing to back off of residential in terms of being an allowance for building height. I'd love to see that restricted in some way. I don't know, Dan, if that's possible in terms of saying that it does have to be, I mean, I think workforce, residential, or that there has to be some component to, there has to be some component to workforce.

Give the top floor to studios for people.

Right, or some floor or something like that, right? I mean, I just think that, you know, that absolutely has changed since 2019 in terms of the way we think about things.

So I think what you're talking about would be like an incentive. And I think the code could be written that you could get additional height for certain types, you know, for deed restricted residential or something like that. Um, the code doesn't restrict that now it's any kind of residential. So I, um, that would in some ways kind of be like a down zoning to some degree, if we were to add that restriction now, not, I don't think impossible. I just think that would be a really big community dialogue.

I think we're entering into a huge community dialogue either way. And so kind of back to your point, or I mean, what I heard Rebecca say, I mean, this is staff capacity. This is, I mean, you look at how much time it's taken us this evening.

I know, but you can't think that we're going to have workforce housing there when we have a Campbell property where we have the blank slate. I mean, we're going to dictate affordable housing and hotel developments or prime real estate in downtown. I don't see that.

Yeah, it doesn't make sense when it costs so much to buy.

And it's not adding to the vibrancy of commercial uses downtown. Yeah.

Well, I would also just call your attention to strategy LUZ 2.4. And I just wanna recognize upfront, this is sort of an oddly worded recommendation from a planner's perspective, because it's not really telling us what to do, it's telling us what not to do. And it specifically says, do not modify the CDC to decrease the allowed scale of development that is currently in place. So there was some public comment and there was some push to increase allowable scale. That wasn't across the board sort of consensus, but there was a consensus that at the very least we shouldn't decrease.

But what's also in there, but you said was not clarified is the aspect of, You may want to position things like hotels outside of the zone between 9th Street and 5th Street. And just, but, so making that change, again, is there an interconnect? And I'm just trying to sort of hash through, make sure we're really thinking through this, that When you said that, it kind of made sense. It's like keep more of the commercial space within today's commercial zone and the end units that feed into that commercial zone could potentially be more residential, hotel-ish type of things. That's what I was kind of reading from what you were saying.

I would actually, I believe the plan would have included hotel and sort of that commercial retail restaurant core. And when it talked about more flexibility, so right now, primarily you're required to have some sort of commercial use on the ground floor within the pedestrian active frontage. The idea about allowing greater flexibility sort of on the fringes was around perhaps you can do residential on the ground floor by right or without a bunch of variances or more office, because that's another thing that we... you know office brings people workers into the downtown that's sort of a daytime population but you certainly don't want a bunch of office spaces in the core where you don't have that sort of pedestrian you know that lively activated space so i would suggest i my understanding of the plan was looking more to like residential office spaces and i would continue i would suggest that hotel uses would be desired within that core

Wouldn't it also, you mentioned what, 2 point, whatever that was, 2.4, but I look at 2.3. It says maintain the potential for the diversity and variety of land use to increase over time and respond to future market conditions. And I would say that the future market conditions are we need hotels downtown, not, you know, four condos, luxury condos. in a space. So that to me would support that variety of land use that we haven't seen since that period of time, specifically around hotel use.

Well, and it seems like what I'm kind of hearing is that To put a hotel, right now, the code doesn't really allow that third floor the height same as the commercial. And so this is just kind of one of those aspects. But I have to qualify, you know, guys, do you think a hotel in downtown is not attractive? at any block from any part of the downtown plan, if someone came in and said, we're going to tear down the Chieftain and put it up a hotel, maybe that's a bad example.

Terrible. That's a bad example.

But you know what I'm saying? I'm just asking you guys as councilmen, it seems like your dialogue is leaning toward not wanting any hotels downtown.

I'm trying to understand what the plan is saying.

Okay.

And that's kind of, okay. And identifying where there's maybe some inconsistencies or competingness between what they're requesting or proposing.

May I ask Rebecca another clarifying question? When we talk about this height change, so looking at the different zones in downtown, this is kind of to Michael's comment. So right now, anyone could build some type of lodging development, three stories, condos, whatever that would look like, in, say, a commercial oak till. And what you're presenting tonight is to say we want to change that to allow hotels to be built in commercial Oak II with three floors. That would be the same as what we're allowing currently for other lodging.

No, what the plan says is that the code should be amended to allow hotels to be the same height that we allow residential uses to be. So when we look at our individual downtown zone districts, if we look at, let's start with CO, commercial old town. I don't have my glasses, so hold on, I have to.

So just take the Wells Fargo or the Oak Street side of that, right? You still wouldn't be able to apply that taller height because it's not a use by right.

No, no. I'm sorry, let me clarify. Okay, so if we look at CO, which is primarily Lincoln Avenue, there is an overall building height of... 28 feet if there's not residential on the uppermost floor. If you add residential on the uppermost floor, you get 38 feet by right. So that's on Lincoln. If we look at Oak Street, if we look at sort of this side, the side we're on, CK2, there you don't have a differentiation. So it wouldn't impact that CY2 district. So we don't already allow a greater height for residential on Oak Street. It's only in CO and I believe CY2. Yes. So it would be Yampa and Lincoln where this code amendment, potential code amendment would impact because that's where we already make that differentiation between residential and non-residential.

Okay, so right now, if someone had residential on Lincoln, it could go 38 feet. And what this code change is proposing is that a hotel could go in on Lincoln and be 38 feet. Correct. Thank you.

And then I just wanted to address Councillor Byrne's comments. So right now, hotels downtown in all the zone districts, I believe, are conditional use. That means the use itself would require Planning Commission approval, but the height is, if you meet the dimensional standards of the code, the conditional use doesn't really give us the ability to say, that has to be lower. We'd have to tie it to some unique impact of that hotel that would allow us to place some additional height restriction on it, and I have a hard time thinking of what that, a legitimate sort of impact would be that we'd be mitigating. So the hotel would be evaluated, is this an appropriate use in this location? And if yes, then it would be able to go to 38 feet if the code were amended.

And it's also important to remember that downtown has different design standards. So I think many people are thinking a hotel, you're going to get the hotel that you are thinking of on Highway 40, you're going to plop that down in downtown. And that's not the case. You're going to get a hotel that meets the design standards of downtown. Setbacks and things like that. Look like a downtown building.

Like the Hilton Garden Inn. What's that? It's not going to be a Hilton Garden Inn.

Well, it could be branded as a Hilton Garden Inn, but it's certainly not going to look like that. It's going to look like a building that is appropriate for that.

Would it look like, I mean, Alpenglow or House in Place? I mean, if you look at House in Place and the picture that you guys had that we saw, I mean, the facade is so different and unique going down one block, and it's the entire block, but yet it looks like a totally, that could be a hotel, but it was made into condos. that are not occupied all the time. And I love having the Bristol because the Bristol gives a lot of vibrancy.

Right now, developers won't put in a hotel because they can't generate enough rooms to generate enough revenue, basically.

That's the bottom line. But can't they come in and ask, I mean, if they developed it and asked for a variance? What we're trying to do is avoid variances by building the code, right? And so right now, it's a conditional use, and they could ask for variances. I mean, it's not like they can't do it. They just risk spending all the money in the development design phase to then be shot down.

We know of several who wanted to do it, and they ended up not doing it. Yeah.

Help me understand that though, right? I mean, you said, I thought that it was 38 feet on commercial Yampa. On CY.

If you have resident, if you have resident, oh, on C1, let me double check. No, C1 is going to be lower. C1. C1, we do not differentiate. So the riverside of commercial Yampa would not have a differentiation. And the overall height for any type of use is, I think, 36 feet, if I can read that.

But the Lincoln side of Yampa. Yeah.

The Lincoln side of Yampa is zoned CY2. Overall height right now is limited to 28 feet unless you have residential on the uppermost floor, and then you get 38 feet.

What are we talking about? Four parcels, maybe?

I'm not going to make any assumptions about redevelopment.

There's not a whole lot left, right?

Well, but the rest of downtown Lincoln... tear down some old buildings and put up a hotel. I mean, it's all about money. This plan was developed right before COVID. So lots has changed since then. Has there been any conversation about, not updating it, because I know it's a lot of work, but re-looking at it? We don't have a dying downtown. We have a thriving downtown. We really do. And so I think things were a lot different in 2019 versus, So what are your thoughts?

I mean, certainly I think our community has changed. I think, you know, if you're all reading the downtown plan feeling like it's no longer relevant or sort of like the underlying theme is no longer, accurate or presenting the vision for our community, then I think, yeah, it would be time to update the plan. Okay.

I'm not feeling that. I think I'm going back to my... I wish we were doing a holistic review. It's bugging me, not you, but that we're picking out.

That's bugging me. If there were some things... If we go back and look at the development plan downtown, and granted, staff picked out a couple... But we can pick out a couple too. I mean, so look at it and go, maybe there's some things that we think we want to address, then let's have that discussion over the next six months and see where we go. Because I agree, I don't think I want to limit it to just these two pigeonhole design development dimensional standards. You guys have brought up a great point. I mean, there may be some other aspects of it. So my question to you is, What are they? And I will look at the code this next couple weeks with that same caveat. Like, is there something I wish we could talk about? And I will bring it to us and say, hey, besides this FAR and the parking deal, We should look at the X, and I don't know what X is. So I don't want to limit your ability to bring that up just because staff says, well, there's two that we want to work on. We have the ability to say, what about one or two others? But the question to you guys is, what are those other two others? And so let's have the freedom as counsel to be able to look at those and say, you know what? I was talking to some people, and maybe there's a couple other things in the development plan we would like to consider. So let's take this opportunity not to just hone in on two. We're not going to try to create more, too much more work, but we need the council to at least have the opportunity to say, what would those two things be? Clearly it was a conflicting conversation that we've had. So you need to have the freedom as a councilman But be specific. Besides these two that the staff put up, what would be the ones that you think we should address? And then let's talk about it. And then maybe we say, okay, add that to that, make it three, make it four, and then limit it to those things and kind of see where it goes. That's what I would propose because I don't want to shut you guys down.

Okay. And I would love obviously staff's recommendations. I know you all have been focusing on it as well. So if there are other areas that you think are important outside of the dimension that we've now directed you to do, you know, I'd love to hear your opinion on that. Okay. And the FAR, I do have concerns. I mean, I do have concerns about removing parking from FAR. Does anyone else or no? No? Yeah. You do?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think the bigger buildings.

Yeah. Right?

And I think we just need to think differently about parking, right? I mean, from the perspective of, you know, back to the mobility part that, you know, that we have parking and mobility recommendations in the downtown plan. But I guess I go back to Tom from the perspective of, again, what I asked before is we've got limited capacity, staff capacity, and we are, we have some significant housing goals that we need to achieve. So Do we have the bandwidth? I mean, I appreciate your suggestion, Councilor Pacino, because I think that that's exactly what we need to do is we need to look, you know, again, look at this as, I love, I would love holistically, but I understand, right? I mean, in terms of trying to start picking away at it, but I'm concerned that we don't, that we need, that we don't want to divert our attention away from our other goals.

I think we're missing one point here, that we voted on this four to three to go after these two. All right? So I have no issue with looking at two others or three others three months from now or whatever and seeing if we have support of a majority of council for those. But I think tonight we, you know, and there's only six of us here tonight. So I think we need to come to a conclusion here to Rebecca's question here. And that was somewhere in here. I know we haven't had public comment yet. Not that there will be much, but the point is that, you know, we can go back and forth on this and say, well, let's add a few more, and do we have the capacity to do that or not? But the real issue here is we voted four to three to add this to our council goals, and now here it is in front of us tonight. So I think we owe it to... decide on this and not say, well, let's pitch this four months or five months down the road and see if we want to add a couple more. And then we're into a problem with staff time and everything else. I think we need to make a decision on what we have tonight, one way or the other, and move on.

Yeah, I mean, when we had those discussions in the past, I don't think that the, or I'm suspecting that the downtown plan was not well read by council. And I'm expecting that people have read it more and have a little more insight into it. And one of the things that the plan highlighted is the low density relative to other resort mountain towns of downtown businesses. And they're not well represented. And so does this also increase the number of businesses in downtown by increasing a... by making these changes. And I question that that is the answer. Yeah.

We could disagree on that.

Yeah. I mean, that's why we're here, to make decisions. And so I think we're... I don't want to separate. I mean, the decision is really based on this tonight. We're throwing a lot of other stuff in there now. And I think we need to make a decision on this.

Well, you're president.

Well, that's where I am. I mean, as far as I'm concerned, and I lost the question, Rebecca, but before we do that, are there any other questions for Rebecca? Let's follow the process. We OK?

Can I just make one comment? Because the question on the last slide, I think, is, you know, should we move forward? If you all are like, no, let's not move forward, then we'll take that direction. But I just want to be clear, even absent with this goal, at some point in time, you probably would have seen staff bring an amendment forward, just like you saw the last lodging proposal. We try to update our codes and we try to implement our plans all the time. So we're always... either they're sort of those like housekeeping sort of cleanup amendments that you see, or we try to tackle some specific recommendations in a plan. We try to keep our, we're trying to improve our code. The design standards project is a direct recommendation out of the mountain area master plan and the community plan. That is us trying to implement that plan. So you might all see this amendment come forward at some time anyway even absent this council goal unless i hear from you all tonight like don't even don't spend your time then obviously we won't do that but i just wanted to mention that that's a good point thank you okay is there anybody in the room who would like to make public comment anybody online please raise your hand if you'd like to make public comment

Seeing none, we will close public comment, bring it back to council for deliberation or an answer to the question, should staff move forward with this council goal?

I'll ask Rebecca another question. So when you look at the, I'm a broken record, the connectivity, parking, and mobility, is there an alternative in terms of the suggestion about the floor, that far and parking in the sense of to the extent that we talk about intercept parking lots, right, or public-private partnerships to build additional public parking. So, you know, when we think about where we are today, instead of maybe moving forward with that recommendation, is it an option to say, okay, a developer could pay into a fund that ultimately supports a remote parking lot.

So we already have a fee in lieu, payment in lieu of parking. We rarely ever get anyone to pay it. I don't know how much we have accumulated in that fund, but it's certainly not enough for us to... develop additional, significant additional parking. So I would say we already have that option in place, and I think that while the code speaks a lot to parking improvements, including things like intercept lots, remote lots, that kind of thing, and increased transit, I don't think that that was, I think that was in concert with maintaining our current code requirements, that property, that uses do provide some of their own parking. So one thing to keep in mind is that our code requires parking for different uses, but it's certainly not you know, a retail space, it's like one per 900 square feet or something like that. You look at, let's use the Yampa Valley Kitchen restaurant as an example. That restaurant, I think, was approved with three parking spaces. That met our code. Obviously, they generate a need for a lot more than three parking spaces. So I think that the recommendations that have to do with public parking are intended and needed regardless of what, I don't think they were, the thought wasn't that it replaces the need for some sort of onsite parking for individual uses. That would be a pretty different shift, I think, if we were to move away, like decrease what's required onsite. That would probably mean we'd have to do a whole lot more in the public parking realm to make up for that.

picking up much higher density of building without any parking.

But these, I mean, but that's a repetitive, I mean, again, that's an issue that we're hearing a lot about, right? So I think we need to think differently about the way and if we, you know, if we don't have enough money, then maybe we're not charging enough, right? I mean, I mean, again, things have changed a lot since 2019.

Are we ready to go thumbs up or thumbs down on this? Council?

So we're going to address each one. I think that the question from Rebecca is for guidance on the building height for lodging uses and for the exempt above grade circuit parking from FAR, correct?

Do you see these as one thumbs up or down on both or do you see these as separate?

I mean, I think it can go either way. I was thinking that based on your council goal, these two would be packaged together.

I mean... Do you want to separate them out?

I would like to separate them out. I'm sorry, Rebecca. I didn't mean to cut you off. I would like to separate them out based on Rebecca's description of the building height for lodging. So, Rebecca, thank you so much for, like, walking me through that and the different zones. I'm okay with that. I am not okay with the floor area ratio unless we have more conversations around parking and other aspects of the downtown plan that we can help alleviate some of that. So once we're ready to incorporate more of the plan with this FAR exemption, I'm a no for that one.

All right, are we ready? And I'll say I concur.

Okay. Then we are going to go thumbs up or thumbs down on modify the CDC to allow the same building height for lodging uses as residential on the upper floor, LUZ 6.3. All those in favor?

Okay. Opposed? Again, I'm just opposed from a pure resource perspective and knowing what we have before us and how we need to stay focused from a staff perspective.

Understood. So that was 5-1 on that. And then on modify the CDC to exempt above grade structured parking from floor area ratio when wrapped with active uses CPM 3.11. Okay. All those in favor, thumbs up. All those opposed, thumbs down. Okay. So that's three to three, which means that that does not pass. Is that correct?

Okay.

I feel there's just too much interconnection between.

Yeah. Okay. I mean, yeah.

Again, we've already hashed it out.

All right.

Thank you, Rebecca. Thanks for taking us through that. All right. I will take a motion to adjourn.

So moved.

Motion Council of Pacino, Second Council of Gary. All those in favor, say aye.

Aye. We are adjourned.