City Council - Regular Meeting

And it is now 5 p.m. So, Julie, would you read roll call, please?

Steve Muntean.

Here.

Gail Gary.

Gail's online. We should. Here I am. There she is. Yep.

John Agosta.

Here.

Dave Barnes.

Here.

Michael Baccino.

Here.

Amy Dixon. Here. And Brian Swintek.

Brian will be a little late, but he will be zooming in. So we'll just keep an eye out for Brian. Okay, let's rise for that. There's a flag in the Bennett and one up in the front. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Okay, good. Well, it's good to be indoors right now, I think, given that my car said 101 this afternoon. I don't know if that's possible, but it is hot. So anyway, we will be taking public comment tonight at two different times. The general public comment on any topic will occur at either 6 p.m. or after the city manager's report, whichever comes first. So if you want to make public comment on a topic not on the agenda tonight, feel free to do that at that point in time, either in person or online. With that... We are going to move into our city council reports tonight. And who would like to kick us off tonight? Councillor Barnes.

I could start us off with just a recap from the apartment market. It was probably the busiest as far as engagement went, I think, all summer. It was three big resounding sort of themes for it, but there was a few... A few comments. All the benches on Lincoln that are facing the street should be turned around so they face the sidewalks rather than facing the parked cars. Somebody at the Steamboat Art Museum said they were facing the wrong direction. I said I would go down at 10 o'clock at night and do it myself, but I didn't. install shade sails in Civic Plaza. The three years down, there was a second homeowner I want to shout out to the staffer. He said it was our STR system is the easiest he's ever seen. I see he was very complimentary of how easy it was to follow, understand and the rules. He's from Oregon and has dealt with a few other towns and said there's a way more complicated. So I figured that should definitely get passed along. The three big themes were flock cameras are starting to be a reoccurring theme. And then e-bikes and e-bike safety. I'll say I fielded my first threat as a city official to be sued, not to be harmed. He leaned in and said, I've got your number, Mr. Barnes, and there's a tragedy on the bike path. We will be suing the city and you personally. I said, well... That's really not how it works.

And after about 10 minutes, we ended up almost hugging it out, and we were fine.

But that's the resounding theme. And it seems like everybody has the same talking points, which is, feels like we're waiting for the tragedy that so many are predicting in order to get serious about this. Complaints from, it was from drivers of vehicles, motor vehicles, saying that e-bikers are passing them on the right, not sort of yielding, not understanding what the cars are doing. Electric motorcycles without even pedals on the roads, sidewalks, and on the bike paths. Some folks asked about rental shops filling in visitors as to the rules about sidewalks, bike paths and being a good e-bike driver. Let's see. And then, you know, the solutions that were kicked around, can we ask the chief of police to redirect animal control to do some enforcement on the bike path, license every e-bike over the wattage limit, easier for police to know who's driving it, boys to chase, fines going to parents of minors. more education of kids, seizure of e-motorcycles on roads and sidewalks. Just feels like that we're getting to that point that we're gonna have to be more proactive or at least maybe do a presentation in council on this. I know we have something scheduled, right, Tom? Anything I missed?

Um, yeah, flat cameras. Um, maybe, um, I, I got a number of, uh, people that talk to me about flat cameras. Um, and basically my, my response to them is, you know, we're planning a town hall meeting, uh, in the near future. And so, um, whenever we can get that, whenever we know those dates and how that's going to work, it'd be great to get a city, um, uh, release, uh, you know, public release about that.

And I believe Tom, we have a date.

Yeah, we have scheduled for August 25th, and we're working on a press release to get that out.

Yeah, I think it was at 5 o'clock or 4? Yeah, it'll be 5 o'clock. 5 o'clock in here, August 25th.

August 25th, he says.

August 25th, which is, yeah, the fourth Tuesday of the month.

Yeah.

Anything else from you, Consular Barnes, or are you good? Well, it sounds like you guys had a lively time at the farmer's market last weekend.

Yeah, it was busy. Okay.

You want to keep going this way, and we'll go around?

I have some stuff around the retreat, but I think you have it overall. So let me hold that until after your discussion on the retreat. The only other item is I did attend, in Councilor Pacino's absence, the mountain rail, and it was actually – I was really surprised. I mean, they are moving on the front range. I mean, they have a number of them are very, very close to identifying the terminals and it's feeling like they're making some really good progress on that front. So it's moving, it's moving. I was looking through here, they also had, a consultant come in and give a give a talk to the entire colorado mountain rail um organization and it was really intriguing because um well he came from um uh what's our local or our federal um uh passenger transit uh system um Amtrak. Yeah. So he worked for Amtrak for a number of years on the managerial side. And he actually came in and he used as a use case a mountain rail between Yapa and Craig. And he says this is, you know, of all the all the routes for. uh local rail you know opportunities um he felt that that was the strongest and and so he encouraged the um consort consortium to you know really look at that as basically you know if we can succeed with with one for going from yappa to craig then we can certainly take that footprint and and make it work in other you know other parts of the state so yeah so it was encouraging

Councillor Pacino.

Yeah, it was a light week. The Building Oversight Committee is what we did on Wednesday of last week. And just kind of an update, we do it quarterly, four times a year. And we're just kind of projected on budget with our... It actually has our permit fees and our user use fee may actually be increased a little bit depending on what happens with the... Stockman and some of the large projects that are coming online. So we'll see that in the third quarter and fourth quarter permit fees. So that may push us well above budget. We have a very nice reserve in there. One thing I wanted to mention to anybody in the development community that we passed and goes into effect July 1st of this year is the wildfire resiliency program. And that has a huge impact to building materials that are used for the outside of the buildings and even inside. And so right now there's a lot of applications, the permit may not have been approved. And so any new permits have to fall into that new guidance. there's a lot of redesigning going on. And if they haven't, they need to, because it's not the same code. The building code has changed, and it's a little more stringent with wildfire resiliency. So just let everybody in the community know that that is definitely something that's going to happen. And it is in effect, and it's being enforced right now. So you cannot get a building permit if you don't have the right materials. So as people are bringing them in, the building department, that's the check gate for everybody. And they'll tell them, that doesn't approve. Go get something else. And so we'll see how this goes. But that was, again, as everyone here knows, but as the community needs to know, that was a pass-through by the state government. We're just following the rules of our Colorado state rules. Nothing we can do.

Well, for homeowners, right, they should plan ahead because there's a much smaller pool of materials that can be used. Yes. So people are ordering them up in bulk. And so there's a shortage already of some of those fire-approved materials. So folks, even homeowners that have to do renovations.

A big part of it is like even LP siding, which we think is a resilient kind of siding. And it's a... is not approved. A hardy plank or a fiber cementus board could be, but some of those that you would think are good are no longer approved anymore. So thanks, Dave. That's it. Thank you.

Okay, two quick updates. I just wanted to follow up on the comments I made at the July 7th, I believe, council meeting regarding the change with Steamboat Ski Corps to only market homes in their in-house program at Steamboat.com and Steamboat Central Res. I reached out to Ski Corps directly, the leadership, on Sunday. I wanted to give them some breathing room, because they were dealing with the Fish Hook fire last week, and that was, I'm sure, very time-consuming. But really, my ask to them was to consider postponing the change. And that I do recognize this is ultimately their business decision to make. I also asked to really work with the lodging community with the transition plan. I can only assume the lodging community had a very difficult year last year, as many businesses did. And I really emphasize I would love to see more proactive communication and changes like this in the community and really to engage folks. Again, I get these are business decisions that they're making, but I wanted to be clear on my expectations that may not match theirs. And that's fine. But I feel like I just need to be clear on that. And, you know, I just want to make sure that everyone knows that I don't have a grudge towards Ski Corps. and I don't want to be in the middle of these conversations, but when community members bring concerns to me like this one, it's my responsibility to step in. And that's why I ran for council. So I will always stand by that. I will speak for our community. I feel it's important to be updating council when I'm hearing things from community members. And we all have our own little community members that we know and that talk to us. And the working middle class folks are my people. And those are the ones who I'm hearing from. service industry um our trade industry landscapers all of it i mean that's the work that i used to do and i um stay connected with all my friends so um i'll keep it posted if i hear back from ski corps but i just kind of wanted to close the loop i did put the ask out they would just consider postponing um to engage the lodging community a little bit more about a transition plan My last request is for my fellow council members who are on the chamber board. You and Brian, I wonder. So for anyone who's following the news, fire coverage has dominated the headlines. I mean, it's like I won't even repeat what Bill or Bill Owen said back in the early 2000s. For those of you that are around and he was governor and he made that comment about the state being on fire, which is not good for our economy. So I'm just concerned that this kind of coverage could cause people to reconsider visiting the mountains, particularly steamboats. And I mean, yeah, it's hot right now. But we've had some beautiful days now that we've had containment of the fires by stagecoach. I just got an update that the fishhook is 55, I think I just saw. percent contained. And so I don't want to disregard the really important work that our folks are doing to fight the fires. And I want to find a way to still support our businesses and bring people to our community, especially, again, coming off of a really difficult winter. So I don't know if this is something you could bring up to the chamber, if they can be proactively putting things out. I think I just quickly glanced online and saw lots of updates on fire activity, which is great. And now I'm like, okay, and now I'm bringing people back in. Like, it's safe to travel. Come visit Steamboat. So anyway, I would love if you could bring that up. It might be too late in the season now, and gosh, summer's almost half over. But that's just a concern that, yeah, skies are clear, and we're open for business.

On the lodging thing, I think, Gail, you may be, there's the chamber Tuesdays, or whenever they have them, we kind of went to the chamber breakdown group Tuesdays. Or whenever they have them, we kind of went to the chamber breakdown group. but um that's one i think we'd like to get a report back this next month on this steamboat hospitality and kind of hear the tone and tenor of that group specifically so yeah keep your thumbs up so we want to make sure that we get there and kind of hear from them with a little bit longer than just a three-minute conversation so hopefully i'll bring that up so is ski core at those meetings

So I would just be careful. That's the awkwardness.

It's fine, but this is the whole lodging bosses all in one room. I don't know if they're there or not. That's fine. At least some of their people in there. Maybe not the top, definitely people.

And my last request, Tom, I don't know if we do any social media around this, but if we're pushing anything out to come visit SEMA, this might be a good time.

Yeah, we can certainly look at that. So I just wanted you to know that when we when Chief Sarasoli and the other staff meets with they go every day to the incident command updates, when the new complex incident management team came in, they asked what the city's highest priorities were. Obviously, we talked about some of our assets, but we also said one of our major priorities, economic development. And so they have been trying to the best of their ability with the messaging going through that lens. They recognize the impact on our economy. We also said that keeping Highway 40 was critical for our economy. So they were very focused on that as well. So I think we've been giving them that message. And I think also talking to the chamber and doing some proactive efforts on our part is probably a good idea.

Yeah, and I respect so much the work that they're doing, and I would never expect them to then fight fires and get the communication out on that, and then also somehow try to weave in, like, oh, but we're open for business. Like, I do not expect that from them, but there's other ways we can weave that in. Like, I think about URA down in southern Colorado. I mean, they were like, please come. You know, yeah, we have a fire, but our businesses really need to see you all, so...

okay that's it good point thank you um and julie let the record show that counselor swintec is now with us uh and we'll go to both of our um zoom invitees tonight counselor gary do you have anything to report uh my main report will be on slate creek when we get there in terms of reporting out on last week's okay thank you and counselor swintec anything from you nothing to report Okay, then coming back to the retreat a little bit, I wanted to share that what has actually gone on the last 12 or 18 months since this council was established took his oath in office here. And there's a lot of things that have happened. I just want to share a few with the community tonight because I think it's important that we shared these at our retreat. And I won't spend much time on them except to say that here's a few. Slade Creek, I hope you're familiar with that we closed on Slade Creek. That's really exciting news. And there's some big articles on that locally. Another thing we've done is we've completed the Stockbridge purchase and we are working on a plan now around that piece of property to move forward with affordable housing and potentially some other uses like childcare or maybe senior facility. We're in the process of moving forward on the Slate Creek annexation piece. for November 27. So all those things are in motion. We've had a reset at Yampa Valley Housing Authority. We've made some property management changes there. We're going to have our six-month review on those changes, which seem to be working because we're not hearing any negative feedback at this point in time. The Cottonwoods has been open and Those purchased for different levels of AMI has gone well. If you're not aware, they just reduced some of the units to 100 to 120% AMI from 120 to 140. So if you're interested, go to YVHA.org slash Cottonwoods and get your name in there. A few other things, home-based steamboat, a deed-restricted pilot program we've implemented and that's moving forward. We're gonna get final recommendations on some inclusionary zoning potentials. We've... Made a lot of progress on STRs in terms of the process and the litigation and the fines have been changed significantly. And we haven't heard much negative feedback anymore on that. We've made some changes with the chamber and using some local marketing district funding to help fund the chamber. We've increased bus service frequency. We've ordered new buses. We got the West Steamboat Trail going and we have a lot of potential for the RTA that's moving forward. Decarbonization and the environment is in the works, water conservation, geothermal, community engagement efforts. We're writing articles, trying to be more transparent, educate the public, communicate more than ever. Fiscal sustainability, we're looking at a stormwater fee. We're looking at the possible fire consolidation district. We're looking at bond financing for capital projects where the community is interested. And that's very important that if we do go out and get some bonds that those bonds are allocated specifically towards projects that the community is looking for. So that's a lot of good stuff going on. There's more, a lot more, but I just think we should feel good about the progress we're making and we want to keep making progress. Before I turn it over to talk about some other progress that's being made here, I wanted to also just... mentioned and we mentioned this at the retreat as well that we would like to have the community mental health survey results at a community report put on by the valley community foundation and the health partnership we talked about that i just want to make sure we still all in agreement to have them do a community report in september and october yeah and counselors gary and swintek um Your thumbs are up, hopefully, maybe. Okay. Thank you. And I think that's going to be very important because mental health is so important in this community. And, you know, there's a number of people who are obviously cost burdened with rent, having to work many jobs, having to find childcare. So I think that's a very important piece that we're going to look forward to looking at the survey results in September or October. And I also want to turn it, you know, we talked also about As Councilor Gary said, Slate Creek, which she'll give an update on. We talked a bit about the MOU with Ski Corps, which we'll be talking about a little bit later. But I also want to turn it over to Councilor Agosta to share something else we talked about and some good news.

Yeah, thank you. So one of the other accomplishments we were talking about, it was Whistler Park. So city council discussed the funding for the city's purchase of Whistler Park land from Siembo Springs School District. So last fall, the district decided they wanted to sell the Whistler Park property to help fund a 22 unit teacher housing complex near the Sleeping Giant School. and gave the city the first opportunity to actually purchase that land. And we jumped on that opportunity. A little bit about Whistler Park. Whistler Park's almost 15 acres, but 9.2 of those acres belong to the school district. So only 5.6 acres are officially city park land. The city has long maintained the district's portion for lacrosse, soccer, volleyball, and the city's only rugby field. It's where dogs run free and where you'll see cranes, elk, and moose as they pass through the Walton Creek. This purchase keeps all of it a park permanently going forward. The original funding that we had proposed committed $1.8 million of accommodation tax with the remaining 1.8 coming from grants and private donations. After evaluating the grant path, Council committed at the retreat last Friday to fund the full $3.6 million purchase through the accommodation tax, which is exactly what the tax was created for, the purchase of parkland and developing trails. The city already has made $100,000 down payment with the remaining $3.5 million due in July of 27. Council has directed staff to appropriate those funds in the 2027 budget to be finalized in October. There's, we had many people who actually did contribute already to the purchase fund that we had set up for the purchase of Whistler Park. You know, every dollar we were reaching out to each one of those contributors and, but every dollar raised will go towards the purchase of the park. And lastly, I'd like to thank Parks and Rec. They were instrumental in actually putting together this contract, negotiating with the school district and getting us a contract in place. So thank you, that's great news. We're gonna move forward with bringing the entire Whistler Park into the city parkland.

Okay, thank you, good news. okay um is there any other reports from anyone before we uh turn it over to counselor gary to talk a little bit about slate creek steering committee any other

Okay, Councillor Getsch. I'd like to add just a comment to Councillor Dixon's discussion about housing management companies or rental management companies. And I also reached out to one of the larger ones and had a discussion. And to help understand the problem a little more. And one of the things that really highlighted is basically when they were able to host their with steamboat.com, they were actually ability to actually sell entire packages. So it's not just come, you know, people are here on vacation. They don't want just the rental or many people don't want just the rental of the beds. They also want ski passes and they want, you know, getting fitted for skis and transportation and everything. And so basically their added value is be able to package up the entire solution for their guests. And that is something that they're going to deeply miss.

Okay, thank you. Councilor Gary.

All right. Thank you, Council President Lunteen. Tom and Councilor Barnes and I attended the last Slate Creek Steering Committee meeting on July 14th. And we'll distinct that's the discussions regarding how to use the kind of formerly known Brown Ranch and not to be confused with the Slate Creek Parkland acquisition that Councilor or President Lunteen mentioned earlier in his comments. So as I mentioned, we did have our Last steering committee meeting on the 14th of July, we focused on communications approach as well as specifically on the project roadmap planning. The steering committee decided to recommend moving forward with a project roadmap that takes us to an annexation project. takes the annexation agreement to a vote in November of 2027. The assumption is that the parcel will be smaller and it will be kind of within the confines of the municipal constraint analysis, infrastructure analysis that has been presented. The roadmap does contemplate a developer advisory committee and that we will likely have some sort of developer partner selected to make sure that they buy into the process for the final plan that is presented. The steering committee also approved the continuing to move forward with community builders and Civic Canopy for ongoing facilitation as well as community engagement, acknowledging the work that they have done to date and specifically just the knowledge that they have of this project and the various different players and the history in terms of what we've been through, as well as wanting to make sure that we don't, that we can continue to move forward and don't lose kind of any time in terms of moving from this phase to the next phase. We will also be looking to secure a consultant to support the various different scenarios that will come about during kind of the next planning process. Yampa Valley Housing Authority will bring back a proposal, which includes funding as well as budget implications to the next meeting of the steering committee, which will happen sometime in August. We're in the process of trying to find a time and a day for that as well. YBHA kind of in the meantime is also talking with city staff and reviewing the constraint analysis, kind of what needs to be done from an infrastructure perspective, as well as kind of all of the other things that play in to come bring back to the committee kind of discussion in terms of what's the real expectation as to the date that someone could actually move into something that is built out at Slate Creek. And just the intent of the committee going forward is to make sure that we create a financially feasible implementation project that has community support. The goal is to instill confidence in the process and the plan and make sure that the roadmap that we move forward with answers questions that came up during the last annexation agreement discussion. We also... recognize and want to make sure that make, make it clear that what's going to be built out at Slate, you know, potentially built out at Slate Creek, assuming again, that there is community support, that this is just part of the housing solution and just kind of one piece moving forward that we, you know, there's no expectation that it's going to solve all of the problems and I think, as you heard from President Monteen, there's been a lot of work by this council in terms of NYBHA with near-term as well as mid-term opportunities as well for housing as we continue to move forward with Slate Creek. So I think that's kind of predominantly it. Again, just for anybody that has any thoughts or questions about when we talk about scenario planning, the goal really is to look at different housing types and kind of compare the various different metrics and levers as we look at that, as it pertains to cost per unit, water use, transportation, energy, et cetera. And so all of that will be brought back to the community for input. So I think that's the kind of primary update at this point. Happy to answer any questions from council.

Okay. Council, any questions? Or Councilor Gary? Okay. Thank you. Appreciate that. Um, before we move on, uh, Tom, I know we have, you know, the flock, uh, presentation, which will be in, in later in August. And so we have a process moving forward, uh, to address that. It seems like the, these e-bikes and whatnot, just continually to just, um, you know, it's very predictable that at every farmer's market and every couple of days and emails and whatnot, we get something on it. Do you feel we're doing, is there anything else we can do basically regarding this that we should be thinking about?

Mm-hmm. That's a good question. You know, the police department's been working with the Parks and Rec Department. It's in my report tonight about sort of the enhanced education effort that they've been carrying out the last few weeks with pop-ups on the Corps Trail and in different locations, trying to spread the word and trying to educate folks about it. I can't speak to whether it's making an impact or not. Sounds like it's not really. So I think probably it's warranted to have a conversation with the Parks and Rec Commission and the police department about maybe taking a different step or a different strategy. So I think we should have that conversation.

Okay, good. Thank you.

All right, any other thoughts? I think, you know, what's interesting, but it's really not, is that this e-bike problem is a problem across Colorado. And so I wonder if reaching out to other communities, I saw an article recently where an eight-year-old was stopped in Salida riding on the sidewalk. So not an e-bike, but like whatever those other ones are. And so I wonder if we're worth it to also reach out and talk to other communities, because this is a problem probably across the country. Actually, I know it is. So that might be helpful too. Yeah.

One suggestion someone came at the farmer's market, gave to me is basically, can we take the dog enforcement folks and the public service officers and split their duty and have them do some duty on the trail, on the court trails and less duties on dog enforcement or animal enforcement. It was just one idea she threw out.

And that could be part of park and rec and police department process.

Yeah, we'll look at all options.

Okay.

Yeah, Councilor Muntean, President Muntean, I mean, I would actually absolutely support that. I think, Tom, I mean, gosh, in the first couple of years I was on council, Parks and Rec came forward with, I think, a fairly comprehensive plan. But council actually kind of opted to just move forward with a couple of the recommendations. So maybe even taking a look at what those recommendations were. And again, to Council Dixon's point, let's look at what other communities are doing. But I think we're hearing loud and clear that something needs to be done. And so I would absolutely support that so that, again, when we get to next year, maybe we have some stronger things in place. We certainly made some progress, obviously, with requiring helmets and doing education. But I think there's more that can be done.

Yeah. Okay. Okay, everyone, we're going to move on and we're going to look at agenda review here. Our agendas are not really jam-packed, as you'll see coming up. If you look at the August 4th agenda, you will see that we do have a couple of community reports, and we've actually added a third one, the State of the Police Department, which we were going to do tonight, and we've had to postpone that. So that'll be added to the August 4th one. And then we have... you know, very few, no consent calendar items right now. So it's a pretty lean agenda. If you look at August 11th, which is our next work session, we have two things on there, the community engagement strategic plan update and airport, Bob Adams airport operations and revenue. So right now that's what we have going for that. And then on August 18th, as you know, we have canceled that particular meeting because we didn't have much on the agenda at all. So everybody has August 18th off. And then the next meeting on here is September 1st. And September 1st, again, is very light at this point in time. So don't really have too much else planned. to discuss at this point in time around that, unless any of you do. We good?

We're good.

Okay. With that, then we'll go over to Tom for the city manager report.

Great. Thank you, President Muntean. City manager's report can be found on our website, steamboatsprings.net. Tonight's report is on there as well as all the previous reports. So just a reminder, it is organized by our strategic plans outcome areas. And so starting off with thriving community, Just a big kudos. I know it seems like a long time ago, but the ski and rodeo staff, along with Pro Rodeo Series and the Winter Sports Club, hosted a very, very successful 4th of July weekend at Howelson Hill. It included three consecutive rodeos, Nordic ski jumping competition, a lot of other events. So all events were really highly attended. There are a lot of people in town for that. So kudos to the entire staff that worked so hard on that. The Free Concert Series continues in collaboration with the City of Steamboat Springs, continues to bring together locals and visitors at Howelson Hill for live music, great food, and a vibrant community atmosphere. There's been three, or there will be a total of three concerts in July, the last one coming up on the 25th, and then the final concert will take place over Labor Day weekend. Moving on to, oh, and this was mentioned earlier, but just the Slate Creek Parkland Acquisition Project was closed as of yesterday, and you saw there was an announcement today. So that is, again, a big milestone, and congratulations, everyone involved in that purchase. In connected and engaged community, on July 13th, the Historic Preservation Commission designated the Maxwell Squire Building as a local landmark on the Steamboat Springs Register of Historic Places. The Maxwell Squire building is right over here at 840 Lincoln and is home to Lion's Drug, Beard and Braid, and several other businesses. The property meets eligibility for designation under criteria for historical importance and architectural importance. The higher local landmark designation is warranted based on the building's overwhelming significance to the entire community character, sense of place, identity, and collective past. So congratulations to the owners of that, getting that designated as a local landmark. And it's really good timing. I don't know if that building just kind of completed their renovation, looks really good. So very synergistic with those two announcements. I may have mentioned this before, but I'll mention it again. The utility division launched the customer water use portal on June 30th, giving customers an online tool to monitor usage and detect leaks sooner. This has been a goal of the city's for many years and part of our water conservation efforts. So data and information is power, and that is a really, really good way of sort of individuals being able to see their water use live. So go on there to the seamboatsprings.net utility division, and that water portal is on there. Moving on to healthy environment. The Yampa River Botanic Park renovated a garden focusing on plants that are keystone species, meaning the plant is host and food source for numerous pollinator insects and animals, as well as specialist species, meaning the plant has an exclusive relationship with one pollinator. This garden will bring color, cheer, and educational opportunities to this very accessible and visible garden right on the main loop. You know, that's kind of a good news item. I bring that up, too, because this last weekend was the Botanic Park's big fundraising special event, their Passport event, which I attended. And it was a great event, very well attended. If you haven't been to the park lately, I'd go. It is in full bloom. It just continues to impress me with the sort of the benefits The quality of the plants, staff, everything there is just top notch. So a great place to visit. Under high performing government. I just want to mention parks foreman, Stash Kapinski was selected by the Steamboat Pilot as one of this year's 20 under 40 honorees for his leadership, service and positive impact across the Yampa Valley, recognized for his dedication to maintaining high quality parks and supporting the community. So congratulations Stash for, that's a very well respected honor and great to see city employees get that. So congratulations. The city has published the 2025 short-term rental annual report. It's included as an attachment in this report. The report provides a brief overview of the city's short-term rental program and a summary of the 2025 licensing and compliance data. And then future reports will present both annual and trend year-over-year data. So I know that's been requested. Really good data in there in terms of the STR program and kind of the numbers. So take a look at that. House and Ice Arena staff have been actively collecting and analyzing customer service survey data to enhance service delivery and community satisfaction. A total of 233 responses were collected from participants, parents, spectators, and community members involved in arena programming facility use. The survey results indicate exceptionally strong customer satisfaction, positive perceptions of safety and inclusion, and high quality program delivery. The house and ice arena staff and facility received strong marks for safety, customer service, and overall program excellence. It did identify several operational improvement opportunities, primarily related to communication processes, registration systems, scheduling, transparency, and facility maintenance. So again, Citi is a strong proponent of continuous improvement, and this is just another effort to sort of take a look at our operations, get some feedback, and see where those opportunities for improvement lie. Congratulations to that staff for taking that effort. Appreciate that. Steamboat Springs Transit recruiters, Darcy Fikowski and Shane Gassaway completed a successful trip to Alaska. They met a lot of potential candidates and saw several of our winter seasonal drivers in their summer jobs. They have already filled seven of the 22 openings and have 40-plus additional interviews scheduled. This has been a really successful recruitment effort going up to Alaska, and that continues. So we hopefully will have, you know, again, fully staffed for this next winter season. But moving on to safe community, the airport division met with Ian Satterfield, one of our deputies in the fire department and representatives from the State Division of Fire Prevention and Control to discuss placing state-owned firefighting aircraft at the airport during fire season. The state has requested waiver of airport fees for this deployment in the airport division and staff are working with fire department to determine whether a mutual aid agreement with the city should be used in place of fees. So I appreciate sort of looking at some alternatives to that and we're glad to help in any way that we can. reliable and resilient infrastructure outcome. Wastewater treatment staff together with engineers from Jacobs Engineering, Public Works Administration and the Facilities Division held a kickoff meeting on June 30th to begin the wastewater treatment master plan effort, which is expected to last about under a year. And the primary reason we've gone ahead and moved forward with this master plan is kind of the next note. And that is that the Wastewater Treatment Division received an update from the state regarding the plant's discharge permit, which we were kind of waiting for until we moved forward with a master plan. We submitted this about four years ago. The state has since ranked all submitted permits and the city's permit is currently numbered 238 on the list with the state reviewing an average of only 20 permits a year the division does not expect to receive updated permits for several more years so we are moving forward with the master plan we need to make progress on looking at what we can do to improve that wastewater treatment plant and even expand it potentially in the future so that's the effort moving forward Transit summer ridership is currently down 2% and total local ridership for the year is 13% lower than the same period last year, which we would expect given sort of the slowing economy. That's the bad news. The good news is they are operating this summer with 93% of buses operating on time and 7% of the buses arriving late or not at all, as opposed to last summer, which was 83% on time and 17% of the buses arriving later, not at all. So improving a lot of that has to do with the ability to get staff and construction certainly plays a big role in that as well. And then just to note, this is primarily kind of for the community as a reminder, up in Ski Time Square, the issuance of a right-of-way permit for the Stockman development up there at 1965 is anticipated this month. This project is the first of four planned projects in that area that will all require right-of-way permits and will impact traffic circulations and construction activity in the areas expected to continue over the next four years. Those are all pretty large projects. And then finally, West Steamboat Trail, the clearing and tree removal for utility installation at the core trail are complete. Utility work is expected to begin within the next week or so and continue through September. And just a reminder, construction of the final section to Sleepy Bear Mobile Home Park and the pedestrian tunnel under U.S. 40 is planned for next year. That completes my report. I do have one other announcement that was not in there and just letting the city council and community know that the city and Mount Warner are moving probably tomorrow from a voluntary to a mandatory two day watering schedule. So going from voluntary to mandatory, this is consistent with the stage two drought announcement that we made. We are working with Mount Warner on that, and we will continue to monitor that. We continue to see a lot of folks watering more than they should, more frequently than they should. So we will probably ramp up some enforcement. Enforcement is, they get a couple warnings before they get issued a citation. So they will have plenty of time and understanding of what the rules are. First one's an education, the second one's a formal warning letter, and then the third one is actually a citation. So anybody that we are in extreme drought conditions, so just a reminder, two-day watering schedule for the entire city.

Does that still assume that Wednesday is the non-watering day for the entire city?

Great question. John is nodding yes.

Yes. And I guess the other question around that is, I think a lot of people who have irrigation systems probably have no clue how to set them.

Yeah, that's why we're going to be doing a press release. A lot of these are done by landscape companies too, so the landscape companies are responsible. Ultimately, it's the property owner that's responsible.

But they need to call their landscaper because they're just as likely to turn it on every day as they are to two days, that type of thing, because it's not something that most people do, I don't think. Okay. Counselor Dixon has volunteered her time. Counselor Dixon. Well, this is a call and she'll reset your monitor. You never stop surprising, do you?

Is there a list of other like permanent watering, hand watering or drip irrigation? It's all be listed on the website as well.

All that information is on the website.

Yeah.

And of course there's no washing cars, washing your driveway, washing your deck or any of that kind of stuff. That's correct. That's part of the stage two drought . OK.

Does that change anything that rely on water, such as asphalt repaving or coating companies?

They're not limited, yeah. They're not limited.

OK. Any other questions for Tom?

What's impressive on how many of those .. And so far 12 program publication letters.

Amy or Michael?

My microphone's on, so apologies. So back to the home-based Steamboat. I'll repeat that since my mic wasn't on. Lots of interest. And so far, 12 program qualification letters have been issued. I think we talked about coming back in October and talking about the numbers and what we're seeing. Like, how quickly will these move forward? Do you know?

Good question. I actually just signed one of the agreements this last week, so they are moving forward. Awesome. We can get some more information about timing and process from the Housing Authority since they're our administrator, if you'd like a follow-up on that.

No, I just think for us to have, gosh, well, for September, probably before that meeting in October, if we can have a good idea of the numbers and where we're at, and just like the timing on how long we're seeing so we can anticipate. and if we should actually increase that number that we're allocating.

We will have information a lot sooner than that. Okay.

Other questions for Tom? Councillors on line, anything? Okay, thank you, Tom. Thank you. Okay, we're going to move on, and we're going to move on to general public comment. which is provided after staff reports. City Council will not make any decisions nor take action except to direct the City Manager. And those addressing City Council are requested to identify themselves by name and address. And you will have three minutes. So is there anybody in the audience who'd like to make general public comment tonight? Come on down. We got a few here. We'll get to all of you.

Can y'all hear me okay? All right, my name is Greer Van Dyke. Name and address, is that what? I live at 1476 Storm Peak Lane here in Steamboat Springs. I live here with my husband and our two daughters. We have a four-year-old and a one-year-old. And I wanted to take a quick minute A typical morning in our house, so alarm goes off around 5 a.m. Myself and my husband, we get the kids up, we get them fed, we get them ready. We drop our children off at care around 8 a.m. I'm at work by about 8.30 a.m., pick them up at 4, dinner, playtime, bath, et cetera. We do it all again. That routine, while it feels like Groundhog's Day, and at times it definitely does, and it's exhausting and fulfilling because two things can be true at once, That routine only exists for us because we have found childcare. Getting childcare in this town truly does feel synonymous with winning some sort of lottery. I had heard a lot about this prior to having children. It was quite another thing to actually experience it in real time. Comments like, whoa, it's wild that you got a spot. You probably just got lucky or wow, that never happens were comments that I was pretty consistently on the receiving end of when I would share that we found a spot. So I wanted to take just a few minutes with you all, be honest about what it really took to get there. Rewinding briefly, just for the sake of context, by the time that I was pregnant with our first child, I'd witnessed dozens of friends battle their way through the pursuit of finding and maintaining childcare. I was told that if you didn't start calling care providers the moment you found out you were pregnant, you were likely going to be too late. when i started to make the phone calls waiting lists were somewhere between 12 and 18 months long finding reliable and consistent care truly did feel like a half-time job on top of my full-time job i was pregnant with our second daughter when my first daughter's care facility shut down due to a string of misconduct issues that were discovered that reality really did cripple tons of families who relied on their children being in care We pivoted, we got on waiting lists, pieced things together for a handful of months, made sacrifices, and felt like we were ground zero again. We currently pay $3,500 a month for both kids to be in care. We're lucky we found spots. I have colleagues and friends who have left jobs because they couldn't do the logistical Tetris. Over the years, I've watched friends make really tough decisions doing endless mental math. backing away from work altogether or just leaving town. Only 45% of children under five have access to licensed care, yet 77% of families need it. Route Thrive by Five has a plan to change that. More slots, more affordable options, and better wages for the providers who make it all possible. It's a real plan with real numbers and real solutions behind it. So I'm asking you tonight to consider that, be part of the solution. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. State your name and address, please. And you have three minutes.

Thank you. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Bill Gallagher. My address is 26990 Eagle Lane in Clark, Colorado. I'm the head of the North Route Community Charter School, where we have preschool from the ages of one through five-year-old. So my subject is similar to the previous presenter. Every community asks the same question. What is the best investment we can make in our future? Decades of research from economics, economics, neuroscience, and education all arrive at the same answer, high quality child, early childhood education. It is one of the few public investments that simultaneously improves children's lives, strengthens families, builds a better workforce, and saves taxpayer money. The single best study that I have personally seen is by Nobel Prize winning economist James Heckman, who published a longitudinal study in 2010 in the Journal of Public Economics about the subject. Note he published it in the Journal of Public Economics. about early childhood education, and he found that participants in early childhood education had higher education attainment, higher lifetime earnings, better healthcare, lower crime rates, less reliance on public assistance, and that benefits often extended to successive generations. Our brains are built out early in life. More than 90% of our brains development occurs before age five. During these years, children develop the language, the self-control, the social skills, and executive functioning that predict later success in school, employment, and health. Waiting until kindergarten is often too late to build many of these foundational capacities. Research done at Harvard Center on the Developing Child and the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child demonstrates that early experiences literally shape the brain's architecture and influence lifelong learning and behavior. Why this matters for Steamboat Springs. For communities like ours, early childhood education is also an economic development strategy. Reliable early learning allows parents to participate in the workforce. It helps employers recruit and retain employees. It prepares children to arrive at kindergarten ready to learn. Today's preschool classroom becomes tomorrow's skilled workforce, civic leadership, and healthy community. If we want Steamboat Springs to remain a thriving community 20 and more years into the future, there is no better place to invest than in the earliest years of life today. Whether through partnerships with childcare providers, support for preschool expansion, workforce housing, solutions for early child educators, or collaboration with our schools and nonprofits, every step this council takes to strengthen early childhood education is an investment that will pay dividends for Steamboat Springs for decades to come. I would welcome you to visit our early childhood program or any quality childhood program to see the things I'm talking about if you haven't been to one lately. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Okay, do we have anyone else in the audience who'd like to come up? Good evening.

Good evening. My name is Julie Bridgewater. I live at 40635 Anchor Way, Steamboat Springs. I am here to speak about early childhood education in Route County. I've worked in the industry for 20 years, 16 of those in Route County. I never imagined myself in early childhood education when I was young. I happened into this profession because what else was I supposed to do with a degree in molecular biology in a mountain town? But here I am 20 years later, committed to young children and finding deep meaning and purpose in what I do. Two years ago, I took a position at the preschool in North Route as their director. And I should note here that at the time the program was temporarily closed because all prior staff had left and care for the North Route community was in jeopardy at this point. So now I find myself in a position to help others entering this profession find deep satisfaction that comes with working with young children and hopefully these committed individuals choose to make early childhood education their career as I did. But the industry has changed. We know so much more about the importance of quality early childhood education The education and training requirements that new teachers entering into the field have increased because the quality of a child's formative early experiences depends almost entirely on the quality of the adults providing it. And societal factors have changed as well. More children are attending care full-time because households need two incomes to meet living wage standards. And early childhood teachers are filling the gaps in raising the children in our community. These increased demands on these professionals are not reflected in their compensation as across all regions and credential levels, early childhood teacher wages fall short of Colorado's recommended benchmarks. This puts immense stress on those individuals tasked with co-raising our future generations at a critical point in their development. Our program operates on razor thin margins. If I'm honest, it's deficit. But there is no budget for increased wages, continuing education, or quality ratios without pricing families out of the care they need. Other mountain communities have solved this problem because their elected leaders decided to put a solution in front of their voters and trust them to make the right call. Steamboat Springs has the same opportunity. This council has that opportunity. Route Thrive by Five strategic investment plan addresses the need to do better for our early childhood teachers, our children, and our families. With sustainable public funding, we can offer wages that make early childhood a viable career in this community with compensation that reflects the important work our teachers are doing. Thank you for your consideration.

Thank you very much.

Hello.

Hello.

My name's Colleen Miller. I live at 40207 Lindsay Drive. I've had the privilege of being the executive director of Family Development Center, serving children and families in Rowe County through Newborn Network, prenatal parent support programs, and Discovery Learning Center, nationally accredited preschool, for the last 20 years. I want to share something that keeps me awake at night. It isn't licensing or enrollment or fundraising. It's wondering whether the incredible teachers who care for our youngest children will still be with us next year. I work alongside dedicated professionals who love what they do. They build relationships with children during the most important years of brain development. They celebrate first words, first friendships, first successes. They don't do this work because it's easy. They do it because they believe in it. But many of them quietly ask themselves a difficult question. Can I afford to keep doing this? Despite our best efforts, the answer is becoming harder and harder. As a nonprofit provider, we have worked tirelessly to increase wages and improve benefits. Every year we look for ways to pay more because we know our employees deserve it. But every dollar we add to wages increases the cost of providing care. Those costs are then passed on to families through tuition, families who are already stretched financially. At the same time, we work harder every year to secure grants, hold fundraisers, and ask donors to fill a gap that continues to grow. We cannot continue asking families to pay more while expecting nonprofits to fundraise their way out of a system wide problem. This isn't a family development center problem. This isn't a provider, a private provider problem. This isn't a school district problem. It's a community challenge that requires community leadership. That is why Route Thrive by Five exists. Providers, schools, businesses, healthcare, local government, community organizations are coming together to build a long-term strategy for early childhood in Route County. Tonight, I'm not asking you to solve this problem. but I am asking you to lead. Lead by recognizing that early childhood is essential infrastructure for our economy. Lead by staying engaged in this community conversation. Lead by asking difficult questions and helping shape sustainable solutions. And when the time comes to consider long-term community investment in early childhood, I ask that you be prepared to stand with the families, educators, employers, organizations, your neighbors, friends, family that have done this work together. Because if we don't lead now, we will continue to lose teachers and families. We will continue to lose classrooms, families will continue to struggle to find care, and our employers will continue to struggle to find workers. I ask for your leadership, not just tonight, but throughout this process as we work together to build a stronger future for the children, families and workforce of Steamboat Springs and Route County.

Thank you very much. OK, is there anyone else in the audience who would like to make public comment tonight? OK, no. OK, let me see. Is there anybody online who would like to make public comment? Please raise your hand if you would. Seeing none, I will close public comment, bring it back to council just since the public comment tonight is on early childhood education, teachers, childcare. I have a daughter and a son-in-law who are both teachers and I marvel at how good they do their jobs and how underpaid they are. I think one of the things that you bring up and I'd like council to kind of respond if you want to on this is the fact that the childcare crisis and the affordable housing crisis we face in this valley are kind of run in parallel and in many cases are different sides of the same coin. that people who have problems with housing also have problems with child care. And, you know, when somebody spends, what was it, $3,500 a month for two kids for child care, and, you know, you're paying 40% or 50% of your income on rent and another 20% on child care, it doesn't leave anything, obviously. And so this is a big issue. You know, we... when we purchase this land out on the west side of town the c dot and the campbell property you know we're looking at that not just as an affordable housing piece but also as a child care potential facility because we start to think of child care and housing similarly if there's a development for housing whether it's single-family homes or or whether it's um condos or whatever is there a way to combine that with child care and we want to accelerate obviously that development i think the other side from my standpoint is that we don't we don't really have many homes that offer childcare anymore in this community. What do we have, two or three or four? I don't know, but it's three, four, four. So are there ways to incentivize that obviously? And is there ways that we can help the teachers similarly to how maybe UC Health health helps their employees as well. So yes, I think we do need to lead. And I think we got to continually ask ourselves, are we doing enough? And are we leading enough? And I just throw that out there to counsel. We have all this group here and I think they'd like to hear from us.

Well, frankly, I think that anybody who teaches, we should try to figure a way to get free housing. We should make it to where anybody that teaches kindergarten under, free housing that we build into the system and make them, in order to make a paradigm change for childcare, we need to make sure that they're the ones that are taking care of, I mean, doctors, lawyers, teachers. I mean, somehow we know that the subsidies are never gonna cover it, we're never gonna get enough nonprofits to raise enough money for it. But I really think that, you know, this has been going on since, I mean, I had three kids in this town and hasn't changed y'all. What's been worse is the in-home daycare facilities are gone. We had like 20 and now we have like four. You don't realize that when first tracks left and we had all these other ones left, how that is. But when you're talking about a paradigm change, I throw it out there because as we're about ready to start a housing project, And we know we need 15 or 20 teachers in a housing project to take care of the daycare facility. We need to start building that into that whole profession. And we can lead as city leaders how we subsidize that. How we take tax dollars from our community and subsidize housing for our community. teachers that are at that level. I mean, I'd like to see us get a paradigm shift there. And we now have that opportunity with the Campbell property to create that. So I don't know what the future holds, but I've been thinking about this because so many of you guys have been coming up, talking to me on this. But I think that if we had free housing for the teachers in the child care facilities of all of, at least the city of Steamboat that we can subsidize, I think it would be a paradigm shift that could be an example for other communities down the road. I know it's a huge thing, but I don't really care. I think we should try to find a way to do it.

So I totally agree with you. And hi, everyone. Colleen, hi. So yeah, you all know, I work in family, had a kid. Both of us were working, so had to find daycare. And this is 25 years ago. I can't even imagine trying to afford. We couldn't afford it today. And I was fortunate enough to where I worked, I could bring my daughter to work with me for the first nine months. I mean, that's huge. It was hard, but it was huge. And then Carolea was our in-home daycare provider, which, Colleen, I know you know Carolea. And then Margaret went to Discovery. I mean, these are really important steps in her growth. It's allowed us to continue working. And I just see this as a larger problem. a society problem. We see our society failing our most vulnerable on both ends, the very young and the very old. And so we do have a role of city council to step in. And I would love to find ways for us to be creative about doing some type of property tax. You know, there are creative ways to do it. We're not putting the burden on our working class families. I'm going to make lots of friends and nonprofits, and I'm going to make lots of friends with this statement, but L.A. has a mansion tax, and any home sold over, I don't know, $3 or $4 million has a separate tax to it. They apply it to affordable housing, but there are creative ways. And I think we have to have those really tough conversations on how are we going to help fund early child care in Steamboat and Route County. So I support all of you in the work you do.

So I want to... Take a different slant. I think what the Thrive by Five folks were also telling us is education. And when I keep on hearing about this problem, I keep on thinking, you know, to the benefits that my child, my son had growing up because he had access to his grandmother who was a special ed teacher. And the education that she provided him in the early stages of his life built a really strong foundation. And I would love to say it's my genes that pass on to him, but no, it was that early childhood education. And so I do look to the Stockbridge to assist there because I think it's a multifaceted, it's multi-likes of the stool It's not just housing. It is education. And I see a senior center over there. And my envision, if I take a step back, my vision would be that there is housing for our child care providers and all our city staff. And there's also, you know, educators in the senior community that would, you know, that would work with the child care center that we may have on plan. So child care, housing, and, you know, and some senior providers that provide some insight. So that's what I always come back to and think about when I hear about this problem.

Any other comments?

Yeah, we went through the whole challenge with three kids and started off at North Route Preschool and then moved our way down into town and had multiple in-home care on the west end. We had two different providers there and then ended up landing in Holy Name. So it was like a whack-a-mole for sure, trying to get on the list, get a spot and juggling with three kids. And we were super happy when they graduated out and then we found out about Winter Sports Club. and transferred all the dollars to the club. But I wanna thank, you know, Thrive by Five and Megan and the whole constituency of you folks and all the hard work you're doing and especially keeping it front and center and I appreciate that and realize the challenges that we have moving forward.

Okay, thank you. Anything from our online counselors? Councilor Gary, I see you have your hand up.

Yes, thank you. Sorry that I'm not there to see everyone in the audience, but absolutely appreciate you all and all the work that you're doing to keep this issue at the forefront. Also was a working mom who relied heavily on childcare with both my husband and I working. So absolutely appreciate the need for that as well as certainly our kids benefited from the early childhood education and know to that and support that we absolutely need to have kind of adequate resources as well as pay for the teachers. I think you have a count, certainly I, and I believe from a council perspective, we're supportive of the efforts and know that there are certain kind of constraints we'll focus our efforts, I guess, where we can make the most in terms of, we kind of make the most of it. Right. And I think Stockbridge was mentioned, certainly as we look at Slate Creek, I think we need to just basically see what all is on the table in terms of possible, you know, land location facilities, you know, working with folks. So yeah, Again, you know, appreciate all the work that's been doing and that you all have done and will continue to try to solve this problem going forward because it is a critical one.

Okay. Any other comments?

Yeah, I just want to chime in. To focus on the how, I urge council, for the housing component, I would urge council to look at putting on a ballot to open the STR funds to more broad uses for affordable housing, like rent subsidizing, some of the things that we've talked about. We absolutely and easily could put this on a ballot to our citizens for them to open it up beyond just What is it? Increasing the stock of affordable and attainable housing. And then I would urge the Route Thrive by Five, please continue pushing on this. And I would say what's most helpful for council, we get stuck on the how. And so if you're able to continue to do the work that you're doing to see what are ways we could actually fund this, How could this work? And then continue to bring that to council and bring it to our awareness. That will help us to take action because I think right now, while we all feel the same way, I, well, I should say for myself, I get stuck on that. How does this work? How would we make, how would we, how would we implement this? And so by continuing to push and do the work that you're doing and giving us information on how it works in other places, how we could make it work here, then we can advocate from behind the dice, um,

effectively to to to make real change okay thank you so i thank you hearing the comments from all the counselors um there's a lot of support from the city council i would say it's pretty much unanimous support um and counselor swintec is right the how is always the difficult part but We all know the needs are there and how do we do that? And you're doing a great job of increasing awareness and coming up with ideas and just keep them coming. And we're gonna need to see what we wanna do here moving forward. I think we need to spend some additional time and really dig deep into this. So I'll make a commitment that we will do that and look into that shortly and see where this takes us. in terms of what else we might do from a leadership position here. So thank you so much.

Thank you.

Yeah. Okay. With that, we will move on. Next on our agenda tonight is community reports. And items on the community report may be commented on the same manner as the consent calendar and public hearing items. So as we go through this, if anyone wants to make a public comment after the presentations and after council, Ask any questions or whatnot, we'll open it up to public comment. We have two on the agenda tonight, and the first one is our 2027 sales tax budget. Kim Weber. Thank you, Kim.

Thank you. Good evening, Council. Kim Weber, Finance Director. So tonight I'm here to talk to you about 2027 sales tax. I know it's a long ways out, but we have a fiscal policy that says in July of every year, the Finance Director will come to City Council and talk to you about what we plan to project for the 2027 budget for sales tax. One of the main reasons for this is a long time ago, we would get ourselves stuck in a situation where Staff would be headed in one direction on where the sales tax projection would be. We'd bring a balanced budget to city council and there would be maybe a discrepancy on what we thought the projection of sales tax would be. And as you know, the sales tax makes up 60 to 67% of the general fund budget. So 1% change in what that projection is changes that balanced budget quite significantly. So the fiscal policies say that we will use these methods to conservatively project what the sales tax budget will be for the next year. I will tell you that I would not put this projection in the conservative bucket. I probably wouldn't put it in the aggressive bucket, but I'm stretching the conservative. And spoiler alert, what staff is proposing is a 2% increase from 2026 projection. So when we came to you, I don't know, a couple months ago, we said, We will probably be proposing to budget flat to 2026 budget. It means the same thing, essentially, or pretty close. Right now, we're about 2.5% down from budget. We're proposing a budget of about 2% up from projection, but we'll go into the details. So we've used these items, we'll go through these a little bit, to come to this recommendation. This is just a visual look at what our sales tax has been over the last 10 years. And what stands out the most to me is how flat it is or going down. And a little later, we'll look at the CPI, which does not look like this. So this is the last five years have been really flat. The blue is the general fund sales tax, which is right around 39 to 40 million. The red is about $2.2 million of sales tax that's collected by the city, but it is TIF funds that go to the SSRA fund. So you can see across the bottom, it was pretty consistent in the 2010s to see about five or 6% increase every year. Then we had 2021, 2022 big increases, COVID recovery. And then it's been really flat or down since then. This is just a reminder of where we get our sales tax from. So these are the different areas that we collect sales tax from. Miscellaneous retail is the largest. This includes the miscellaneous retail from people buying stuff in town, but it also includes deliveries. So you'll recall that you should be paying tax. We should be receiving tax on all of the goods and services or goods that you receive delivered. So that's our largest category. Lodging, 21%, and it goes around the circle. So you'll see restaurants, grocery stores, construction. Those are our big sectors of sales tax collections. So where are we at right now? We've collected sales tax through May. We are down about 2.6% from budget, also from what we collected through May in 2025. Budget, so what that looks like, budget 17.4, January through May, we're about 16.9. So we're about $463,000 down from our budget. If we project every month from June on to be down about 2% from last year, we'll, in the year, about a million dollars below our budget. This is all still in line with what I've been telling you all year. We talked about that we would pivot if we reached 10% down. So we're still in the 2% to 3% down. But what Councillor Dixon talked about earlier on with the wildfires is quite concerning from a marketing perspective. Obviously, if you've been outside, it's not concerning from an environmental perspective downtown, but what people are hearing on the news could be concerning. I think June, we'll have a really strong June with some of the special events move to June. I'm concerned about July and August, but we'll see. So if we say 2% down the rest of the year, we'll be about a million dollars down. So just looking in the early years, consumer confidence was a really good indicator of our sales tax. It was something I looked at quite often, and it really painted a pretty clear picture. Not so much in the last few years. It is kind of all over the place. A year ago when I was presenting to you, you can see, I don't have a little pointer, but you can see towards the end where there's a steep downward slope, That was June of 2025. It rebounded a little bit, which is good, but it's been fluctuating, and you can see it's fairly low. It's down at that 2014-15 level, so it's not bouncing back very quickly. The consumer's perception right now of the labor market, there's more people right now saying jobs are hard to get than they've been saying since 2021. So that's a little bit of a concern. But they're viewing the businesses conditions improving. So it's one thing that you can say is consistent about the economic indicators is they're all over the place. So looking a little bit at the CPI, and we'll talk a little bit about how this affects us, our sales tax in different ways, but you can see this has a little bit different mark than what our sales tax has been. This is the Denver Aurora Lakewood CPI, pretty steep. increase and right now it's over 4% from last year. We're definitely not going to see that in sales tax increases. This has less of an increase on my presentation tonight and more of a impact on what the October budget is going to look like because all of our expenses are subject to this. And I don't think there'd be many people that would say that our CPI in the mountain communities is actually a lot greater than this. And especially when it comes to construction. So just another data point. So kind of a summary, increasing inflation, Where that affects us on sales tax mainly is higher inflation diverts spending money for people. They have to spend it on their goods and services that aren't negotiable. And so it could affect their consumer spending. And then the labor market is softening, yet not to levels of concern, I wouldn't say. So how do we use this information when it comes to projecting sales tax? There are several things. So snow forecast. Last year was an unusually low snow year, especially from January to April. So we are going to be comparing upon that. So hopefully that will be better. Forecasts are saying it'll be better. Forecasts are favorable. Increased inflation can have a positive uptick to our sales tax because as groceries go up, our sales tax goes up. As utilities go up, our sales tax goes up. Those things, a lot of municipalities don't collect sales tax on. We do. So that usually levels out our sales tax a little bit. But then they'll have visitors or locals have less discretionary spending. Consumer confidence, as we talked about, there was a sharp decline last year, small rebound, but it is still staying pretty low. And most of the articles that I've seen, most of the information I've seen show mountain tourism is not rising at a huge level. So that's how we come to our proposed sales tax budget for 2027. 2% increase from projection. I do want to see what June is, July is, and then put that 2% increase on that. So if July is down by 10%, this projection will go down. So right now we're proposing starting the budget at $40.6 million of sales tax. We budgeted $40.9 million, so just about $300,000 lower than our current year budget for this. And some of that is because of the inflation, anticipating a better snow year, which is where I'm a little more comfortable on the not as conservative side, so. But happy to have a discussion, answer any questions about any of that information.

Okay. Thank you, Kim. Who wants to start? Okay. Councillor Barnes.

Good question. Do we get any insight from SSRC on to like the sales of icon passes? I do quick math on gasoline. So it's like 27% more expensive in steamboat than it is on the front range. So I would say those CPI numbers are much greater than are listed on this.

I would agree. Everything I look at is a lot higher here. Everything that gets delivered here is a lot higher. So that is the numbers that I have access to that are published, but it doesn't really reflect what we see here. Yeah, yeah.

Mm-mm.

I just have a quick question. So basically it looks to me like you're proposing a budget, which is equivalent to the budget we proposed last year.

For 2026, the year we're in, correct?

So basically it's, you know, so why I look at it as not 2% increase from projection is basically as flat from our, what we budgeted last year.

You know, it's interesting that you say that. Cause I was telling Tom why he said, why don't you say it this way? And I said, because everyone hears it different. I said essentially equal to budget in my last presentation. And I was asked, why would you ever propose something to budget and not to project it. So yes, you are correct.

Okay, so on that note, so to tag on, so when we were talking about projection, you're taking the actuals from January through hopefully- May. Oh, May. Okay, so you won't have actuals, the timing doesn't work to have actuals to prepare the budget for June or July.

It's not even due yet. What is today? Maybe it's due today. 20th. Yeah. So you don't have time. No. Okay. I won't have that for another 10 days.

Yep. Okay. Fair. I like, I get that for sure. Yeah. So, so you're going off of actuals for half the year. Um, and then you're doing projections for the remaining part of the year. I mean, that makes total sense. Yeah. Yeah. I totally support that, Kim. That makes sense. Um, to the point about not having numbers from Ski Corps, we do have numbers from Vail Resorts. And I think you and I emailed that, now I can't remember, I was trying to look it up, but if I remember incorrectly, Vail Resorts, I think that's a good indicator for us on what to expect for next year, that their season passes sales were down, and that was this spring sometime. So their season passes for next year was like 10% down or something. So we don't have...

I think it was 12% down.

Yes, we don't have a ski steamboat, but we have Vail Resorts to look at.

Similar.

The thing that concerns me about all this is that, you know, you talk about the K-shaped economy and whatnot. The tourist dollars, which are what, about 40%? And we're building a billion dollars worth of new stuff. And the tourists... You know, money is not really the issue. The high end still is spending because their home prices are up, their stock portfolios are way up, et cetera. But where that comes home is in the locals here, where you said, well, you're gonna spend more because prices are up, but you're gonna buy less. And you're going to be strung out even more. And you're going to be cost burdened even more. So over time, it'll be interesting to see if our sales tax starts to even go more into the tourist economy at a higher percentage than the local economy, which I think would be a very dangerous signal if that happens on a trend line.

Yeah, and to be honest with you, that's a really hard number to predict and to estimate. We take a portion of our utilities that we assume are locals, and then we look at what April looks like or May looks like. and some of our fall months because they're lower tourism times and we take out all lodging. So it's a hard number to get to. We've done it over the years. So it'd be hard to see that switch except you'll start seeing restaurants and lodging take a greater percentage of the sales. That's when you'll know that's happening.

Councilors Gary and Swintec, do you have any comments or questions for Kim?

I do not. Thank you, Kim, for that presentation and appreciate the questions of the other council members. I think it's been informative and lets us know what to expect.

Same. Thanks here, Kim, for everything.

Okay. One last quick question for Kim. We definitely, like many other mountain communities, had that COVID bump. And it shows that in the year-over-year percentage. And so, I mean, it's shocking that we had a 21% increase from 20 to 21. But then we had another increase the following year, 15%. And then even in 2023, 3%, so smaller. But I've always wondered... are we just seeing a natural recalibration back to a more normal, consistent growth and that this is just kind of a recalibration?

Yeah, and that's what we were calling it. I would consider like a 5% to 6% a recalibration, like that's what we saw. That's what we were seeing before that. A two, 3%, that's not even up with CPI, I think there's something different going on.

Can you remind me, what are you thinking that the cost of expenses for the city is gonna rise by as a percentage from over last year?

I don't have a percent like, It's only gonna go up by what the sales tax goes up, but that means we'll have to bump down services. Is that what you were asking? I mean, so we'll come in with a balanced budget that balances to whatever the sales tax and other revenue sources are. But I don't have a good answer on what I think we're going to budget for fuel or fertilizer or scoria or personnel or any of that. We just aren't quite there yet.

Okay. I mean, I was kind of getting at what the percentage of cut would be in this budget.

We've asked departments to cut out 2% of their operating budget. That is what we've asked to start with. But with other increases, we'll be asking them to go back and make additional cuts.

And that was the same amount that we asked for last year?

Last year, we asked departments to come in flat with their prior year budget, and we ended up, we cut some at the end. This time, we knew that this was gonna be even more, and so we asked them to actually come in lower.

Okay, great, thanks.

Thank you.

I love my education questions. So just to understand, your projected budget this year, as I was looking at the Whistler Park acquisition stuff, we had talked about we had appropriated 500K for this year. But we use like 110 K or 105 K so far of that, you know, so does that mean your, does that translate into your project? So your project just does assume that we did not spend the fort that 400 and or 390 K.

That's a good question. First of all, that's in the capital projects fund. And so this we're focusing just on the general fund. My projections that I provided tonight are not spending. They're just revenue projections. So I don't have right now a spending projection other than we typically come in, we legally have to come in within our budget. Therefore, we typically come in at least a million dollars below our spending. In that situation, I would not have only projected a hundred and some thousand because I know we're committed to that. So if we're committed to spend it via contract, then I would project the full amount.

Okay. Thank you, Kim. And since you weren't asking for anything from us tonight, I'll still open it up for public comment. Is there anybody in the room or anyone online who would like to make a public comment regarding this topic tonight? Seeing none online or no one in the room, we'll close public comment. We'll move on to our other community report, Climate Action Plan Collaborative Update. Matt, is that you? Come on down. There we go.

It's going really slow. There we go.

All right, everybody. My name is Matthew Mendisco. I'm with the town of Hayden, but specifically, I am the chair of the Climate Action Plan Collaborative. With me is Paul Boney. He is with Western Resiliency Center, and he's a program management. They are the program management entity for the collaborative, and tonight, we are responsible to come in here and provide an update to the council, we're doing this in other places as well. So this is Steamboat's turn. And former, our council member, you know, Gary was the chair, but our bylaws say that you have to cycle off of that position. I can't remember what the years were, and it says that the vice chair, who was me, is supposed to step into that role, and that's what happened, lucky me. So anyway, I'm gonna get started. And so overview, this is just very quick because we have a lot of slides and I'm going to move very fast through some of these. Here's the agenda. We'll get to questions at the end. So we'll go from there. But as you can see here, you know, snow water quality equivalent here, the Gampa Valley is changing. We know this. There's also like a map, you know, wildfire defense things where we have two wildfires in Ralph County right now. We've been lucky, obviously, that those didn't grow very large, but they're still fighting those as we speak. I saw a small fire two days ago pop up in Moffett County. It sounds like they might have that under control, but nonetheless, I think we're just getting lucky. And why does that matter? Well... We have the Routt County Climate Action Plans, a little bit of history. This was Routt County's 2018 emissions, including the city of Steamboat. They totaled 693,367 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. uh during this period um hayden station was excluded 2.4 million tons but we did do a revision of this study recently and that was included um so you could do the math really that didn't really change much um a little bit but not what I would call measurable. But in any case, what you look is you see, you know, what is the route County? No, I don't want to turn up my volume. What is the route County climate action plan? And why does it matter? Well, here's where I'm going to say, like, you know, I don't think it's any secret, you know, we can do as much as we can. with climate action, with carbon reduction and everything else. However, you know, as it was pointed out to me by several people, you know, while if Rock County just completely eliminated all its carbon emissions, some other carbon emissions might just float over, right, or whatever, because we all share this atmosphere together. However, One of the biggest benefits of climate action also has to do with clean energy, fuel efficiency, people's electric bills going down, an economy that actually could be fueled by some of the changes we're doing, the Regional Transportation Authority taking people off the road was one of the biggest, in addition to getting cars off the road, which is part of our climate action, what does that also do? Provides a safer road. I was driving here today and somebody took it upon themselves to pass and I had to get off on the shoulder because they were coming and I probably, it's like, you know, at this point, it's like you're risking your life every day just to have a trip from Hayden to Steamboat. So I think you can see the categories here, energy, transportation, waste, land use, economy, and accountability. These were the six things that were in our climate action plan. And it's an investment in the economic future. We want people's energy bills to be lower. We want this to be affordable. You guys were just talking about affordable housing. We want those houses to be energy efficient so that people are spending less on their energy bills. They're spending, you know, less on a car. They're spending less on those things so they can spend it on childcare. They can do whatever they need to do, you know, to make life work. And I think, you know, one of my primary, as the chair, what I've been trying to champion is this economic future and our health and well-being and kind of taking this not... All of the climate action things we're doing are important. We want to save our forests. We want to have a better, you know, the water, that is a huge issue, right? And our water, I mean, has anybody looked at the river today? Like, it's bad. And so we need to preserve those things and we need to do whatever we can. And I think the climate action plan is one of those tools and vehicles. And that's what I would, you know, advocate for here. So... And then, you know, you have some survey results here. You guys have seen these. I'm not going to go through them. But nonetheless, you know, two-thirds of respondents are very concerned about low water, 82% advocating for tourism practices that mitigate climate impacts, several of those things. And then here is where we're at today. You see the CEO grant, which we're going to talk about here shortly. Paul is going to talk about for you. That's the Noresco Hire to Develop a Building Electrification and Decarbonization Plan. And I kind of highlighted some of those things as well. But you can see the timeline of where we started, where we're at today. You can see that new, you know, the first part of this grant was that decarbonization update. So, again, by sector, transportation, you can see, I'm going to move this really quick so you can, stationary energy, I always, you know, that includes homes, that includes, you know, those sorts of things. Fugitive emissions. It's kind of risque, I guess, but nonetheless, things that we don't know about that happen. Wastewater, water, and then, you know, some of the other things. So you can see all of these. I think it's just important to note those. And then I think...

I think I'm beyond my slides here, but okay.

All right, I'll keep going. So 26, largely due to greening the grid, this was our update on the greenhouse gas emissions inventory. You can see 26% decrease. Greening the grid, a lot of what does that mean? That means that YVEA or our providers of energy are getting their energy from renewable resources. They're bringing that electricity, those megawatts in, but they're bringing them in because YVEA really doesn't produce a lot of its own electricity. So they're bringing those in and they're bringing those in from renewable sources. That's what that means. Transportation, 32% increase, driven by 26% increase in vehicle miles. We have more people, more cars on Highway 40. We know that. I mean, I can see them coming through Hayden every day. You can see them coming into town. We know this. And then waste, we've had a 10.5% increase primarily from the release of methane at the landfill. It doesn't take a genius to know that from 2018 to now our population has increased. And guess what? Population increase does what? Produces more waste. That produces the methane, that, you know, sustainable practices. So getting to sustainable practices within waste is actually pretty important. It's like another source that we need to focus on. And probably a source that we can have real impact. And now we're actually at the greenhouse gas inventory. Key takeaways. You want to read the whole report. You can scan that right there. We've had several grant recipients from the Route County Climate Action Collaborative Fund. We just had our second round, Northwest Colorado Health, Route County Riders, Yampa River Botanic Park, Strings Music Festival totaling $52,400. These are really great improvements, everybody. And I think it's one of those testaments to like, we're actually doing things. We're getting money out into the community. Those people are doing things to help advance the plan. And I think that's one of the main takeaways from what we're doing right now. Same way with 2025. We were super excited about the 50,000. So we've increased it by a little. And I think that, you know, that you have the Colorado Energy Office, Energy Efficient Conservative Block Grant. That's what Paul's here to talk about. I'm going to let him take it from there. By the way, Paul, you have seven minutes.

Good to see you all again. It's only been a week, I guess, since we were talking about alternative transportation. For the record, I'm Paul Boney, the Energy and Transportation Director at the Western Resilient Center. So I'm going to dive in a little bit deeper today. The big win and the big effort we've had since we last talked to y'all was this energy efficiency and conservation block grant. It was about 230 some thousand dollars. We've done two thirds of the work on that. We have about a year left to run and we now have a toolkit for all of the CAP governments. A building electrification and decarbonization plan, which was one of the CAP working group goals, was to write a plan so that we could track progress. A dashboard that's on an Excel platform so that anybody can come in and take over the loading of the information in that dashboard. And then a story map so that we can educate the public on what we've done. Very quickly, the CAP, the original plan, said we had to do two things. We had to electrify buildings and we had to make them more efficient. The CAP established goals for those and those were incorporated into the plan and the roadmap. This is the meat of the matter. The blue line says we're gonna continue to expect growth in the route county. The orange lines are contributions to carbon emissions from natural gas and propane. The different shades represent residential and commercial. And the blue lines represent residential and commercial electric use, which are currently electricity is the single largest contributor of carbon emissions in Routt County. As the grid decarbonizes and gets to 80% carbon-free electricity, those bars kind of flatten out and they just float a little bit with growth. And what I really want to put out and make sure you're aware of, if we implement the plan and meet the goals, the cap goals can be met for Routt County. And there's headspace. If the electric grid goes beyond 80% clean electricity, all that blue goes away, and then there's more headspace for natural gas and propane. So the good news is we didn't know if we could build a plan that would meet the goals, and the analysis work that was done says, yes, we can. In addition, that plan added some programs that the consultants brought in from different governments and organizations across the state and the country. And so their top five recommendations are listed here. The CAP Energy Working Group then digested those and discussed them, and their top three rankings were to build a decarbonization workforce hub, to have a boost up program, which basically makes sure moderate income folks get access to efficiency and electrification, and then building energy benchmarking, which is basically making sure we go after the biggest loads first. So all of that's in place, and we have till 2050 to implement. The second piece of the grant, which is also done, is what we called Community Outreach and Education. We had a capstone event. A couple of you were able to attend that. We called it the Heat Pump Hoedown. We had over 190 registrants between, we did two sectors, one for what I'm gonna call the contractor builder community, another for the general public. and we've been getting calls from all over Colorado and other parts of the country and how did you do that and can we do that? So we thought that was a great success and that was a second checkbox on the three deliverables we need with the grant and then we're gonna present this to the Colorado Energy Office and all their grant participants tomorrow. By the way, I'll go back real quick. That leak to Mountain Town 2030 is a one-hour podcast we did with Mountain Town's 2030 that summarizes all the work we did to get to where we are today. So if you want a deeper dive, that's a nice, easy way to catch up there. So thanks to the city, we just wanna give you kudos. You've been very instrumental and kudos to staff. So council and staff and leadership for all the efforts you've done. You have a decarbonization roadmap, which was a huge plank, and that'll be very helpful. And then we had a meeting with city staff just this week. We're gonna launch a tool that'll hopefully start attacking VMT reduction called YampaGo. It's a software program that helps people carpool, take advantage of alternative transportation. You can have contests. And so that's gonna be a very nice tool and thanks to the city for stepping up and funding that. And our goal is to implement that at the fall ride and drive in September have the rollout to tie those two events together. The city also has an EV fleet transition policy. The core trail expansion you talked about and we're hoping Steamboat Transit, which is currently a leading example of public transit in small mountain communities and the RTA when they come together will really make great strides towards VMT reduction. Waste is also an area where the city has been very active. So again, we wanna thank you for that. Obviously the goal to reduce the amount of waste by tonnage. So you can see the list of programs that are being worked on by your staff here. And the big one's gonna be construction and demolition diversion, because that's a lot of tonnage. It's about a third of the waste stream. And then a lot of support from the public for composting and organic waste coming out of the stream. Land use, there's always a lot going on in land use. So I won't read you all of these, but basically the CAP is charging along on saving water, keeping water temperatures low, replacing wetlands, and the new one being the landscape code that'll reduce water consumption for exterior watering. And then economy, thanks again to the city for implementing your procurement policy and the Steamboat Springs Green Store. And you can see the two open recommendations from the economy working group. The goal is to eventually get to a circular economy that reduces carbon emissions. So Matthew and I pledged that we would bust through this in a hurry because we really want to take your questions. And then I'll put a pause there and say, if any of you want a deeper dive or city council wants a deeper dive in a workshop, we're more than happy to bring in the CAP working groups. We're happy to have folks come visit and ask questions. And thank you for letting us present to you today. Thank you.

Wow. Right on.

I know.

I don't know how many times you rehearsed that. And we didn't get to practice together.

This is like two guys playing in a band that never played together before.

Well, there's, yeah. Questions for Matthew or Paul?

So back in side 10, I'm stuck into side 10. And it has to do with transportation increase of 32%. And then you had some cap goals of vehicles, you know, miles traveled, reducing that, but I didn't, I was having difficulty linking the problem to what is a solution outside of our working together in our TA. But is, what else do we have to reduce, truly reduce vehicle miles traveled?

I think that is to be quite honest, I think the RTA if you look at the cat plan the RTA primary. And then the second is in terms of vehicle miles traveled. There is a lot of discussion about advancing transportation from also on electric vehicles as well. Reducing carbon emissions from electric vehicles. The RTA has made some, you all have made some advancements.

The RTA will be looking at buses that are, you know,

electric or close, those sorts of things. But I mean, to be quite honest, I mean, I think the RTA right now is mountain rail. Also, I kind of throw that commuter rail.

Wait, Matt, could you talk into the mic, please?

sure sorry those are going to be primary those are going to be our primary vehicles um for reducing vehicle miles traveled do i think we're going to get to you know are we going to decrease 26 of those vehicle miles um probably not but uh it'll be a good start yeah yeah well yeah

So there are some things in the work. Oh, that'll help. One that's not in the CAP plan because it didn't exist when the plan was developed, but there's a clean diesel fuel that can be dropped in for regular diesel. So we're following and pulling on that string. There's a Colorado Clean Diesel Working Group. And the goal would be to replace... petroleum-based diesel with this clean diesel the mountain did a pilot last year. They didn't have gelling issues and they were happy to do again. The challenge is our diesel fuel goes from a pipeline to Utah and then has to get on a truck and come back to the Riampa Valley. That adds a dollar a gallon to the cost of that fuel, which is prohibitive. But if we can get enough takers, and hint, hint to maybe city fleet, county fleet, and other big diesel fuel users, we wanna see if we can maybe get a compression on that price gap. That would take a big dent out. Vehicle miles traveled. Obviously, people in cars, the fewer people in the cars, the more VMT. So as Matthew mentioned, the RTA, ski train, this Yampa Go app will help people carpool to events and things like that. So that's a program. So there's lots of things I think that will reduce VMT. And then there's some others. Transportation. Airplanes were kind of one of the spikes besides vehicle miles traveled. And so looking at aviation fuel blends and that kind of thing are also things we have to keep researching and piloting.

What is clean diesel? Or how does it mean?

So I'm not a chemist, and I didn't sleep in a Holiday Inn last night, but there's biodiesel, which is organic oils, and clean diesel is actually done at the refinery, and it's a process of capturing hydrogen in the refinery process and putting it into those kind of other oils and fats so that the source... fuel is organic and then they can i in the old days we used to call it hydrogen a we can add hydrogen and carbon chains to that at the refinery so the feedstock is organic but the molecule changes so it's lighter and doesn't gel and that's my layman's clean it's clean produced it's not clean part well it burns a fuel that was already in the carbon cycle so you're not mining carbon to have something to burn

And then one more question. So, you know, AI is projected to increase energy demand by 20 to 25 percent over the next 30 years. And how does that how do you guys look at that with a climate action plan? Like it's the projections now is to slow the greening of the grid. um how does that affect your decision making and you know electrifying too early or is it just still on the same uh pathway so i mean i think projections are for the grid to be about 45 or 50 green by 2050.

So that's an excellent question. I'll kind of take a macro version and you can maybe go to Hayden on a micro version. Colorado statute has established that 80% number and Excel has said they will meet that 80% number. The additional loads they're seeing have pushed back by a couple of years. They thought they were going to be ahead of schedule and now they're saying we'll just be on schedule by 2030. Colorado seems to be on a legislative front committed to 100% clean energy and the governor, our current governor said it's that last 20% that's gonna be hard, but I was on a call today. There are folks that have baseline clean generation that seems to be at an affordable price point compared to the grid that say they can hit that 20%. So between now and 2030, we'll start, I think, seeing those more baseline clean generations come on and certainly hopefully by 2050.

And I see Council Member Geary's hand up, I will, right after I answer this question. I think, just something to add to that, I'm fully aware of the statutory things, I'm short. But also, I think one of the things that we can look at is, and I'll just use Hayden as an example, when we're not doing geothermal electricity, at our business park, but we are doing geothermal heating and cooling. But if you do the estimates, if you heat and cool a building with a heat pump and so let's just take 15 buildings in that business park, that's going to save 7 megawatts of electricity per year from the grid, and that energy can go to other places, to your point. And so that's not necessarily, and if you do electric heat pumps or whatever the case may be, I think it's incumbent upon us to think about how we save megawatts as well to meet a growing demand from other sources, whatever they may be, whether it's AI, whether it's whatever. So Council Member Gary, I just want you.

Councilor Gary.

Thank you. Thank you both for the presentation. I was just going to maybe follow up on that vehicle miles traveled conversation and I think and just all it's, you know, I think my understanding that maybe the transportation sector group has is focusing on kind of vehicle miles traveled right in terms of some of the various different potentially strategies and actions that can be taken to address it. And certainly you all spoke about the RTA and certainly SST, but I was just going to ask you if you wanted to elaborate a little bit on that.

All right. Go ahead. You're in the works.

We did have a little disappointment. We applied for a camp grant with the Colorado Energy Office to do a plan for VMT reduction, just like we did for buildings. We didn't win this current round, but we got good feedback from the staff. So our intent as the implementation team and from the CAP transportation working group is to stay on that funding of developing a VMT reduction plan. Because while we know what our carbon emissions are from airplanes and vehicles, we don't know exactly the granularity on where that's coming from. So that's that'll hopefully be phase one. And then it's going to be a sewing together of multiple patches. It'll be almost a quilt between what does the RTA do for the folks coming and going to come work here? What does the ski terrain do when it comes on? What does the amp go do when people know they can carpool and coordinate? And if I don't get a ride with Fred because he had to leave early, I can call Sally on my app and jump in her car. So we're going to continue in the cap transportation working group is going to continue to stay focused on VMTs because that went up 37%. So that's a nail sticking out of the board.

All right. Thank you.

Nothing. I had nothing to add.

Okay. Other questions for Matthew or Paul?

Yes, Tom. So the climate action plan and the collaborative itself is, primarily focused on decarbonization and reducing greenhouse gases. And with maybe a few exceptions, there's virtually nothing in there about resiliency. And I'm wondering if the collaborative is starting to have conversations about that, maybe shifting the focus or adding the focus for more resiliency efforts.

Actually, I think what I was trying to do in this presentation is kind of convey this forward-thinking moment about trying to blend in resiliency efforts, specifically thinking about our economy, specifically thinking about how we can blend these two things together to actually get resiliency in terms of our electric use, in terms of all of those things that you're talking about. The RTA is a perfect example of that. Will it help vehicle miles travel? Yes, it will. But also it's going to provide resiliency, dependability, safety, all of those ancillary benefits, which actually, if you ask people, may rank higher on their list versus some other things. And so I would say that while the plan, original plan, was focused on decarbonization, if you look at the goals of the CAP, you can find several resiliency projects that are in there. And my goal recently has been focusing not just on what the CAP's original plan was, but how that does blend into everyday life, resiliency, and those sorts of things. I think if a request came from our respective entities, like, hey, maybe we need to take a new look at the CAP to blend in resiliency, I think that would be good feedback.

Mayor Mrakas, Okay, so I see you have a question for us that you'd like answered. Mayor Mrakas, Or this question around how can the city, the collaborative board and working group work together to successfully implement the CAP. Mayor Mrakas, Did you want some specific feedback on that beyond what we're doing today.

Councillor John Gallo, I mean whatever we're doing now, or if you guys have any other feedback we would welcome that at this time for sure.

I have a quick question. I think we'll go into that. I didn't get to ask. So I guess my question is, what do you view as the low-hanging fruit for Steamboat? Because taking all of this together, it's a lot. And so what can we act on? I look at the 10% increase to waste. And so I know we've been trying to get composting in Steamboat and the pay-as-you-throw. Do you have any thoughts on helping us move that along or somehow not see this increase for waste as a landfill?

I should ask that question.

and landfill is not my area of expertise, but we have very capable staff and a dedicated group of landfill and haulers working on that. What we laid out in the landfill slide, I think are solid planks. So again, to solve a problem, you have to understand its components. So we have a good understanding of what's going into the landfill. Organics obviously contribute more greenhouse gases than maybe, Hard lumber, which contributes more than concrete. So that kind of thing. So I think that group's done a good job of focusing. And again, our solid waste team wants to thank the city for all their efforts and pay as you throw and recycling and focusing on the problem. So you have a very solid staff. alicia on that landfill issue as well so i think it's just a matter of giving him time getting the new waste management contractor time to get up to speed they've already changed with the what's the acronym the murph on the recycling component so i think right now it's kind of hold the course and steady as you go and start seeing the impact come down okay are you all composting in hayden or what do you do

We do not have composting in Hayden. However, I mean, this used to be a big deal. We were a single hauler place. So recycling is mandatory in the town of Hayden. You don't, I mean, you can say, well, I don't want a recycling bin, but you still have to pay for it. So it's, It's kind of a, you know, why would I not ask for it if I have to pay for it kind of deal. And then second, so, but we do not have composting. I think, you know, we, trash is actually part of our enterprise fund in Hayden. So it's dealt a little bit differently. It's not privately paid. Our residents just pay it on their water bill. And so that's kind of where we have approached this. Before we track the recycling stuff, we get a report about what ends up in the landfill, what's actually going to the recycling plant, those sorts of things. And that's mandatory in our contract with Apex now at this point. It was waste management now, Apex. Okay, thank you.

Other questions? Other thoughts or ideas?

Sharing here.

I do want to open it up to public comment just very quickly to see if there's anybody in the room or online. Please raise your hand who would like to make a public comment. Please come on down. Okay, seeing none and seeing none online, we'll close public comment. Is there any other final thoughts? I just have one thing around residential. Do you feel like there's enough focus on the residential side of things?

Can you clarify specifically what you mean by that?

Well, I guess just the whole notion of if people want to, you know... move away from more expensive fossil fuels, if people want to move to solar, for example, or different windows, for example, or whatever, siding or whatever, do you feel that there's enough awareness out there in the community that they can find solutions for this, or do they have to really work at it?

I would say that those who are paying attention and are aware of a lot of these efforts are very aware of what you're talking about, what they can do, et cetera. Is the average everyday person as informed about that? Probably not. And I think that it's incumbent upon us, governments, et cetera, as well as, you know, the Cat Board to try to educate folks. Maybe not in a way that it's like, well, you know, it's your duty to climate action and like all of this other stuff. As I said, if we're focusing on economy, maybe it's like, for example, Northwest Colorado Council of Governments has their winterization program and they have that, you know, I mean, almost for free, not entirely, but pretty close based on your income. They will come in and replace windows, they'll replace furnaces, they'll replace, you know, so for the amount of money that maybe you're going to spend on, you know, one of those items, you get all of it replaced for free. And so if we could start educating people about that and that they're going to actually just, it's going to save them money, right? I think we can achieve what you're talking about in both directions.

Okay, I just think we could probably do a better job of that. Even when I think about things as simple as an electric lawnmower or snowblower or leaf blower, and YVEA gives special rebates on those things too, and I just don't think the overall community is that aware of all this stuff.

I would agree that I think we can do a better job of those things uh we can always communicate better and we can always do a better job of that and i think uh councilmember gary has her hand up and i paul wants to say something about that as well

Yeah, if I could. So we're on the last legs of this capacity grant. So we have about a little over $100,000 left. So we are recruiting right now. We've got to go through about two dozen resumes. We're going to bring in an energy apprentice to work on this project, and their goal is going to be education, outreach. like picking up the phone and call center, calling contractors, following up on every everyone's ever had an energy assessment. Did you do anything? If you didn't, what was your barrier? So we'll have a better handle. The thing I've got to warn you and I, you know, Kim's presentation was very powerful. Activities, unfortunately, take people and people take money and desktops and that kind of thing. So we've got about one year left of solid capacity development funding. And then we're going to be back about this time next year saying, okay, what do you want to do now? Because the state funding's run out. So we hope to have a really nice report on what we did with this energy apprentice. As I went through the slides, we want to create what we call an energy concierge. So there's a clearing center where anybody who has questions can come and talk to the answer person who's not trying to sell them anything. They're just trying to share information.

Okay. Thank you. Councillor Geary.

Yeah, thank you. And again, I mean, thank you, President Monteen, for kind of your question and your point. And thank you, you know, Matthew. I mean, again, there's a lot of resources out there, but we can never communicate right enough in too many different ways. I mean, certainly you can always go to the Climate Action Plan website. There's also a community newsletter. I mean, there's all sorts of ways to get the information out and for are the residents of our community to find out what the resources are. So, you know, again, just to plug in for signing up for the newsletter, sign up for, you know, the collaborative Instagram. So you can follow on in terms of what's, you know, what's happening. I think as Paul mentioned, there was kind of this, you know, the heat pump hoedown. So, you know, anybody that's interested in kind of moving in that direction, you know, there are resources out there. And I would mention too, that as part of the accountability or kind of requirements, we do have a kind of an annual meeting. And so that annual kind of community meeting will be on September 9th, where, you know, again, we'll report out on all of the actions that are, have taken place. You know, we kind of, again, lots of information. So appreciate the presentation today, you know, would encourage everybody to kind of, you know, take the opportunity to look through that because it really was just kind of highlighting some of the accomplishments and actions throughout, you know, the year. But, you know, certainly, you know, one of the exciting things has been the CAP grants. And, you know, one of the points of those grants are that they're replicable, right? So trying to put out there various different examples at an organizational level, what different entities can do to, you know, to implement some of the various different strategies and action of the Climate Action Plan. And, And again, I think as us as council, certainly, you know, and I'm assuming, I think Eric's in that audience that our decarbonization plan, there's going to be a lot of, you know, hand in hand work, right. With the energy working group and certainly with this grant from, you know, the block grant that's going to set up our, you know, the city in a good position to be able to, you know, take advantage of that and move forward. So it's, you know, uh also kind of ways that we can you know use the resources in you know different ways and share the various different resources so um they say there's a lot out there thank you yeah happy to answer any sort of questions anybody has offline okay all right i think we've had our questions answered thank you so much paul matthew thank you you too um

It's 7.19. Would you like to take a quick 10-minute break and come back and finish up tonight? Okay. We'll see you in 10 minutes. What are we missing over here? Amy? Amy? What's up?

You're supposed to eat those, John. I know, but I just complained to you about him, didn't I?

I don't like potatoes.

Damn it. I want Julie to buy me one.

Hey, Councillor Dixon. We'll give her another minute.

She said something about the laundry.

We'll give her another. minute and then we'll get started if she's not back. I will. Okay, we'll assume Amy will be, Councillor Dixon will be back shortly. I'm just going to read the instructions for what we're going to do here on the consent calendar, motions, resolutions, and ordinances. First readings, here she comes, right on schedule, perfect. So items on the consent calendar may be reviewed and commented upon in the same manner as other agenda items. Any member of the 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 from the consent calendar, they may be approved with a single motion. Tonight we have a total of five items on the consent calendar. So what I will do is read the five items and then we'll go back and I'll ask council if they'd like to pull any items for further discussion and then I will also ask if anybody from the public online or in the room would like any item pulled. So with that, item number six is the resolution approving a preliminary plat major variance PL20260095 route county search and rescue addition. item seven is a resolution approving a development plan conditional use major variance pl202 50215 round county search and rescue addition number eight is a first reading of an ordinance vacating a portion of a utility easement located on lot 16 replat of mail property pl202 60166 Item number nine is a resolution approving a memorandum of understanding between the city of Steamboat Springs and Steamboat Ski and Resort Corporation for a $200,000 payment to the city for expanded transit service for one year, which may be renewed for up to two. successive one year renewal terms. And item number 10 is the first reading of an ordinance amending section 2-541 of the revised municipal code relating to the departmental organization of city government. So I will first ask council, is there any of these items like you would like to pull for discussion?

Well, is someone gonna pull nine?

I'm sorry. Okay, we're waiting for you to.

Okay, yeah, we should probably talk about the resolution. Okay, so you want to pull number nine? Yes.

Yes. Would anybody like to pull any other item?

I also think for transparency, we should pull 10. So there are my two. Okay.

Councilor Dixon wants to pull number nine and 10. Any other council member want to pull any other item? Okay, is there anybody in the room? or anyone online, if there is online, please raise your hand if there's any other items you would like to pull. Hearing none, we will pull items nine and 10, and I would then ask for a motion to approve items number six, seven, and eight, and leave them on the consent calendar and approve them with a single motion. So moved. Second. Okay, we have a motion from Councilor Agosta, second by Councilor Pacino. All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Opposed?

Aye. That was in favor.

We got you. So items six, seven, and eight remain on the consent calendar and are approved with a single motion. That brings us to number nine. which is a resolution approving a memorandum of understanding between the city of Steamboat Springs, Steamboat Ski and Resort Corporation for 200,000 payment to the city for expanded transit service for one year, which may be renewed for up to two successful, successive one year renewal terms.

Okay, Tom, do you want to, do we have questions for Tom on this?

Or do you want a presentation from Tom on this? What would you like? Yeah, just is anything changed from our discussion that we had last week?

So I'm sorry. So we have not talked about this in public. The last time we talked about it was an executive session. So I think we need to go over it. So whoever wants to do that, I don't care. Tom?

I'm happy to give you an overview. And as it's written in the staff report, The public probably knows city officials have been meeting, council members, staff have been meeting with Ski Corps for several weeks to talk about their 2026, 27 winter parking program. With respect to understanding what that program is, what the potential impacts are to the community, to the city operations, They have a fully developed operations plan that talks a lot about different mitigation measures that includes signage on private property, potentially using Haymaker as a park and ride, some wayfinding signage that they're doing, as well as a number of other items. One of the topics that was discussed was the potential impact to the transit service. And we've had several discussions with them. And the outcome of that is this memorandum of understanding, which is an agreement by Ski Corps to provide the city with $200,000 for at least this next year. for an expanded, what I would call a moderate expansion of the transit system, primarily an expansion of the yellow line, which is, as you know, the on-demand call, to be able to expand that service to more frequent service, as well as an expansion of the geographic area that it serves. as well as potentially using some, as well as expanding sort of the transit system itself by having buses that can be kind of floater buses. We know there are areas in town that some people get left behind, particularly during the high volumes times, and be able to have those floater buses be able to, when we know that's happening, get out there and make sure that people aren't left at the stations if there's a high volume situation. So those would be primarily the two areas of expansion that this money would be used for. So it is a one-year agreement with the ability to renew it for two successive years, which would ultimately equal $600,000, but we only basically are agreeing at this point for one year so that we can evaluate the success of it at the end of the year. both parties can understand whether it worked and if it needs any changes or whether we even need to continue it. So we wanted to make sure that we were having the ability to evaluate the expanded transit service to see if it was meeting its intended purpose. So that's basically what the agreement is in a nutshell and I'm happy to answer and Dan's happy to answer any questions with respect to any details of the agreement itself. And I believe there are representatives from Ski Corps too who can also answer questions if you have questions for them as well. Okay, thank you, Tom.

I don't have any questions, but I have a comment. Okay.

I'd like to thank you guys for the work you put in, Tom, Gail, and- Are you going into how you feel about this now? Let's wait till we have this and then we can go into that, okay? Right now, we just want questions, and if we don't have any questions or thoughts, we'll open it up to public comment, and then we'll bring it back to us. Gail?

Councillor Geary? Yes, thank you, President Luntean. I mean, I think, Tom, the other piece to make sure and point out is the early termination clause. Unless I missed and you said that. Again, just for public, again, for public awareness.

Yeah, I mean, there is a clause, and maybe, Dan, from a legal standpoint, you can just sort of describe the mechanics of that.

Sure, the agreement is structured as a series of one-year agreements. And at the end of each year, there is a contemplation that the parties will get together and decide if they want to do it for another year. And there's definitely a requirement that the parties engage in good faith. And I think there would have to be at least several rounds of negotiations. But if you got to the end and you were not satisfied, then you could terminate at the end of the first year or the second.

Yes, Councilor Agosta.

What we're seeing here is a proposal on how to address what we're anticipating to be a higher volume of traffic on our transit system or also a higher need on our transit system in situations where we're not having coverage today. Were there other options or other ideas floated to address? I mean, I'm looking at this saying, you know, we don't have much time to react. I mean, we're basically in the reactionary mode at this point in time, and it's difficult to just kind of build a solution in a couple of months. But were there ideas that were floated besides this one?

Who was in those meetings? You were in, Gail?

Yeah. There's been a lot of ideas floated, and there's a number of ideas that are in this that Ski Corps is implementing on their own, including, well, I don't want to get ahead of ourselves here, but in terms of other programs, we realize, number one, that we don't have the capacity to, to implement additional bus service beyond these floater buses in the short term for a one-year program. So ideally, if you could look out and say, you know, I could snap my fingers and I could order three buses or something like that. But given the timeframe around this, it's really down to what can we do to mitigate the potential impacts. And we call them potential impacts because we're not 100% sure of what all the impacts are going to be. or to what level, but what can we do to mitigate these things in the short term, meaning this ski season, and then understand the impact of that, which gives us the way out, if you will, or a different path forward after year one. So when it's into that mode, what happened was that, well, we have the ability with the yellow zone to expand, and we looked at the neighborhoods that appear to be the ones that needed it the most, and that was Blue Sage, That was Brooklyn, and I think it was High Point? Yeah, off the hilltop roadway up there. So we decided to do that. Then Jonathan Flint came forward and said, well, we usually have three buses that are not used regularly. when, you know, when some are in maintenance, we always have some extra buses just in case, you know, there's too many in maintenance or some break down or whatever. And so we said, well, if we put those in as floater buses, we have to obviously pay for more drivers and everything else that go along with that. And they would be there hopefully most of the time, not on a schedule, but if you were at the GTC at 3.30 or 4 o'clock in the afternoon where there's a big backup, all of a sudden the bus pulls out and another bus would pull in. Or you're at 3rd Street or 5th Street downtown, same type of thing. So it's not that many other things we can do from a transit perspective. We looked at the possibility, and it's still moving forward, I believe, around the Haymaker shuttle, where Ski Corps would offer a shuttle from Haymaker for people coming in on the south end of town, same type of thing. There's only so many things we can do from a transit perspective in a very short period of time because we don't have the buses in order to do that. And so we're looking at this as what we can do right now to mitigate this this year. Is that fair?

Yeah, I think that was accurately stated.

Yeah, and I would just add, I mean, and reiterate, I think as President Muntean said, right, I mean, in terms of just the lead time necessary to get an additional bus or, you know, to get drivers, et cetera, those were kind of the constraints from the city's perspective as we look at this being implemented next season. So what we have before us is the memo of understanding specifically regarding the the agreement that was reached for the $200,000 to help us with what's been described, expanding the yellow line as well as putting in place additional floater buses with the goal, because it is an alternative, to take the bus up to the ski area. And whoever hasn't done it, it's a great way to get there. You get delivered right up to the GTC. And so, you know, we're hoping, right, that that becomes a feasible alternative for, you know, a number of folks who, you know, want to continue to go up there. You know, Councilor Agosta, I mean, yes, Ski Corps has proposed a number of different other mitigation efforts that, you know, are outside of the scope of the MOU in terms of, you know, things that they are doing. And as Councilor Muntean said, there are a couple of other things that are you know that are currently under discussion in terms of you know potential let's hope you know kind of kind of park and rides but those there's details that yet have to be worked out on that um so um that you know this this is you know again it's mou in front of us but know that there are other things that are out there as well other questions

Tom, what metrics are you going to use to determine if this is successful or it's somehow... Jonathan does a very good job with metrics in terms of the transit service.

So he'll be able to... to measure the number of people that are using the yellow line, the expansion of that, particularly those geographic areas, to see if it's even being used and sort of what the ridership is and cost per rider, as well as tracking where and when riders are potentially being left at stations because of volume. So we will track primarily those two data points to kind of see if it's working. Perfect. Thank you.

Is the ski area going to report, I don't see it in the MOU, are they going to report their findings, how many people they parked, how many people they had in high occupancy vehicles, how much money and revenue they're generating from the paid parking?

That's a good question. They do track all that. I think it would probably be best for you to ask that directly of them.

But it's not required under the MOU to share with us.

Well, again, I'm drastically or quickly looking through my notes because, I mean, to your point, Councillor Dixon, and to your point, Councillor Barnes, yes, I think we agreed upon the fact that we need metrics to determine whether or not, you know, this is, you know, whether it's been successful and also, you know, collect the type of information that we need to move forward. So, you know, we absolutely, you know, have talked about that. And You know, and I know, you know, again, they absolutely will be looking at it in terms of kind of the perspective of how many single occupancy vehicle, you know, cars that the reduction and various things and things like that.

Yeah, we did talk about that and they, I believe, were willing to share that type of information about the trends as they go in terms of one occupancy, two occupancy, three occupancy vehicles and that kind of thing.

Is anybody in C Corp online? Because I think that's a... Well, there's one in person. Better.

And when we get to public comment, you may hear from him. Any other questions?

One more question for you, President Menteen. So we're talking just about the MOU for the 200,000, but you mentioned all this other work that's happening. I did email Rob, but he doesn't need all sorts of emails from Amy Dixon asking very specifics. But I think what we need as a community is the plan moving forward. So I've already had homeowners... associations reach out to me asking how they get a sign saying no parking. I don't want to, like there should be a better plan.

I think you may have seen the package of what Ski Corps was going to do. And that was at the retreat.

Yeah.

And that includes the signage and stuff. And maybe if Rob makes public comment, he can talk more specifically about that whole package of information there. Which I think we need to, and the plan, I don't want to speak for how they're communicating that out to the public, but I think that's going to come up hopefully here. Any other questions? Okay, let's open it up to public comment and hope one person at least comes down. Oh, here he comes. Thank you. You have three minutes if you'd state your name and address.

Thank you. Thank you. Good evening, Council. My name is Rob Peroman. I still live at 790 Mauna Kea Lane. That's Steamboat Springs, Colorado. In addition to myself and my wife, we're babysitting our grand dog. There's a couple bears in the neighborhood right now. So I'm here. I represent Altera Mountain Company. I'm the executive vice president of our mountain division for the Rockies. And I'm also the interim president and COO. and I held that position for nine years up until a couple of years ago. So I'm back in the saddle, as they say. A couple of things with this MOU. It is MOU and there's a clause in there that says if the city would like to change where the funding of the contribution goes, we will meet and discuss that. Again, we don't know what we don't know. We offered this contribution as a mitigation just to augment the service that the city already provides with SST. And we felt meeting together over the several weeks that it was good to expand the yellow line and also provide this peak demand or additional buses during the peak periods if there's extra capacity and the team is not working on the buses that go in for maintenance. If they're in for maintenance, they're not available for the extra capacity, and we understand that. So we're trying to be as flexible as possible. We also have a very detailed operating plan. We're almost ready to share that. We will make that public. We have been working with all the stakeholders, the neighbors, the businesses around the mountain area to make sure when we roll this out in several months, we are fully dialed. And when I say fully dialed, we need to be adaptable because we don't know, we don't know. A couple other comments. is that you heard from you know route county climate action on reducing vmts and carpooling that is one of the goals of paid parking we want to contribute to less vehicles on the roads and getting people to carpool we did some studies throughout last winter where more than 500 vehicles going into the meadows lot were only occupied by a single person We need to stop that. We need to get people to carpool. That is a goal of ours. And we said it numerous times. If we don't make a single dollar off of this winter parking plan, we've accomplished our goals to get people to carpool and to utilize multimodal transportation. I'd also like to remind the council that we contribute $2.75 million a year to SSP. This is an additional 200,000 for the winter parking plan because it's the right thing to do to mitigate potential impacts. In addition to the $2.75 million, we have contributed and are working on a 20 year commitment to the RTA. We need to get that accomplished here very soon. I think our deadline is January. Our goal is to get that done very quickly. I just signed agreements with jet blue and with Alaska. I'm going to keep going today and yesterday for the air program. So in addition to the 2.75, the 1 million to the RTA, we also contribute to the air program, as you know, very well. Council President Muntean. So we are here. We want to mitigate the impacts that the winter parking plan may potentially have on this community. We want to get people to carpool. We want to contribute to better multimodal transportation throughout the Yampa Valley.

Thank you, Rob.

Thanks, Rob. Thanks, Rob.

You can go ahead. I'll allow that.

So you just heard our question about are you willing or would you be able to share, you know, because basically data to prove what you're trying to achieve.

Yes. And I forgot to mention that. In terms of metrics, part of the MOU is that we'll get together in the spring and share metrics. And that is our intent, to share the number of carpools, to share the number of, you know, VMTs, and to share emissions and work with, the Western Resilience Center who's been supportive of carpooling and this plan. So we're gonna get studies and share data on how well this plan is working because we need to work together to adapt it and potentially shift the $200,000 contribution to somewhere else. But along with that comes all the other aspects in the operating plan that we will be sharing here in short order.

And that operating plan, just for everybody's, I'm not asking you to go through the whole thing at all, but it's going to be shared to the community. Yes. Not just the businesses or the neighborhoods, but the entire community.

Absolutely. In terms of wayfinding, in terms of carpooling, in terms of incentives, in terms of enforcement, in terms of all that stuff, we are absolutely almost ready to put that up on the website and share that to our guests and our locals and our community.

Any questions? Thank you, Rob.

Thanks, Rob.

Okay, is there anybody else in the room would like to make a public comment? Seeing none, I'll go online. If you want to make a public comment, please raise your hand. Seeing none, we'll close. There's one. There is one? Yeah. Okay. Bill, are you there, Bill? I am. Go ahead, Bill. You have three minutes. Please state your name and address.

Bill Jamison, Burgess Creek Road. Let's talk about your proposed plan in expanding the yellow line. That has gotta be one of the dumbest ideas out there. The yellow line costs two or three times the amount of any other line you got out there and how you can just, the screen that is in the packet, $22 for a trip. I mean, it's operating as an Uber. If the yellow line is gonna run, to the metals lot, it's truly an Uber. And how are you going to control the costs of this yellow line? Rather than talk about $200,000 to expand the yellow line, you ought to be thinking about how you're going to fund $8 or $9 million transit system that you want to expand. This idea that it's a free bus is Myth. It's costing you $8 or $9 million to run. You ought to be having a fee-based system of at least $5 per ride. In addition to that, I know that the MOU and other agreements with Ski Corps, they don't like a lift tax. But at some point here, you're going to have to face your revenue diversification issue in ways other than fees on wastewater or a fire tax on the city residents. And you ought to be thinking of where the big money lines are. And that's transit for one and how you're gonna fund it. And where are our big resources for revenue? A lift tax has got to be at the top of the list. And following that, you need to convert this bus system to a fee-based system. Back in the 80s, it was a fee-based system. And this idea that you need coin boxes and all the other reasons Jonathan Flint gives you as to why he can't have a fee-based system, you know, This is the 21st century transit systems all over the world operate on touch cards phones and everything else so let's get serious about how you're going to fund these things, other than looking for a fire tax for the district or other means, thank you.

Thank you bill. Okay, is there anybody else online who'd like to make a public comment? Please raise your hand. Okay, seeing none and seeing no one in the room, we'll close public comment. Bring it back to council for deliberations.

Mr. Bartz. Yeah. Again, I'd like to thank Rob and Tom, Gail and Steve and whoever else is in the meetings working on this MOU. My concerns today have never been about whether SSRC should have paid parking. I want Steamboat Ski Resort to run their business, be successful, and thrive. Our economy and local businesses and thousands of jobs depend on a healthy resort. Likewise, SSRC depends on a healthy community with reliable transit, workforce housing, quality infrastructure, and the exceptional quality of life that makes Steamboat what it is. Our futures are seemingly inseparable. Over the past five years, SSRC has invested more than $220 million. and expanding the resort increasing uphill capacity by approximately 60 percent that success has also had increased demands on transit housing parking public infrastructure and city services those impacts are real and they deserve to be addressed comprehensively not one issue at a time as someone whose children grew up in winter sports club i've watched the access to the base area change and slowly disappear. Parents, skinners, hikers, and local families have all experienced that change. And this year that change becomes front and center. These are more than transportational and parking issues. They are fundamental changes to the way our community experiences the mountain. In my opinion, these issues should not be separated. Paid parking transit, the proposed GTC, Meadows Gondola, parking infrastructure, community access, and future transportation investments are all connected. Negotiating them one at a time is not a strategy. Unfortunately, this MOU is fundamentally unbalanced. SSRC is given broad authority to terminate this agreement if the city merely refers a lift tax to the boaters or if future legislation by the state creates taxes they oppose. Yet there is no reciprocal protection for the city or our residents. If paid parking expands from three days a week to seven, there's no additional contributions listed. If parking fees increase, nothing additional is listed. If additional impacts are created, nothing additional is listed. The city must report out to SSRC passages, bus routes, numbers. SRCC is not, under the MOU, held responsible to the same standard. We are not guaranteed to receive numbers or revenues from paid parking. The city's compensation never changes. The community assumes a greater impact while SSRC's financial commitment remains fixed. That is not an equitable agreement. Equally or more concerning, this MOU contains no measurable benchmarks, no timetable, and no requirement for either party to negotiate the larger issues still before us. There is no commitment to a comprehensive framework addressing transportation, parking infrastructures, GTC, Meadows Gondola, community access, or future public-private partnerships. While it's been represented to folks that will be working together in the future, the reality is once this agreement is approved, there is simply no guarantee that those discussions will happen with the urgency this community deserves. Sometimes no deal is better than the wrong deal. And I believe the city and city council should engage experienced public-private partnership negotiators and establish clear objectives for a comprehensive mobility transit and parking initiative that addresses these issues. We need a 10 or even a 20-year plan, timeline with ideas and solutions to meet the future. I want SSRC to succeed and I want our community to succeed with it. But successful partnerships require hard work and balanced agreements, shared accountability, and reciprocal commitments. This MOU does not meet that standard. I don't want the community to feel like this was our problem and we didn't negotiate it correctly.

Okay. Thank you.

Other thoughts? All righty. Well, I will take a different tune. While I've been hard on Ski Corps, for sure, they did not have to come forward with the $200,000. So I've been thinking a lot about it over the past few weeks. This was all them wanting to contribute some way. Will it fully mitigate all the impacts around the traffic? We have no. And I agree with you, Dave. I mean, yeah, like there has to be a larger strategy. But this is not the purpose of that today. I view this as a goodwill effort from Ski Corps to say we recognize that There will be impact. How can we try to help mitigate it? We have a really short runway here to get this up and running. I don't think this was about us negotiating with them. I really think this was SCICOR just coming and saying, well, thank you, Councilor President Menteen and Councilor Gary, that they brought this forward wanting to find a way to help. You know, with that, I actually thank SCICOR for doing that. And I think there's a lot of work still to be had and to be done, but this to me is a great first start. They didn't have to do it.

Okay, other comments?

Well, I mean, thanks, Councillor Barnes. Your letter, it's a cord in accountability for this whole process. For me right now, in the short runway of this next season, and too many unknowns. The one thing that I have a hard time with in politics is we plan for the absolute worst, and sometimes it never does come. And in this case, we don't know what that worst case scenario can be. We don't even know what the best case scenario will be. Let's talk about the best case scenario. We get a bunch of cars off the road, right? And it's a successful season and it works great and the impacts are not what we anticipated. We don't know that. We don't know what the impacts are going to be. But this was a, I agree with you, a fair option to say, hey, we want to be part of mitigating any potential. But I also think that I think a two-year with the way that it's written gives the successful one-year renewals. If this isn't working out and it's just a total chaos, I guarantee you we're all going to come back and talk about this in the first year. But we have to start with something that's reasonable. We can't say, give us an extra $2 million and we'll be happy. Will we? No. We don't know what we're happy against. We don't know what we're up against right now. And so to me, this is a very good step, working with our relationship with Ski Corps, moving forward, and saying, okay, let's see how this impacts our this first year. I'm fine with that. I don't know how else a better way to do it. So if any one of you guys have a better way of doing it, let me know. Because now's the time to speak.

Okay, thank you. Councillor Agosta.

You said, you know, I asked the same question, you know, as you have asked, Councillor, which, you know, basically if we got $2 million today, would we be able to solve the problem? No, if we got two new, but through two or three new buses, you know, today, would that solve, you know, would that solve the problem? Probably not. In terms, you know, well, if he had right away, I mean, if we had commitments for the buses, you know, right, right, right now, we don't have more buses. And so, you know, it doesn't matter. And even if we were handed $5 million, it, you know, there's a lead time of what, two years to get a, to get a bus. And so, The MOU as written does not lock us in to anything. We could drop it after a year and basically we decided, we did some research and determined that expanding the yellow line and adding some extra buses when they're available is what we can provide, but then it gives us a year to understand the impacts. COUNSELOR BARNES, WHEN YOU WERE TALKING ABOUT WHAT IS THE PROBLEM, I WAS NODDING YES. THAT'S THE PROBLEM. I WAS WAITING FOR WHAT THE SOLUTION WAS AND I DON'T FEEL LIKE THE SOLUTION IS NEGOTIATORS. I SAY THE SOLUTION IS WE HAVE A CAPACITY PROBLEM THAT that we will understand more in the year's timeframe or basically through the season. And then how do we come up with solutions to those problems? But just sitting together with some highly paid negotiators doesn't do it. It doesn't tell us how we're gonna solve the problem.

Okay. Councillor Swintek or Councillor Geary, any thoughts from either one of you?

I'll let Councillor Swintek go first if he has any comments and then I would like to make a comment.

I just echo what Councillor Dixon had said. The resort didn't have to do this, so I appreciate this gesture. I'm more looking forward to seeing this as a new leaf and the new partnership that we've talked about where we work on rebuilding trust and better working relationship between us so we can achieve great things in Steamboat that benefit the community and the resort.

Thank you, Councilor Swintek. Councilor Gary.

All right, yes, thank you. I just wanted to, I guess, make a couple of corrections. Just to be clear, when we talk about the yellow zone and the expansion of the yellow zone, it is not to the GTC, but rather it would connect back to the main transit line, which is just expanding the yellow zone as it exists today. So again, it's about getting people from their home down to the main transit line. And then also, I think to Councilor Barnes' point, I mean, the termination is both ways, right? I mean, in the sense of both parties have the ability to terminate. So just, again, from a point of clarification, And then, you know, again, appreciate Councilor Dixon's comments as well as Councilor Swintek's. You know, would it have been good if we'd have been brought in, you know, to the table a little bit sooner? Yes, but I think as has been discussed in terms of our ability to order new buses or really to build a robust transit system, that is going to take, you know, more time. So, you know, again, we did what we could in terms of kind of anticipating what we expect to be potential issues and just making sure that anybody that does want to, you know, ride the bus has the ability to have up, you know, a positive experience as well as has the ability to, to get there. Um, but you know, again, I am, um, you know, again, supportive of this and, uh, appreciate, uh, you know, ski core. And I think certainly, you know, this is an opportunity to kind of move forward and, um, work together and really start looking at the issues that our community faces through the lens of a strategic partnership. So I think that, you know, what we've done here is a start and there's a lot more opportunity out there. So thank you.

Thank you, Councillor Geary. And I would just add one comment to this about, I don't want to repeat what anybody said. So starting next week, there's going to be work on more of the long-term strategic vision, the strategic partnership piece of this, and where our mutual interests lie and making sure that we understand that we are two elephants in the room. Not one and one of us without the other is not a dance at all. And we need to be more effective. We need to collaborate better. We need to understand what the expectations are of each other and make sure that we know that if the mountain wins and the city wins, the community wins. And that's the bottom line. So with that, given what I've heard here, would somebody like to make a motion?

Move to approve agenda item number nine.

Second. Okay, we have a motion from Councillor Pacino, second by Councillor Dixon. All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Opposed? Nay. Okay, motion passes 6-1.

Thank you.

Okay. With that, we'll move on to First reading and number 10, first reading of an ordinance amending section 2-541 of the revised municipal code relating to the departmental organization of city government, Tom.

Yes. And thank you, Councillor Dixon, for pulling this. I appreciate that.

And can I just say, I support it. So there's not, I just, it's just good for transparency. Okay.

I think it's great that you pulled it. And I'll just give a brief overview. As you know, city council or city manager is responsible for all the primary administrative functions of the city, with the exception of creating new departments. That is expressly stated in the charter as a responsibility of city council. So I am bringing to you this ordinance that creates two new departments. The first is the Deputy City Manager Department, which was actually informally created in 2019 when the previous city manager kind of reorganized what was then called the General Services Department, did some reorganization and created the Deputy City Manager. which has been functioning for all intents and purposes as a department. It oversees the divisions of city clerk, communications facilities, IT and programs and grants divisions. So through this ordinance, I would like to formally create the deputy city manager department to oversee those functions. Secondly, I am recommending that we elevate the human resources department to its own department. The human resources and risk management are both vital functions of the city. and elevating that to a kind of a standalone department, I think provides clearer authority, improves accountability, and really elevates that, those primary, those responsibilities within the city, within the city organization. So the other changes do not change any departments, but kind of clarify some of the language We have in there still, it is called Public Safety Services Department, which is a holdover from a previous organizational structure. So that changes the name from that to Police Department. It changes some of the description of the fire services, doesn't change the name, but changes some of the description to better reflect kind of actual duties. And then as well as the Department of Parks and Recreation, that kind of just changes the description of responsibilities to kind of better reflect some of its actual responsibilities and duties. So that's the extent of the changes. Okay. Thank you, Tom. Any questions from anybody? There's no FTEs. It's just, it's just now, this is just changing organizational structure. Yeah. Cool.

I have a question that is just purely me being curious. What does the org chart look, look like with deputy city manager? Is it department heads like line into you and then dotted line into deputy city manager?

No. So the deputy city manager is one of my direct reports as all the other department heads are as well. So it is just another department head that reports directly to the city manager.

Got it. So no lines from department heads into deputy city manager.

No.

Okay. Thanks.

Okay. Any other questions? Okay. With that, we'll open it up to public comment. Is there anybody in the room? Or anyone online? If you're online, please raise your hand if you'd like to make a public comment. Okay, seeing none and no one in the room coming down, we'll close public comment, bring it back to council for a motion.

I would just like to make a comment that thank you for looking at this. I think this is a really important move for the city. You have an excellent deputy city manager, you have excellent staff. And so I appreciate your thoughtfulness in looking at this.

Move to approve agenda item 10. Okay. We have a motion by Councillor Pacino, second by Councillor Agosta. All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Opposed? Motion passes 7-0. Okay. We're on to public hearings. There's a second reading of an ordinance, number 11, which is an ordinance vacating a portion of utilities located in lot one, Jackson to Trani subdivision, PL20260100. Okay. If you want to give us just a, does anybody need a presentation or just a brief overview? Brief.

Yes, this is a partial easement vacation, a utility easement, public utility easement at 7246 Ridge Road. And it's gone through the sign-offs. It's not needed, at least that portion. And so we're recommending approval. And I'm not Jeremy Brown, I'm Bob Keenan. Subbing in for him tonight.

I think we figured that out, but thank you, Bob, for letting us know. Any questions for Bob? None? Okay, then I'll open it up to public comment. Do we have any public comment from anyone in the room or anyone online? Please raise your hand. Seeing none, we'll close public comment. Bring it back. Move to approve agenda item 11. Okay, we have a motion from Councilor Pacino.

Second.

Second by Councilor Agosta. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? Aye. Motion passes 7-0. Next on the agenda is the City Attorney's Report.

I don't have anything for you in writing, but I did learn last week that there's been an interesting development in the regulation of tobacco and nicotine products, and in particular, flavored tobacco and nicotine products, which I think is something that's sort of evolving on people's radar with underage use of these kinds of products. Anyway, the city and county of Denver recently banned the sale of those products. They got challenged and last week a district court judge upheld the city's power to do that. So I don't know what extent you hear about this, but it does appear that we do have the power to act in that area if you're interested. Okay.

And as a reminder, Councilor Gary and I will be meeting with Seamboat Springs School District Board, not sure if that's their title, this fall, because they wanna partner with the city and looking at tobacco use for minors and eliminating, sorry, I should probably- So just for edification, the process for doing what Denver did would be what?

You would need to give staff direction to bring you an ordinance. And, you know, there could be, you know, a work session or two if you wanted to talk about it. But it would take an ordinance. Okay. Thank you. Okay.

So that includes like some of the, just like the, food or the liquid stuff that there's out in gas stations?

You know, I actually did not take a deep dive into the Denver ordinance. It's broader than just tobacco. So I think it's, you know, the vape pens as well as tobacco. I don't know if it is, if it extends to things that you don't inhale, like food products. But if you're interested, I can certainly take a deeper look.

Yeah, I would say, can you bring us back more? Some information? What Denver's doing.

We have an opportunity too, if you want. We have a work session coming up with only two topics on the discussion. I don't know if this is something we'd want to do at a work session, but if there's a sense of urgency around this, I guess I would say what would be the next, you know, how could we move this along if council wanted to? And I...

I think you'd probably need to get me and the chief together to talk about what we can do. And if we see trouble areas, I have had some conversations with the chief about tobacco generally, and we don't get the sense that there's a major problem here, but you may hear differently.

Yeah, I mean, I know vaping and the nicotine products like that are just sold at gas stations. have landed in schools and teachers and counselors would be super happy to weigh in on that.

Sure. You know, we could give you some information on what we do now. We do have regulations regarding the sale of tobacco products to minors. And so in addition to talking about what Denver's done with flavored products, we can also give you an update on what it is that the city does.

And the level of fines and all that.

Correct.

I wonder if that would be helpful. Oh, I'm sorry, Gail.

I was going to say, I think that would be helpful. I mean, I think we absolutely have heard right from the tobacco free coalition. I mean, in terms of having conversations with a couple of that, it's at least at least one high school person, as well as a couple of folks from the county health department. and Human Services. They came to our Council, Coffee with Council a couple of times, as well as I've had individual meetings. So, and I think Councilor Muntean, you also went to a PIC meeting right at the high school. So there's absolutely, I think we've heard adequate, a lot of interest from the community in terms as to asking what we could do to address this issue.

So do we want to take a thumbs up or down on having Dan bring us as much information as he has from both sides of it?

Yes, can I just do one? Councillor Geary and I will probably be meeting with the school board this fall because I'm looking at the message that this is a priority for the school board and they really wanna collaborate with us in this city around the community engagement. So I, yeah, if we could get the information and then we could talk about as council and then Councillor Geary and I would have a plan when we met with the school board, if that works.

Okay, when I get some information together, I can present it to you in a city attorney report, and then you can decide if you want to expand upon that.

Everybody?

Yeah.

Everybody in on that? Thumbs up? Okay, good. Thank you. Any other business tonight? If not, I'll ask for a motion to adjourn.

Move to adjourn.

Okay. We have a motion by Councilor Pacino and a second by Councilor Augusta. All those in favor say aye. Aye. This week at the Farmer's Market, I believe Councilor Barnes and I are going to be there. I don't know if anybody else is thinking about it, but please look at the schedule moving through August because I think there's some openings. So have a good week off next week.