City Council - Regular Meeting

All right. It is 545. We've got everyone here, so we'll get going. Any questions about the agenda tonight?

Anything from you? I do have two very brief items. First, just a reminder, you do now have your packets for Thornton Fest. It does have a run of show, and most of it's pretty typical. The one thing that I'll remind you is an addition this year is now the Volunteer of the Year Recognition Awards. There is a note that that will be at 6 45 at the anniversary stage is when we'd like to have council members there so that the mayor will give out that award but we'd like all members to be on the stage for that process so we're inviting all of those that were nominated right that's right i think um at this point uh we've got four individuals that were nominated that have i think a couple were not available and we believe both of the youth will be able to attend so We won't have 100% of the nominees there, but we should have.

We can still acknowledge them even if they're not there. What did you say? We can still acknowledge them even if they're not there.

Yeah, that's right. Second piece is we have continued to try to coordinate with 27J about a joint meeting. And so we did get another proposal from, the school district, they like when possible to hold these on a fifth Tuesday when they don't have conflicting business. That would, they have proposed September 29th. We do already have budget reviews scheduled for you on the 25th and the 29th. And so as you remember in prior years, we've done sort of a lengthier budget review that was difficult for scheduling. So we have kind of taken a couple of planning sessions and dedicated to budget. So that would be difficult. They take a break at the end of June and through all of July and they don't hold any meetings. The one counter proposal that I didn't identify potentially to make back is both your August 18th and your September 1st planning sessions at this point are both have relatively few items. So I think there was hesitancy previously to dedicate one of your meetings, but they continue to try to find time.

On the 18th of August or the 1st of September seems like a reasonable alternative to work through both schedules. So everybody okay with that and throwing it for an option? That's it for me. All right. Thank you. All right. Let's jump right in then. We have fireworks enforcement.

So this will be a team effort. W. Chief Hawkins is going to introduce this. So the council will remember we came to you with some ordinance changes that have since been put into place to help with fireworks enforcement. We also had a previous discussion about mitigations for the 4th of July celebration. We made a commitment as we got closer to the 4th of July to touch back in on both of those pieces, enforcement education and event planning. And so that's what we're here to do tonight. So I'll give it to Chief Hawkins.

Good evening, Mayor, Mayor Pro Tem and Council. Paul Hawkins from the Police Department. I've got Lieutenant Bob Peterson up here with me. He's going to go through the presentation and we'll try to answer any questions related to the actual enforcement side of it. And we've got Chief Kelly up here to talk about the coordinated response, not only to the fireworks themselves, but any education stuff that's going on. And then we've got Chris Nike up here to talk for the parks perspective of things. I want to hand it over to Bob real quick and get into the slideshow, and we'll go from there.

All right. He just kind of went over it. The purpose is to update Council on Public Safety, Fireworks Enforcement, Community Strategy, and the actual fireworks show. We actually have already approved this. This is the big piece that we took it from 10 to 38 and we can now cite homeowners more of a nuisance. So that should make enforcement a little easier this year. We went over it prior. We were averaging about 16 or 17 tickets a year, which is pretty low. So hopefully this will help us with our enforcement efforts this year. Call volume, we anticipate to be right around what it is every year. We're 500 fireworks complaints around the 4th, over 210 just on the 4th. A lot of them are made anonymous. We're reaching out with our PIOs and trying to reach out to the community and express how they can more effectively report so that we can enforce instead of just calling in and saying they're hearing fireworks. And obviously new ordinance is going to help us with that, it sounds like. Bubble messaging boards came in this week. They should already be out and deployed doing education on the legality of fireworks in Thornton, which is they are legal. They will be out all the way until two weeks past the fourth. So those will be moving around the city for the next month and then two weeks after the actual events. Talked a little bit about public service announcements through the police and fire. On the police side, we've already started with our PIOs. We've got some flyers out, some stuff going out to talk about the ordinance changes and our enforcement efforts and what's legal and what's not. We've already started on briefing training, making our folks aware of the changes so that they know that their stance is going to be a little different and how they can more effectively enforce it. And community liaison officers through this month will be going to the high density housing communities and identifying previous problem locations and trying to do some education out there prior to it becoming a problem. Overtime shifts will start two weeks prior to the 4th and go two weeks after during identified times and dates, mostly Friday, Saturdays and Sundays during when it starts getting dark until about midnight or until 02. Two fireworks enforcement cars. We've historically put those out there on the 4th and they're hard to fill. So we just made that a part of our actual ops plan and we've mandated some folks to work that. So we have a little extra enforcement and help out on the road on the actual night of the 4th of July. And anything that needs to be enforced at the actual event, there will be plenty of police officers at the event to assist with that.

I don't think this part's me. Oh, sorry.

One more up. No, by the way. Big one. One more time.

Here we go. So Council, good evening. So we've had some previous conversation about mortar size. And so Steve and I had an opportunity to talk to Zambelli Fireworks, which is our fireworks company. And Zambelli is really, truly one of the best fireworks companies in the nation, does a majority of the shows in the nation. And in talking to them, He's assured us that if we reduce mortar size to five inches, we can have a quality show. that it will reduce the size, the height and the width. And by reducing that, it'll be a safer show, but yet the public will not see a difference, should not see a difference. And so the customer experience should be just as it is today and ultimately be a safer show. So we made that commitment with Zambelli Fireworks to try to create a safer environment.

So with the reduced mortars, the fountain fireworks, we'll still have our fallout zones. We're going to do the same mitigation efforts that we talked about before, wetting down the areas. And we will have a number of resources on site during the event, as I expressed previously, up to two Type 6 brush trucks. plus an engine company, plus additional personnel. And there will, as with previous shows, there will be weather condition triggers that we will look at at the time of the show as a go or no-go for the fireworks, specific to wind conditions. We have been in a generally wet weather, and we're happy to see that continue. Wet weather... condition. We expect that to continue for the next few weeks and we will continue to watch this as we get closer. But this is the fireworks plan for the fourth. I feel confident with both our response and the show we're going to provide. We're happy to take any questions on this or on the enforcement and the communication.

Any questions? Was there a cost difference going from the six inch to the five inch that

New question. There is not a difference. What we had them do is create more of a denser show. So there's not any cost difference at all.

Great. Well, thank you very much. Appreciate the effort to make sure that the community still gets a great show, but we're staying safe at the same time. Next is designating a voting person for CML and NIC.

So this is a quick logistical item. Kevin Borgett will come through to walk this through to make sure that we are prepared for some upcoming meetings. All right.

Thank you, Mackenzie. Good evening, Mayor, Mayor Pro Tem. In terms of council, I will try to be very brief on this item. Pursuant to city council policy 4.3, council must designate a delegate to cast votes on behalf of the city at the CML and NLC annual business meetings. CML is scheduled for actually later this month, now that we're in June, scheduled from June 22nd to the 25th in Westminster. The annual meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, June 24th at 1.30 p.m. According to my notes, we have Mayor Coleman, Council Member Martinez, Council Member Algi, and Council Member Russell scheduled to attend. And so per your policy, you need to designate both an individual and an alternate meeting.

Is someone interested? I cannot attend the business meeting this year.

I can do it.

All right, John, we need an alternate as well. Chris, Justin, Wednesday, 1.30.

Yeah, the business meeting is Wednesday, June 24th at 1.30.

Is it possible to get a reminder as well with that too? Thank you.

So what time? 1.30 is when the meeting starts.

schedule at that time, but if it's alternate. It should just be alternate. So John would cover it. Yeah. If he can't make it for some reason.

She know what room?

And it'll be on the schedule too.

Okay. Awesome. Thank you. Awesome. Okay. And then, uh, for the NLC, the NLC is scheduled for November 18th through the 21st. Uh, it's in Nashville, Tennessee. Uh, the annual business meeting has not yet been fully scheduled. They have it listed on their, um, trip planner as, uh, taking place on Saturday, November 21st. Um, And according to our notes, we have all council members registered to attend the NLC. So again, need to designate an individual and an alternate.

I'm on the board, so I have to be there anyway. So I'm happy to be the designated voter for this one. We also need an alternate.

I can be an alternate. All right. So we will bring forward the resolutions that...

All right. Council travel policy and informal board meetings.

Yeah. So this is following up on a request from Council Member Martinez to take a second look at the travel policy. So this is going to be a tag team between Laura Colstead and Kevin Forget. One of the things that I will just say here, we did take an attempt to look at other practices. One of the things you're going to hear that it was a little bit outside the original request is As we looked at this policy, there were a lot of different things in this basket of the policy. Part of our recommendations are not only updating the provisions, but potentially pulling out some elements of this policy that really didn't have anything to do with travel or expenditures. We are going to use the term recommendation in the presentation. I want to be really clear here. This is a council policy. you know, when we say recommendation, these are some starting places for discussion, but clearly want to reinforce that this should be a policy that reflects the norms and expectations of the council. So if there are ways we can change this, happy to do that. Again, just wanted to create a starting place for conversation. Now I'll give the floor to Rob.

Thank you, Tansy. As Tansy mentioned, the travel policy, if you've read it, is home to many different things. Along with discussing overall travel for conferences and that kind of thing, we thought this was an opportunity to also talk about informal ward meetings, and then also memberships, and then clean up a couple of things with city and other benefits as well as sponsorship requests. Those last two are really more, at this point, all we're really recommending is some cleanup to recognize your current process. for those two. But again, as Hanson said, we're really just looking for your direction on this. I will recognize the city attorney's office was instrumental in helping us do the research as well as craft the initial kind of strong person recommendation for you all. And I will note, I think the way we're going to try to go through this is kind of touch on the travel policy, pause, get a little bit of feedback, and then move on to the next one because they kind of do operate as individual issues. So with that, I'll hand it over to Kevin.

Thank you, Rob. Thank you, Tansy. And good evening again. make it very far um but uh by way of background um you know as you mentioned city council did provide some staff direction to take a look at the travel policy and informal award meetings um currently the city's reimbursement expense reimbursement policy does provide some guidance on process and on eligible costs related to travel um however it doesn't necessarily you know go into limits or go into caps or anything like that with travel. So the expense policy also does provide a, it mentions that there's a $200 allowance limit for informal ward meetings, but really doesn't provide any direction beyond that $200 allowance for informal ward meetings. And it lists out the eligible costs. And so we're We also recognize while we're doing some of the research and looking at these policies that the current policy doesn't really speak about memberships. And memberships are obviously very closely aligned with a lot of the council travel. So I thought it would be important to take a look at that. And then we also recognize the opportunity that there are currently three separate city council policies that talk about in-government sponsorships. And there may be an opportunity to consolidate that. So I wanted to just kind of review that with you all tonight. So starting with travel, staff did do some peer city research. What we did find is that most of the cities that we did take a look at did have a limit, either a dollar cap per year or a per trip limit. So we did see that the allowance limit, if there was a dollar cap, ranged from about $6,500 to to $11,000 per council member per year. And we did find a policy that also included a limit of up to two out-of-state trips per council member per year. So as Tensie mentioned, we were just going to provide a concept for consideration, you know, a bit of a conversation starter. One thing to consider is potentially having a limit of trip limit per year per council member. It could include two out-of-state trips per year and one in-state trip per year. The one in-state trip would be greater than 25 miles from the city. The basis of that recommendation is kind of on current practice would be, you know, two NLC conferences and then CML conference. Obviously, there could be some flexibility to substitute those meetings. But again, the kind of the limit amounts were kind of based on kind of the current practice of the two NLCs and the CML.

There's three NLCs. There's a summer meeting, too, because I'm on the board and the Energy, Environment, and Natural Resources Committee, and they do summer meetings.

Mayor, is that specifically for people that are on the board, or is that open to anyone?

It's open to anybody who's a member of those groups, and it doesn't require much to be a member of the group. The board and the chairs of those committees are expected to attend, but anybody can if they're members of those groups.

That's helpful. Thank you. That relates back into kind of the conversation around memberships too. And if you're on, if you end up selecting a new leadership role. So thank you.

That also includes the constituency groups. Yeah. In addition to the advocacy committees.

The first tier suburbs or even the Leos, right? Hilo.

Hilo, yeah. And they're not always at the same place as the main one. Right. For example, Jerish is going to Oklahoma, right?

Mm-hmm. And I'm going to Kentucky. Yeah, exactly.

Sorry. I think that does go into the kind of the next bullet there that, you know, that if there was, if you hit your two-year limit, if you put that in place, that, you know, could be permissible to go beyond that with, you know, general consensus of council with a written request. So you could put some parameters around things of that nature. We'd just recommend, you know, including travel expenses as part of the annual budget process. It also could potentially think about having a carve out for 100% sponsored travel. So where all costs are covered by a third party, potentially not counting that against the per limit if you were to go that route. And then also potentially coming up with an exclusion for the DC lobbying trip, the council retreat, or if there's any other city initiated travel, again, could be excluded from that limit. So we'll pause there.

Dustin? Yeah. So you mentioned you did a survey of other Other communities and they have either the per dollar or the purchase and your recommendation here is a perk per trip what what led you to that over per dollar as something that you thought you would recommend to the Council yeah I think.

the per dollar, you know, the dollar limit changes. So obviously you can have a provision in that that would say that it could be adjusted annually. Again, I think the basis was thinking about kind of the current practice in numbers of trips versus the dollar amount. You know, I mentioned the range is between 6,500 and 11,000, what we found in both per cities. And, you know, the cost of travel these days, I don't know how far that will get you. So thinking a little bit more on the per trip limit was, you know, what we thought would be potentially a better avenue to pursue.

We can do either. I think we landed on that just because from an administrative standpoint, as Kevin said, like going to one city versus another, the cost could vary dramatically based on hotel, airfare. And we thought the intent was more about like getting out and doing this training and establishing some level of limits. And so that seemed administratively a little bit easier for us and quite frankly for you all to manage. But either way, I think we can do either one and figure out a way to do it.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, it was interesting to know if there was a train of thought that you are following. Thank you. Devin?

Given that there's the potential for the, like the boards for the energy and the different ones from NLC, Would we be able to look at something instead of going two out of state and one in state just to make it around three trips period and marking at that point? Because then you can choose if you're going to want to go to CML up in Breckenridge or if you want to go to Tulsa or wherever in Oklahoma for that trip, it's up to you on that decision.

I think you could establish whichever limit you want to. The other thing that we toyed around with, I'm not quite exactly sure how the NLC committees work. I think I'm actually on one and I'm way different as to how it actually works. But, you know, not knowing how they work, you could see a provision for if you are on one of those committees that that is included above your two or whatever you establish the limit as.

was pondering on this and it was more based on the dollar philosophy but i agree with what you guys are saying so uh some council members are just more active instead on more boards and require more travel um if we were to say set it at three that my suggestion is then if someone's not utilizing all the trips like tony tony didn't travel a whole lot actually tony traveled quite a bit

Yeah, he went to NLC, he went to CNL. He traveled less, I will say that.

So what my thought process was, then, all right, you're at year three, should that be the theoretical number, but somebody else isn't having any travel, we're halfway through the year this year, you know, with a formal request, like, hey, Drew, you're not going anywhere this year, can I get one of the excess that you have? And then that way it keeps people from going, like, I got seven this year, and some people have one or two, obviously one is... receiving more benefits. So that might also help keep you at a reasonable number. Just pick up what's left over from some other council members that maybe don't sit on boards or travel as much. I wouldn't care if I wasn't going anywhere. I'd happily take my extra trip.

I travel so much for work, I don't care.

Yeah.

The only concern I would have with that is that then we're horse trading essentially to say, well, can you give me your trip? And then like, so it'd be more if we've kept it like stable and then anything above that, then you have to ask approval from council would probably be easier than trying to kind of deal with someone to give me your trip.

You want more than just come to council and ask. Yeah, so why set a limit then if we're always just going to talk about it? Because that doesn't mean I'm going to say yes to your ask.

We've never said no, but there is that. What's the problem?

Yeah, so before we start trying to figure out the ideal minimum curves, I'm interested to know what the rest of the council thinks about the per dollar approach. And one of the reasons why I even brought this up in the first place was thinking about how to be more consistent with a budgeting process in terms of this category. And setting a dollar amount would make that a whole lot easier. And it would also allow us to make our own choices on what types of conference. For example, some cities like Broken Arrow, Oklahoma might be a little bit cheaper than LA or something like that. You might be able to get more in if you're allocating a budget, just like we would do with any other decision that we make. So, yeah, I see the advantages, but I do also see positives for both sides. But, you know, interesting to know what the council thinks about that other approach.

That's a harder one to set because if you think about like when we went to DC for NLC, that was a pretty expensive trip for the hotel and things over there. If we set an amount for $7,000, I think when we looked at it, it was like $4,000 or something, $5,000 for each one of us to go there, which means now you're at one trip. Because once you start incorporating $800 flights or $600 flights to fly out somewhere else, you've already burned through your entire budget.

sure if we set the budget the right number though that we don't have to say seven right yeah so um but yeah and then it does make me think i feel like maybe we are going to exceed the budget this year because i'm pretty sure we've exceeded it every year yeah we've exceeded it here so there's another thing that's just like exceeding it there's something that we should address but yeah that's was uh some thoughts yeah roberta and then john

I like the idea of doing the number of trips because there's also other factors that can play into it. Like right now, the gas prices, well, they're going down a little bit right now, but they were pretty bad. So then the cost of flights goes up and that's just configuring what's going on in the world into the cost of a trip can just be tricky. And then that would take away from the ability to go on another trip if that were to be needed or desired for a specific reason. So I like the idea of, because now technically we don't have to really ask, am I correct? We don't have to ask council.

It's a courtesy to bring it to council. Council can say, no, we don't want you to go. I don't know that it was ever written down that way though. So we can make that actually a requirement.

I know that clarification what the current policy is.

Yeah.

Sorry, I was not ready with that.

I don't have it in front of me verbatim, but it does make states notifying the council.

Notify versus permission. Right.

Yeah.

We could change that too, that would require approval from the council.

Well, I think that's one of the reasons we're here is you have to give notice or not. So this option would allow you not to have to.

Well, currently the way this written, if it's just notice, if you guys say, I don't want you to go to that, I can be like, I don't care.

That's why we're having this conversation.

So I would, my, my preference would be to have a set number like three and then ask permission for the fourth.

So it would be three out of state and one in state?

Yeah. And then it says at the bottom there, what they have is a suggestion is lobbying, council retreat, and other city-initiated travel would be excluded from the limit.

I would also say that if the city's not paying for it, it doesn't matter. Yeah.

You're still notifying.

That's where the dollar thing is at an edge, because if somebody's not paying for it, nothing on the earth. Or if somebody pays for half of it. I went to the LAO one last year. I think they covered like 80% of it. So how would that factor into TRIP?

It would probably count as one more. It would be the one you asked for an addition and you'd say, which is what you did. You came and said 80% is covered by the scholarship and we said, yeah, sounds great.

Yeah, local progress pays for all of it except for $100 for the... Registration.

So, but that's because I applied for scholarship.

You don't apply, then you pay for it.

Thank you, ma'am. What's our collectively, what's our cumulative travel budget for our trips per year? It's 66,000.

Okay. Yeah.

I thought that was the number. Correct. Yeah. So yeah, I do. You know, everyone's bringing up great points here. I do like what the Mayor Pro Tem suggested. Of course, she reached out to us about her trip next month, you know, as the courtesy. Yes, we have three, like I said, because a lot of us do. I mean, Chris and I had this conversation after the Active Adult Center this afternoon. It's like, you know, right now I'm not doing much travel, right, in my boards and online now, but that could change during my time. I mean, in two years when the next council sits, we're going to be reassigning boards and commissions again. And I may be on a board that, hey, we need to go travel. Let's just say California, sake of argument, right? So, yeah, I like three out of state and then the one in state. Of course, this year with CML being in Westminster, we don't have to worry about the hotel expenses. So that saves the city money for this year. But then, of course, next year it's going to be a whole different ball of wax. So, yeah, like I said, everybody's bringing up great points tonight. But I do like the three out of state and one in state then. Anything beyond that, you know, just a courtesy to council to, hey, I'm going to go to this conference in California.

A courtesy or approval?

Well, oh, gosh.

I said approval.

Approval. Sorry, approval. I stand for approval. Thank you. I apologize, Madam Mayor, Madam Mayor Pro Tem.

And if I could, the current policy says council members will inform city council in advance of travel out of state to attend training programs, conferences, and events where a council member is representing the city.

Approval then.

So we could change that to approval. Yeah. Um, Roberta.

Um, I would just think to, um, instead of I, what does the word, what does the verb say again in the policy?

Like you shall or council members will inform the city.

Okay. So you do need to, no matter what.

It doesn't say how, but it says will inform.

It could be email, could be here, but it doesn't say approve.

Great.

Okay. Just want to make sure that's.

All right. So the suggestion then is three out of state, one in state, and then approval for more. Noting that Justin's suggestion is a dollar amount.

Noted.

Well, my suggestion was just three period, not just three total.

No matter where they are.

Yeah.

All right. We need to get to consensus here. So let's go back, let's start with Justin's because I'm not hearing a whole lot of support. I just want to see you on the dollar amounts. Do we want to continue that conversation and move on to the number?

I'm not opposed to the dollar amount. I think it makes sense. Especially, Kevin, did you send out that budget? I'm trying to find it in my email and I cannot find it, but it showed like what our budget was and what was actually expended each year. Do you have that on you right now?

I have it right in front of me and re-forward it to the council.

I think it would be helpful to see that. I do like the dollar amount. I mean, it keeps us honest with What we said is our budget, but at the same time, I know that's probably an administrative headache to try to track that, and it might be easier to just stick with the three trips total for the year. You know, the horse trading thing, I understand that concept, and I think it could be a good idea. The problem is that, well, I think the challenge might be that If everybody's racing to get trips in now, and if you trade out, now you've lost out if you want to do something later in the year. And I don't, so for fairness sake, if I want to, if all of my trips end up at the end of the year, I want to still have that available as a council member. So I don't know if I think instead of horse trading, it could just be permission based. And that just makes sense to me. So if we can do three trips and stay in budget, then I'm happy ultimately. Okay.

got roberta than devon does the policy um say anything about it being like in the continental us it's more towards city business so you'll have to be you know going to a conference so if we're not going to give a dollar a mouse which i don't think we should i think it should be the three but i do think we should limit I put some sort of limitations around location because many, many moons ago when I first started on Tashko, a very nice resident brought up the idea of sister cities. And my only beef with it was that I saw council members in the city of Denver going on fancy trips to Africa and other cities. And I was like, that could get like, the sister city idea was cool, I thought, aside from like, I just did not find it very conducive to anything in the city of Thornton to have council members traveling overseas to other countries to do that kind of stuff because it just looked, frivolous to me when I would see it. And this is a long, you know, a while ago, but that's just an example of how that could get completely misused, I think, in my opinion. So is there any, any type of language we could put in this policy to make sure that we limit like that type of stuff?

Or with the council approval, there are opportunities on the mayor's side to travel internationally and There's groups that go to, I think there's one that went to Venezuela last year, Puerto Rico this year. I haven't attended any of them. I did go to Switzerland, but I didn't pay for it. The city didn't pay for it.

Yeah, so that's different. That's different.

I would not have had the city pay for it.

Yeah, like Hilo's talked about, like, let's go to the border. And I'm like, well, okay, what's really, you know, how's that going to, what would we be learning there? But also, like, that could get expensive, right? So...

Brighton has a policy that doesn't allow them to leave the continental U.S. So they can't even go to Hawaii or Alaska.

I mean, it's Brighton, so who's going there?

Well, the U.S. Conference of Mayors had their conference in Hawaii a few years ago, and our main went.

Or just the 50 states.

I don't know. I mean, I'm just saying, like, you have people going to France and Ireland and you know, on fancy trips and it's.

Well, I think that would have to be, well, we could say that these three trips are limited to the United States. Anything above that would have to have council approval.

I'm fine with that. I think it should be a discussion instead of like, oh yeah, you know, one of my trips is France.

We're still talking approval, right? That's still on the table as approval of anything above those three, but in the U.S.

So if one of them was one of your three is to France.

Right. I see what you're saying. So we would limit those three to the U.S.? Yes. So that is your suggestion? Yes. All right.

Anything above and beyond that would have to be approved by council and have a discussion.

All right. So that's what's on the table now. I have Devin and Chris.

So currently, it sounds like we have roughly a budget of about $9,000 per person. Oh, sorry, $7,000 per person. I think if we did the three and then did a not to exceed, that would also help with the funding aspect of it as well, where you can be like, yeah, if you want to go on this one, but Miami's in a culture more than Tulsa, then that's great. I think that helps. And that also kind of helps solve some of the problems there because an international flight is going to push that much insane anyway. So if we just did a kind of combination between the two, between you can have your three, but then also a do not exceed of this amount. Because it sounds like every year we break that anyway. So maybe we need to evaluate and see what that number is that we typically go over.

I almost feel like you need an either or. Either a number or a dollar amount. Because from a tracking standpoint, that becomes very complex.

Well, it shouldn't because you should be buying economy class.

We have a policy that already covers all that, right? So we have limits on what we can purchase for flights and hotels. That's already covered.

Then my stance is still just three total areas. And anything that's, I would say anything that's international would have to come in front of council anyway.

I'm hearing everybody and I'll throw this one out then too. I still struggle to see like, why do we need approval here? would say approval if that were to become part of this would be if you know above and beyond the three or four whatever it's collected i think that's what we're saying yeah no i'm saying approve one second if we do approval on anything above and beyond that that's like two thousand or some sort of like because that answers her question that like all right you're going to paris You need to bring that to council because that's going to be obviously more than 2,000. But since we just agreed to let everybody go, if you're doing $1,500 and that's your fifth trip, what do we even need approval for? We've self-managed each other. You said it's never really been an issue.

We've also had nobody try to take advantage of it, just to be clear.

Right. So are we putting rules in place that are just unnecessary is where I'm going. We give notification, that's fine. But if you're on your fifth trip and it's a $5,000 Paris trip, that would trigger something for approval. My dollar amount is like anything above $2,000.

So you're saying no limit. But if it's over 2,000, you have to get approval.

Yeah, because otherwise, what's the point of even having an approval process? We're just going to notify each other and say, yeah, go.

You're learning.

That's what I was hearing from you. So to kind of feather in what Devin was saying, was anything above and beyond outside of our three trips? Again, you want to go to Paris.

You're still saying three trips is covered.

Three, four, I don't care what that number is. Again, we're going to settle on something, but... you know, so someone isn't going to Cairo on their seventh trip, like, look, that's going to need an approval. That's a very unique situation. You said it doesn't happen much. So are we just layering and discussing a lot of rules that really are never going to be enforced or needed? Maybe there's just one rule that needs to be any trips out in excess of your allotted amount above 2000, then you need to get approval. Anything that falls underneath that, like, sure, go to Oklahoma $15.

So we'll go twice. Yeah. So everybody knows. Yeah.

So I'm hearing general consensus on three as the standard. And then, so then the suggestion would be us only for those three. And then anything over $2,000 after those three would require approval. Otherwise, it's just... And I would say any travel outside of the U.S. should also be approval.

Yeah, because it's probably even more than $2,000 in the U.S.

But even if you're traveling, I would say even if you're traveling and you're not paying for it, notification still needs to happen.

Yeah, notification, because that's what we already do. You know, we're just adding a lot of extra approval process that I think is needless. So simplify it is what I'm asking.

I say, you know, we shouldn't completely eliminate the international... I would say it has to be approved, right? Even if it's one of the three, we're finally going one shift in a year, right? And it's somewhere outside of the U.S. It would have to be approved. And we would allow that as long as it's approved, right?

Yes. I think that we're saying that the three is, you have three in the U.S. that you don't have to get approval for. And then any... Well, we haven't gotten that one yet. We just have a consensus on the three right now. It doesn't matter which three, but we only have consensus on three. Well, I'll get that one in a second. But then after that, if it's over 2,000, you have to get approval, or if it's out of the country, you have to get approval. Gotcha. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Then to Cherish's question, are we including one in-state? So CML, essentially.

So three, yeah, four total. Four total, and then anything above 2,000. Is that clear for you? Four total.

Three can be anywhere. One has to be in the state.

So I do have a clarification just for drafting. Oh, sorry, Drew. I'll get you next. The limit of three, no financial limit on that. In that case, is the expectation that there would be a notification to the rest of the council? Yes. So the... Three, national, not international. There's notification beyond those three. If it's less than 2,000, there'd be notification to the council, but not approval required. If it was over 2,000, then the council would have to approve it.

Or if it's out of the country.

Or if it's out of the country. Out of the country is true across the board.

Yep. And then, Drew, you had one more.

Thanks, Kansy, for sending that email out. You can see the expenditures the last few years. Up until 2024, we've never exceeded our budget as a council. And it looks like the last few years, it looks like about $6,000 over $7,000. So I think on the approval front, I'm a fan of the three three trips as like an allocation to each council member, but I do think we should hold ourselves accountable to hitting our budget. So if we exceed the budget that we set for ourselves, there should be some sort of accountability to like why we need to spend more. Because I mean, our residents are going to ask us that.

We don't have any control over what feels like.

Well, I mean, I still think if we set a budget, we should know where we're at.

We should at least have a conversation to know if we need to modify the budget. Is that what you're saying?

And really say, okay, is that trip, is the juice worth the squeeze? You know, are we lobbying and, you know, we're going to get millions of dollars out of this trip, or is it just a learning event? You know what I mean? So I think we'll say, yeah, is it worth exceeding our budget? So I would say we should incorporate, if we have our budget, And if we have to exceed that, then we need to at least acknowledge that we're exceeding our budget, and here's why we're okay with that.

Yeah, based on the email Tansy just sent, we're already at $47,000. We haven't even did the NSO Summit for Nashville yet. Right. And all of us are going to that.

Yeah. So the request then is to have our budget check in regularly on this? Is that something we could add pretty easy?

Yes. I mean, you know, at any point we may have actual expenditures that have happened and then things that are planned. So I do think it would be helpful if people are going to make a request that we knew it in advance so that we could make sure that we have pulled the most recent updates, both of what's actually spent and what's pending. And so that, we could more easily probably, it would be difficult for us to access that information real time.

And I don't think that would be the expectation. I think it would be like, oh, hey, by the way, it's August and we're at 60,000 or 66,000. So now we need to really take a hard look at what are we doing the rest of the year and should we do that? Yeah. And that's really all I'm getting out there.

Okay. Yeah. Not transactionally when requests are made, but just a standing update.

Okay.

Justin?

Yeah, did we all agree to exclude the city-initiated DC lobbying?

We hadn't got to that point yet, but that is a very good question. I think we should exclude it because that is specifically related to city business. Yeah, sounds good.

I'll make sure that we clarify that. Yeah, it has obvious financial benefits for the city.

But I think in every year we do this, where we analyze whether or not the last trip was worthwhile. Like, so for the new people at the end of the DC lobbying trip, we actually will go through it with our lobbyists to see what did we get out of this? Is it beneficial? And do we want to do it again the next year? And we can decide it's not.

Do we currently include the DC lobbying trip into the budget that you just sent out? Is it already in here?

I don't believe so.

but it was already excluded from that budget line anyway.

We had a conversation about that. I tried to make sure we were doing apples to apples, but let's post the data.

Like the DC lobby and the council retreats, those things, if they're already excluded from that budget line, then I don't see that as much of a critical issue as long as it's being accounted for somewhere with some different budget line.

It looks like it is in this budget. It says year to date, including in this amount is the 6,500 for the DC lobbying trip.

TAB, Mark McIntyre:" yeah and see the that's the part that's concerning with that too, is because that means we're even adding more expenses, on top of that, again, so this 65,000 of the $60,000 budget just now turn into $80,000 budget. TAB, Mark McIntyre:" And matter of an hour.

I don't know that we're adding more. I think we're being realistic about the expectations for this year. There have been years. In the past, one year was COVID. So, I mean, 2021, nothing happened. But there were people that were not engaged and not active. That was actually a bone of contention that not everybody was as active as everybody. And so now we have a much more active group of council members. And so now we're almost doing the opposite of saying we're too active. And so we can't have both ways. We either need to allow us to be active or say we're not going to do anything.

HAB-Jacques Juilland- agree, but George point earlier, I think it's more of the where's like what's the added benefit is going this can be coming out of it just. HAB-Jacques Juilland- To sign up for one because you're a member of a certain thing you want to go to that event doesn't necessarily mean that's contributing anything back to the city, I think there needs to be a. HAB-Jacques Juilland- tip for tat on what you're actually bringing back to the table on, especially if we're going to be spending $100,000 of the taxpayers money to be traveling to these trips.

Don't disagree. I got Justin and then Chris.

Yeah, again, I'm going to say this is exactly why I like the dollar amount. It helps me decide, is this worth it? You know, is this trip to wherever? You know, if it's just one of a lot of e-trips, it could be a very expensive trip and not very high value. That wouldn't necessarily... you know, there's more trade-offs to be made when you're factoring in a dollar spent. I get that. I realize it's hard, but I feel like how we're working towards some kind of compromise there, but factoring in that, you know, what's the value of these trips, I think, is an important conversation. I don't know how we judge that, how we do that, but I think it's, I do like how we have that conversation about the DC lobby tripping, where they have the end of each round. And because we used to just combine them with the NLC congressional conference, and we could easily do that again in the future. So and then same with the going out of town for the retreat. So I don't know. I'd like to figure out how we could do that. I'm not sure. what we can do, maybe assure ourselves that we have that on the agenda in a planning session after trips or something like that. I know some cities have write-ups. I think Broomfield requires council members to present what they did at the conference.

We do have that in our discussion, and we do talk about it after these trips. It's not a written requirement, but we can obviously require each other to do that.

That's exactly what I was going to touch on when we were in Salt Lake. Austin sat next to me from Broomfield on a bus and he's cranking out his report from the meetings that you attend. you know, but there's value add. I don't know if they actually represent it or if it's something that just gets emailed to council so that everybody can say, all right, this guy's pretty active. You know, he went to a conference, but he's hitting, you know, six meetings a day and it's more work for us. But if we want the accountability that Devin's referring to, that would also motivate you. Like, I'm not just going to take the trip and goof off. I owe some actual notes back to my colleagues when I return. So you're either a liar, which I hope you're not, or you're going to do the late work to justify you going on that trip and having some content to bring back. So we can add accountability reports.

And I don't want to punish the council because we've done a really good job of doing that. We bring items. I get it. But I also, to the whole point of we fixing a problem we don't really have, right. Is that we do a good job of bringing things back to the council. We did the East Lake street fair because Jessica actually brought it back after an NLC event. We've done other events throughout the city, biking events and other incredible work that the city has done based on information that we've brought back from these council trips. So there is an expectation that they have to be valuable. There is an expectation that we share that information. We are doing that. A written report I don't think is going to make it any better.

I would argue if we're doing that so well, why aren't we having this discussion?

Because a council member asked for it.

That means that it's something we should be looking into and kind of digging into more.

I think it's because there's clarity on how many trips. And so that's what we're trying to get. Is it just a free-for-all? Is it really having a conversation? And if we want to limit the trips to NLC and CML, we know the benefit of those two groups. And then anything above that, maybe we can change.

I think Devin makes a good point. Another option is don't do anything. Don't change anything? Don't change anything, yeah.

I like the idea of having accountability. I like the idea of putting some guide rails around it that we haven't had and for clarity. And I think that helps staff so that they're not stuck in the position of where you say, well, I'm going to go on this trip to Paris. And staff's like, well, I can't tell you no. In Texas right now, a council can't tell you no. Well, that's the only thing I wanted to change or say that accounts for approval. But yeah, but we've never said no. But then again, we always justify what we're doing. Chris?

Yes, so if we're circling back to doing very little, then I re-propose my thank you. Change nothing and just say if you're going on additional trips above $2,000, that's the only time you need approval. Otherwise, we're self-policing ourselves and we're doing a good job. I mean, we're coming full circle now. So at this point, my suggestion still remains the same.

It's the $3,000 and $2,000 or just $2,000 for anything?

No, the three, a lot of trips are fine. Anything in excess, like if it's Nalio or something like that, and it's over 2000, then you're getting.

Which is where we still are. That's the closest we have to consensus right now is for that. I've only had like three, four people say that that's what they want to do. They haven't said a word. I'm sorry.

I fired shots everywhere. Everything that I hear is you just leave everything exactly the same and self-police each other. I mean, that's basically what it comes down to. So, I mean, this was, I think we're trying to solve a problem that didn't exist. So.

So the current policy says that we just inform. Do you want the ability to say, no, that's not a good idea, not a good use of tax dollars? Does that require policy change to approval versus inform?

And let's just say that you have, and yeah, sure. I mean, I'm fine with that too. I'm fine with council to approve that if you want to travel somewhere that's, we all travel, like NLC and all those ones, those ones we all go to. But if it's something out of the ordinary, like, because, you know, whatever committee or whatever organization you are a part of outside of council that maybe has some tie into council because of the organization and you want to go to a conference and yeah, bring those to council. I don't see it being turned down as long as it's within reason and go from there. That's what I would do.

Like I said, we've never said no, but we've never had anybody try to take advantage of it either.

So if it's something outside of that where it's not specifically tied to, you know, we're all part of NLC, you know, there, then we'll go for it.

So if it's not NLC or CML, you bring it for approval. Yeah. That is the easiest solution. No.

I think we're adults here.

that's great but if i want to go to costa rica for a trip i mean that's what i'm saying like that's where the 2000 threshold is like the policy stays the same to your point david and anything in excess of that's outside of our normal trips and it's five grand or whatever number you want to set to it that's when you need approval outside of that like just keep it real simple it's going to tell us we need a budget

Jan, you said we had four people, almost a consensus.

For the three plus one and anything over 2,000.

Is everybody weighed in on that?

Well, Dave did something different. Everybody has weighed in. I have Roberta, John. Chris, me. For the four.

Okay, then I will move with that.

Okay, so three plus one in state. Anything over 2,000, ask for approval. Or outside of the country.

You guys have fun wording that. That's why we have staff that are very talented.

And notification. Notification. Including those that are paid. or by outside organizations.

Yes. It was well discussed. Back to the next topic.

Move on to informal board meetings. So just running through really quickly the current status. As you know, council members host informal board meetings. As I mentioned, you have a $200 annual limit per allowance per council member for eligible expenses such as facilities, facility rental materials, food and beverage. Council members have rescheduled reached out in the past to CMO staff if they want the meeting posted. I have also reached out to CMO staff for assistance in booking the meeting. And right now, outside of that reference in the expense reimbursement policy, there is no separate council policy regarding informal board meetings. So much like the discussion we just had on the travel policy, just putting an idea out consideration, potentially crafting a new council policy on informal board meetings. It can include limiting the frequency of the to once per council member. And then anything beyond that, you have the $200 allowance. You could also potentially post all informal meetings that occur at a city facility and then limiting staff participation to help book the facility. So three potential options in crafting a new council policy. So I'll stop there and ask for feedback.

Chris, it's good? So once per quarter per council member.

Just to clarify that it's the same $200 as you just now allowing facility expenses to be in the list of allowable expenses. That makes sense.

And no staff participation except... Is that what I'm reading? No staff participation in informal board meetings.

And that is informally the practice right now. And we can include this formally in the policy. As I understand it, the practice has been if somebody wanted a staff presentation or staff participation, that would need to come to the council to get approval. But I think that's, as I understand it, has sort of been the informal practice. We typically don't get requests for staff to attend or present at these meetings. So we could further flesh that out that the staff is available to help with the logistics of facilities. We can certainly add that additional provision that if somebody wanted staff assistance or presentation or participation in a meeting that had to be approved by the full council.

I think that sounds reasonable. The expectation for informal board meetings was that staff was not participating. It was just the council that was running it.

Then for informal meetings, like so a few of us have posted coffee meetups. Would that be something that could be advertised in the city? Is that sort of that policy too?

Yeah, so this was also a point that Council Member Martinez asked in the past in terms of When do we post and not post formal meetings? Again, we included in this kind of start that we would do that when they were at city facilities because generally we're facilitating those and we know those. You could broaden that, but then we just need to make sure that we have a process.

I would say we don't put the city in that position to post, but it should not be a city-sponsored event. If it's using city facilities, it gets complicated, but if you're doing a coffee at a restaurant, that shouldn't be posted as a city event.

Sorry, to clarify, I mean, sharing it through our social media channels, not as like a formal posting of like council meetings.

No, because then we're asking staff to do work to post our meetings and that's not the expectation.

Yeah. So yeah, it's just all on us. So nothing would change in this policy on that front.

Do keep in mind that whenever three more of you are together discussing public business, it is a public meeting.

So if you happen to go, you can't discuss city business. Right.

Why don't you leave before we start that conversation? Right.

Let's get John to post because he's going to share.

All right.

Is that clear enough? Go ahead.

Um, so if there's three, if there's three council members there and Adam, I mean, this is always like the evolving question of century. Um, if there's three council members there and, um, so you can't talk about city business unless it's been posted. Is that correct?

Correct.

Okay. So, um, then We'll be posting the ones that take place in a city facility, correct?

Correct.

Under this proposal, yes. Okay. I kind of wanted to clear that up. And then also, what if council members are requesting facilities and there's other organizations there?

Well, you get one per quarter. So if you want to use it for somebody else, that quarter, that's taken then.

Okay. So then does that get into anything with city staff or anything? If there's other people and other equipment and things coming, that's okay. Or is that.

So city, and maybe you can clarify is that when we're using city facilities, there's no staff support. So if it's being used for another organization, the same would apply unless they pay the fee to use it.

Yeah, we, I think we set up rooms, I think, and I do think that AV and like generally, I think when we facilitate informal board meetings, I think we have created a functioning space for a meeting, but that's it. We do the room set up and get the technology ready for the meeting. Yeah, and that's the only staff support that's provided. Okay, and just to clarify, so

Um, because it does come at a cost to the city if there's like, if there happens to be more than one council member there, and then the ends up needing dignitary duty from our police. Is that also okay? Or is that something that needs consideration?

So I am not exactly so our typical protocol for council security detail is knowing that more than three council members are going to be at an event, that's typically that people have RSVP that to us to let us know that that's gonna happen ahead of time. So if we didn't get proactive, that's partially why we ask you all to RSVP to events so that we can assess whether or not a security detail is appropriate. So if we didn't have advanced notice that people plan to attend a meeting, we wouldn't scramble to try to provide.

So the expectation would be no dignitary protection at an informal board meeting because there's no staff support.

Okay, just making sure.

Should we look at considerations on adding things in that's going to be limitations on what those 30 groups could be so that somebody doesn't rent out the room and then hand it over to somebody else in that process that.

Well, that's the thing. If we're going to let them use the room, they get to use the room. If we want to limit it, then we don't use the room. I don't think we can limit from the first amendment. I don't think we can limit what the youth room is used for. So the alternative would be, we can't use city facilities for informal meetings. So with that, we're okay with the proposal?

As I mentioned, we'll be quick with this one. Memberships. Currently, the expense reimbursement policy really doesn't reference memberships at all. We would just recommend simply adding some language to that policy under scope 2.1. Just adding the underlying text on your slide that just says related to memberships to organizations, just including that language. And then potentially looking at adding a section 2.2, which would just be that council members would provide notice to city council before joining or volunteering to, before joining an organization or volunteering to serve on a committee. So just another concept to consider.

So other than NLC and CML? Because we're already paying those memberships. So there's no additional membership fee for those?

yeah these are these are any sort of individual memberships that you have or that may come come to be as these organizations remember we used to be members of the u.s conference of mayors right and then i cut that when i became here we um we don't see this very much um and so we were even kind of on the fence about whether we had it because again the you know solution looking for a problem but we we thought we'd put forward this example like first we talk about the leo that's got members you know so

Yeah, there's no additional fee for women's because I'm also a member.

The way there is, it's like a hundred bucks or something like that. And so is that included in here?

That was the intent with this language.

Okay.

And so that would be approval for memberships?

No, just for magnets.

But then I could join U.S. Conference of Mayors without approval and that's a very expensive membership. Well, I was thinking of something way.

You know, I think approval is not a bad idea, honestly, because you could have somebody who wants to be a member of something that makes the city look bad.

And is really expensive on top of it.

Or expensive on top of it. I don't know about the conference of theirs. But it's expensive. It doesn't make the city look bad, but there's lots of organizations, and you never know what My kid in the future. Yeah, we want the city to pay for that membership and we should have Okay, I mean, this is not like it's going to be Now that that's just it's Well, technically, the council approves the NLC and CMO memberships through our budget process anyway.

So we could also have approvals for memberships for outside of those organizations.

And technically these memberships should have some city public business purpose, right? Right. Just like the one you suggested. They have information, you know, that helps city issues sometimes.

Yeah, but there could be opportunities for things that either don't have city engagement or are really expensive and the council should have approval for that. So I agree with you. We should do approvals. Anybody opposed to that?

Yeah, I'm just wondering if that's what our council members wants to join, like, you know, the Society of Confederate Mayors or I don't know. What?

Don't say that. Do you know what I mean?

Yes. I don't ever know what the future could have or somebody wants to do that. Yeah. The city is going to pay for something. We should be approving it.

Look at me. I don't know what that's about.

No agreement then on agreement for approval of memberships outside of NLC and CMO because we already approved those through the budget.

All right. And then while going through this process, staff did just notice there may be some opportunity to provide some policy cleanup to particular sections for city events and other benefits. And then, as I mentioned earlier, on sponsorships. In terms of... City events and other benefits, we just would recommend memorializing certain current city council benefits. So we would update city council policy 4.1, adding section B listed on the slide there. So we would add that certain benefits are eligible. That would include the up to two foursome Thorn Creek golf passes per calendar month for current and previous mayors and council members. It would include the free recreation center passes for current mayor and council members and their immediate family members. And then also mentioning that other city events would also be a part of that. So city sponsored events, festivals and programs. So we would include all under section B of the current policy 4.1.

Justin? Yeah, I think all of these are great. I agree with all of these. So mark me down for that. One thing I did want to address though is the... is that we want these whatever policies that we agree on and what we have agreed on in the past to be the effective policy, not extras added on to that. For example, I think there might be some miscommunication on the existing golf policy because on the passes themselves, there's an exemption on times and the weekends. That was not part of the policy. It was added on outside of what the council had agreed upon. And so that causes miscommunication and problems. We're trying to use that because the policy is not what is written on the card itself. Those of you who have that card. Yeah, it's right here.

Basically, the limitations are Monday through Thursday, turn it on this card at any time. But then Friday, Saturday, Sunday, there's time to change an afternoon. And yeah, it's, you have to have some flexibility if you're going out to developers or the nonprofits. Like for me, and this is actually has come up, you know, people are going to cut out of their day jobs, like Friday mornings, like they feel comfortable. They can still get a half day in the afternoon. You can tee off early. This card eliminates that with the verbiage that's on there. So it's harder for people to say like, yeah, I'm going to take a Monday morning off. you know you might be coming out of the week mondays are usually busy for everybody so that to justin's point i've experienced it once and if the policy doesn't have restrictions in it then the car should reply because those restrictions kind of limit policy use so i think this is a place i i be honest i don't remember the detailed conversation around the golf passes i think i think we thought we had some latitude to try to balance the underlying

business and revenue generating uses at the golf course with that. If the council wants to give direction for this free play to displace peak demand, we can certainly do that. I think the intent, I do think we were trying to put the program in a way that minimize disruption to profit generating activity for the golf course.

I can see that. We have an awesome golf course. And it's very hard to get tee times. Tee time is used at 9 AM or 2 PM. Those slots are getting filled either way. Like we're either allow it or don't allow it. There's never a rush. There's never vacancy. Or very few times. I don't know. you know, maybe I'm losing a piece of it or time in, but like.

No, we do do some.

Of course, it used to be, you know, two weeks in advance and we're staying up to midnight, like just to get a tee tie.

I think it's really more policy direction from the council. So there are many things that go into the golf course in terms of they do a lot of club play, other things off the peak. There is peak pricing to try to leverage, you know, the biggest revenue when there's the biggest demand. And so it is just a recognition that certainly we could have unlimited play for this replay, but that it does start to compete with profit generating activities for local employees. All right. So I'm happy to take policy direction from the council.

I have two that are interested in changing that. I have Roberta Cherish and Devin.

I just started using it and yeah, it is really hard to get a tee time, but, but, and I suck at golf, but, but also I get it. So I don't know, but I get what you're getting from Chris. Like, it's just so frustrating to try and get a time. It seems like you're, having to, I mean, and you can't only do like, what is it now, two weeks?

But is that a function of the golf card or is that a function of the, it's a very popular place and it doesn't matter if you have three golf cards.

Oh no, I know it's a golf, it's a golf card because you can only do it after noon. I was lucky to get one at 12 plus six. But anyway, that, that, that being said, I'm very grateful for it. So I understand why it is the way it is, but it is really hard. Did you have other things that you wanted to talk about on here, too? That was it. I just was putting in a few cents about all. Chesh?

Okay. Originally, when we did the free rec center, was it not going to invest council members also?

Yes. The other direction, this policy is specifically about compensation and payment to seated council members, so We can include that information as well. Both of these benefits were for current and prior. I think this policy is limited to seated council members.

I think this is great. I get where you're coming from, Chris, when you say that. The other aspect of it is that I don't think council should be the, I'm going to cut in line and go to the front of the tee box and tee off kind of thing. So I understand the need to kind of push things back. And the fact that our golf course is always backed up kind of enforces that even more, because that means that people want to pay to do that. And it's benefiting the city more than us going out and enjoying ourselves on a weekend. So I think this is great. I do think that if there's going to be limitations around it, I do think we need to put those in there. I'm not opposed to the limitations that are on the card. I think they're totally fine. I get where they're coming from with that. But I do think that we need to have that into the actual policy as well.

Yeah, that was my main point.

That's exactly what I was saying. The policy doesn't say anything about restrictions, but the card does. So when the people at the golf course, they're like, well, it says restricted. And it's like, well, we brought the policy forward. That's not true. So the consistency piece is what's frustrating and where I know Justin went out with some developers and others, and they had to pay for their round. Oh.

clear on that.

Nonetheless, you complained to me about it, so I was like, yeah, that is problematic. But to the point of cutting in line, we still have to book tea time, so there's no cutting, but just make it match so that we're not trying to facilitate something that the staff doesn't understand.

language just we need to probably incorporate that too so everybody's on the same so add the language that's on the card into the policy if that's policy then that's policy that's fine and we can work around it but we have two separate things right now yeah and i'm in agreement with that too i don't golf so just uh you know just for just put that out there i don't have the temperament for it but but still we um i you know i do agree with the with everyone there as well we need to have this is great thank you for the presentations this is amazing so But still, we do need to have some type of, you know, we don't want to cut in line. That's for sure.

I appreciate the feedback.

I had my moments, right?

And ultimately, this is the opportunity to get in black and white. I think there was direction given, but it actually never got translated into a policy. So this does get awarded as a part of it.

So I'm hearing consensus to go with the recitation, adding the terms of the card into the policy around golf.

Yes. Yeah. There's nine council members at any given time. All right. And the last proposal here is in reference.

Okay, hold on. We're back to this.

Is in reference to sponsorship requests. So currently there are three different policies that kind of reference sponsorships and they're all separate policies. So just thinking about having a one city council policy that just governs sponsorship in general. So The recommendation would be to consolidate council policy 5.1 regarding education funding, foundation funding, council policy 5.3 regarding youth event funding requests. And then nonprofits is actually referenced in the expense reimbursement policy under section 3.3.1. And then also incorporating into that one sponsorship policy. There's been some council direction given back in 2020 regarding formalizing the golf pass donations to the city operator. so incorporating that all into just one city council policy.

This is great. I would ask that we add on to that. I would like to see a policy around if a council member is an officer, an advisor, a board member, anything for any funding sponsorships that go through, that we do a policy around That council member is not allowed to vote when it comes time to vote or anything giving to those organizations. Because I think that that's a conflict of interest from that side.

Or sponsorships or youth event fundings or nonprofits nonprofits.

Do you mean sponsorships or, like, the donation piece? Like, if, like, the kids came to us and someone said, you know, like, I'm on the pathway, obviously.

Right. So in that situation, I think that's a great organization. But I think that you as a council member, if you sit on their board or you're an advisor for them, then when it comes time to vote to give them money, even though you're not financially getting an incentive back off of it there's still a conflict there because it's there i think that you can bring it forward i think the council members should be able to bring it forward but i don't think they should be able to vote that the city give donations or money or any kind of sponsorships to those organizations is there objection to that is that something to add in this policy

I had talked with the city attorney earlier today. I think we were going to do some additional. Council Member Berg had raised this question. I think we probably would like to make sure if that fits better in this specific policy or in a broader policy like your rules of order procedure at some other place. If we can follow up on that and And I think the city attorney may just want to do some additional analysis.

Yeah, and I've done that. And it's fine under the charter if council adopts an additional rule that governs itself. So if council would want to adopt a rule that says if you sit on a nonprofit board, you can't vote on funding requests or sponsorship requests or anything having to do with the nonprofit. So you have that kind of authority in your charter. if you want a new rule like that. And it indeed may be more appropriate in another policy if you're talking about any funding request and not just sponsorships. But we could find the right place if council wanted that and bring it back.

I'm hearing that's the direction the council's going. Roberta?

Yeah, I think that's important. I've had quite a few community members bring that up to me. like knowing connections of council members where they are on other boards and feeling uncomfortable with them voting on money going and i know it's probably not like a true conflict of interest it's not a financial conflict yeah it makes people just ick so i think we should what about family members

Yeah, that too. If you have a family member who works and is paid by the nonprofit, that is a conflict under your conflict session section that already exists because there's a direct financial interest there. If an immediate family member works and is paid by a nonprofit. So that already, what if they're on the board is my question, right? This would be a new rule. If you sit on the board of a nonprofit, that you, if council wanted to, that you can't vote on funding requests, membership requests, et cetera, for that nonprofit. I think that... For council members or their spouses?

Yeah. I mean, because while there's not, like, maybe monetary things involved, like, there's still other things that occur, like, and I... having worked for nonprofit before and in full transparency, my son works for Laird and Hall now and we give money. And so I was sure to make sure I disclosed that last time we, and I didn't participate in that. But I mean, there's, I'm with that specific organization. I remember in the past when I worked there, there was like weird things that would happen and just make folks feel uncomfortable. So I just think it's better to keep it as clean as possible personally.

Is there objection to that? Council members or their spouses sitting on nonprofit boards that we would provide funding towards? Okay. And we can figure out where the best place for that to go would be.

All right. And then, so just to summarizing the conversation, we... will bring back an update to the travel policy based on the trip limitation by the permission structures. We'll exclude the DC, the comfort tree and city initiated. And then, in terms of informal ward meetings, we'll bring back for your approval, the proposal that was listed on the slides. In terms of memberships, we will bring back something the same proposal, but we'll change notice to permission. In terms of Council policy 4.1, we'll bring back that policy, but we'll make sure to align the limitations on the card with the policy itself. And then as we just mentioned, we'll bring back the policy regarding consolidation to the sponsorships and bring back further discussion on the potential conflict.

Thank you. Thank you for letting us work through that as well.

You will have, we'll stay in policy mode. We will be bringing back the request from Council Member Ayal on City Council direction at your next meeting. We are proactively just looking through all of your council policies. Some of them had not been updated for quite a period of time. So It is possible that we'll come back and have a look at some of the other older policies. As we've done these policy reviews, we have identified a number of things that just are out of sync with current practice at this point.

Before we move on to drones, can we take a quick break? All right, we'll go ahead and get started again. We're going to adjust the agenda just a little bit because we have a session on the drone delivery that's a public discussion, but then we have an executive session later. So we're going to bump that public discussion after we do the boards and committee reports and council discussion items. So any board and committee reports?

Airport Coordinating Committee, we met a couple weeks ago for our quarterly meeting. We are now in the midst of implementing the Ams County Airport Coordinating Committee work plan. All good things about it. We're starting the implementation phase. The plan is basically focusing on three interrelated components, infrastructure, installation and pacing, real estate development strategy, and regional collaboration and governance. There is a parcel that is being developed in Aerotropolis However, State County of Denver, in their infinite wisdom, is going to wait at least another year to start paying out, so it'll be at least 2027 before, say, Thornton starts receiving their 5% share. I mean, granted, it's not a whole lot, but still, every little bit will help, so... Thank you, Jessica, for the update as well. I had a little conference there in our break. And thank you for attending the meeting, of course, representing the city staff. So it's a great group of folks. So I'm excited to see what Aerotropolis does. And more importantly, down the road, you know, what economic benefits the city of Thornton will receive. That's all I have.

Justin? Two things. At NATO, there was a conversation with the Cliff and the Adams County Commissioners. They want to lead a design consortium partnering with the neighboring cities, including Portland. They've reached out to many of us on here to advance the final two inline stations to 90% design. And this is all coming from the FastTrack's FISA savings account and combined with upcoming CTE, which is Clean Transit Enterprise Funding. They'll get us to that 90% design with Adams County so that they're pushing forward with that and looking for support from the neighboring, spelling is important.

I think they were looking for a letter of support as well.

Yeah. And so that is likely to come to us in a more formal way than just this report. But that is something that they brought up to data as well. Also, there was an interesting conversation about Erie and their modeling. The reason that it affects the organs is because some of the same discrepancies could be impacting the organs, discrepancies in population growth and economic growth and stuff like that, that factors into transit, transportation and traffic, transit model, not transit, traffic model. There's all kinds of modeling. Anyway, that was the NATO meeting. we also did share a little bit of our work with the stationary booster plans for them and then the dr cobb summary is uh we uh the dr cobb board approved the 20 the upcoming budget for dr cogg um we talked about the uh we reviewed the successful conclusion of the regional grants navigation program which brought in over eight million dollars to funding uh members Jurisdictions, including the word was one of them. We talked about some mountain corridor stuff. So that was Dr. Cogg and Nita.

Thank you. Anyone else? All right. Council discussion items.

So I don't know if anybody's heard or most likely have seen the news out of Drewfield on updating their ordinance in street racing. I was going to bring that up.

I'm glad you did.

So I'd like to follow their leadership there on that and ask our staff. give them direction to do a new ordinance modeled after Broomfields, which would give the authority to impound vehicles tied to illegal street racing.

I think before we direct to write an ordinance, can we bring back information on what that ordinance might look like with pros and cons of what theirs is, because it may not fit us, and then what the consequences would be for adding an ordinance like that. Because if you're impounding vehicles, what do we do with them after that?

The point is, what I really mean is, let's have that start. Yes.

Yeah.

About an ordinance and what it would look like. Any objections to that?

Chief Beard wants a new Hellcat is what he's hoping for.

Yeah, that's the first one we're going to get founded, right? The other one is about food trucks. with complaints about food trucks operating out of compliance with the hours of 10 o'clock, I guess, is our limit. And also some questions about how much seating and usage of the parking lot is allowed when those food trucks are being used. And then the number of food trucks being operated in one space. Those are all been, and it's not just one person, it's a handful of people have all had various issues. And Ward 1, especially on 84th Avenue, we have a ton of,

food trucks so um we just want to make sure that they are complying with our food truck rules and that everybody is being safe so um can we just look deeper into that before back to the council so uh just to near that back some um get a summary to you all what the rules are and then it sounded like doing some education enforcement on 84th yeah also on washington

Any objection from council?

Is it like between Colorado and Dahlia? Or is it further in Ward 1?

No, it's 84th and Huron.

Yeah, I know that sometimes, not every day, but between Dahlia and Colorado in Ward 2, that there are sometimes, I mean, good intent, but still, I don't know if that's unincorporated, Adams, or if that's City of Thornton.

Oh, you might be talking about 88th.

88th, I stand corrected. Yes, 88th, I stand corrected. Sorry, my old mind working there. So yeah, 88th between Colorado and Dahlia. I know, like on the weekends, it's not every day, but still.

It's a great place to get breakfast right now.

Yeah, I mean, we want, yeah, I want to be in business, but still, just make sure, if that's safe throwing it, that's Adams County. Thank you for the correction, Justin.

Anything else, Justin? No, that's it. Anyone else? Ben?

Um, I know we had discussed this at one point in time, but up Parterre 152nd area, there's a section of road there that's technically Adams County, and it's only like 100 yards long. Did we look into that section to see if there's any way for the city to reach out to Adams County about annexing that section of the road? Because everything around that is Thornton, but there's a 100-yard stretch that's just dirt. And the residents, they're like, hey, why does it go from really nice pavement to dirt back to really nice pavement again? So I don't know if that's something we need to speak directly to Adams County about discussing or because I don't think they have any incentive on fixing it because they don't care.

But typically it's a function of development. And so when the development would come in at that point, they would ask to be annexed and they would be required to update that stretch until it's developed. There's no money to pay for that update.

yeah the county's not going to do it right and the the person who owns the property that's sitting there that's not parterre there's no incentive for them to want to join the city so they don't care but for us as a um city trying to provide back to the residents we can at least look into the road itself to see if we can fix it because it's not that big of a stretch of road anyway but it would have to compete with other budget items That's something we can still look into.

Any objection?

Competing with budget items at this point in the meeting is a little bit off since we've already discussed $100,000 for travel benefits. I agree, but I'm just saying.

I know we previously did get a constituent request for information around this. I'll make sure whether that has been addressed and we'll get that information to the council.

Thank you. Anything else? I have one. Did you have something, Chris? Sorry, I thought you said something. I had one I wanted to bring up. A couple weeks ago, city staff brought forward the idea of a QR code that we could bring money into the city to help with TAF funding. So I was reaching out and talking to some of our charities about that. They actually don't want us to do that. They are concerned it is a direct competition with them to raise money and that we would be taking potential funding directly away from them. And they have asked if we could stop. So I would like to suggest we do not use that as an opportunity to bring money into the city for donations. there's tax implications, things that we'd still have to work out. I think it's just cleaner if we don't do that.

I agree. I'm agreeing.

Okay. Seems like we have consensus to no donations for TAF.

All right. Anything else? Last call? All right.

Drones.

So, um, To start this presentation off, we've been notified by a couple of private businesses about technology that they're investing in and changes in business practices they intend to pursue. So partially just we wanted to share with the council and by extension the public what we're hearing from the business community. So we're going to just share some of what we understand businesses are going to be pursuing. And then we'll have some broader conversation about policy considerations later in this meeting.

So the executive session will just cover how you can regulate if you want to regulate drones and community and the parameters of that.

So I'll ask if council asks questions that are leaning into the exec session, just let us know. We'll hold that conversation to the exec session just in case.

Sounds great. Well, thank you. Good evening. Appreciate your time tonight. As always, Adam Kruger, Economic Development Director. As Tansy mentioned, I want to give an overview on some of the drone delivery activity that we are seeing so that council is informed on kind of generally how drone deliveries work. So I'm going to spend just a few slides talking about that and then answer any questions before we get into more of the policy side in the executive session. So I'm gonna talk about drone delivery service and then answer any questions you got on that piece as I mentioned. Okay, so what you're looking at here on the right is a typical kind of launch location for some of these drone operations. And so generally these are located in parking lots of these existing businesses, at least the few that we have heard from so far, that's how they operate. They take up roughly around 30 parking spaces of the existing operation. the drone would launch from the launch location. Each of those are pads or a drone could launch from the circles that you see there. And they go about six to seven and a half miles radius around from that location. So they go straight up basically and can go six to seven miles to deliver a package and then they come back. Once they're launched, they're governed by the Federal Aviation Administration. So we have as a city, some regulatory authority over the launching component and then some over the delivery component. But once they launch, they are under the FAA regulations. Well, I should also say, after they launch, they can go six to seven and a half miles, and they deliver a package, and then they come back, charge up, and then go back out. So they don't deliver multiple packages, at least none of the ones that we have spoken with yet have done that. They deliver one, come back, and then go back out and deliver another one. So we talked about the businesses that want to do this, engage the FAA to review the airspace operations to determine where they can safely operate. They have to do an environmental analysis that the FAA requires, talk about their environmental impacts, both to the community, the wildlife, and potentially the environment around there to make sure there's no negative impacts there. Some more details on the drones themselves. They're maybe a little bit bigger than council was envisioning four and a half by five and a half feet roughly in size. So larger than maybe some, some had thought certainly larger than I thought when I first heard about it. Uh, they fly, uh, from a hundred, about 150 feet at the minimum to up to 400 feet, uh, in the air and they go 60 to 70 miles an hour. So pretty fast. The number of drones at each, again, we've only got a couple of businesses that have inquired so far, but the number of drones have ranged from about 12 to 18 drones per location. So those launch pads that you see, they would have 12 to 18 drones. They go out, deliver one, come back, charge up, another one goes out. They deliver products up to five pounds and only during the daylight hours. So good way to think of it is basically dawn to dusk is kind of their delivery period. And up to five pounds, you may say, well, how much is that really that they're delivering? So one of the groups we talked to, we asked that question and they said about 50% of their products are five pounds or less. So pretty substantial amount of inventory that they can deliver via drone, but it is limited to five pounds. Delivery methods vary. Some of them drop it from about 12 feet from the location that's chosen for them to deliver it, and others lower by a tether and release it. Drop on my head, right? HAB-Jacques Juilland- yeah so and then noise of these I delivery so when they come down to deliver is around 68 decibels So what is 68 decibels you might be asking that the fair question I asked that same question is roughly the. HAB-Jacques Juilland- The length of sound of a conversation in a crowded maybe or they say dishwasher. which those can vary on size. I've had a couple that were louder than others, or a vacuum. So those are kind of some things to think about on delivery about how loud they are, 68 decibels. Those are some comparables that you can use when you're trying to think about, or normal kind of traffic sound is kind of what they also are. And then a customer must opt in for delivery and then they pay extra for this service. So they don't just decide to deliver via drone to somebody. Somebody has to say, I want a drone delivery and I'll pay extra for it. And the benefit of that for the user is they can get it in less than one hour. In some cases, like 30 minutes. So it's like a pizza. Yeah. Actually, it might be a pizza. I guess we'll have that. So, you know, we realize that there's kind of some general information on it, but we didn't want to get into too much discussion on policy without at least giving some idea on what these operations look like. You know, we only have a couple of examples that we have been speaking with, but they're very similar in a lot of ways with some minor differences that we've kind of outlined here. So I'll open it up for any questions you've got at this phase before we go to the next session.

My question is not necessarily for you, but maybe Chief. Does this run into any kind of issues with the program that you're currently trying?

Not that we're aware of, but we would obviously coordinate and have those conversations.

Yeah. Other questions so far?

I do know that they do account for wind and weather. They also account for, you know, potential things on the ground, you know, pet running around or something out there, but, but they and they don't fly if the weather is

Colorado?

They never fly in the afternoon in Colorado, but they do have restrictions that they cannot fly a drone based on certain weather conditions.

Interesting. Who is the company? We can't talk about that yet.

We do have a couple of different ones. What we've taken here is we've taken some of the general information that we've gotten from them and kind of provided ranges based on that they're a little bit different. As I mentioned, some drop it from 12 feet, some lower it by a tether, some go a little bit higher, some a little bit lower. But generally, these are kind of the basis of how their operations work. They're all a little bit similar at the end of the day.

I do think the businesses at an appropriate time would be willing to come and present to the council and share about their specific plans and practices. um we wanted to make sure that we had a broader discussion before we facilitated anything like that be helpful to know if that was something that the council was interested in justin um what kind of allowed uses for land use considerations would be allowed for like bodies launching sites so yeah we may have to amend our code

Okay, to allow for this use, but we'll get into that in the exec session to Okay.

Like all the different options.

Yeah, right. Yeah. How we could regulate if we wanted to.

Maybe this is an executive session question. Um, but Liability for the city as far as if anything happens with these, I'm assuming everything would go back on them, but is there anything from a standpoint?

Definitely that's true. Yeah, I don't see liability for the city.

Any other questions for the open session? All right, are we ready to move on to the special? I'll go ahead and call to order the special meeting of the city council. Can I please get a roll call?

Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here.

Thank you. Before I ask for a motion, can we please get a purpose of the two executive sessions? I guess we'll start with the first one.

The first one is to discuss drone regulation and whether or not council would like us to bring back any options for the regulation of this and say us need to be coming to our community. And so we'll do that in an exec session just to briefly give you some legal advice on that.

Any questions?

What would the motion be?

Motion would be for an executive session pursuant to Colorado revised statutes 24-6-402-4B, confer with the city attorney for purposes of receiving legal advice related to regulation of commercial drone delivery operations.

Can I get a motion as stated?

So moved.

Thank you. All in favor, please say yes. Yes. Any opposed, please say no. All right, can you give us an overview of the second executive session?

Yes, the development for Dodge Ranch has gone to the Planning Commission. Since that hearing took place, we would like to give legal advice to City Council as this matter is coming to you next week for a public hearing. And we want to make sure we review criteria and our current setting for that development. Any questions on that one? And the motion? The motion would be for an executive session pursuant to Colorado Revised Statutes 2464024B to confer with the city attorney for purposes of receiving legal advice regarding procedural and evidentiary issues associated with the quasi-judicial review process for Dodge, Wrench, Desiree.

Can I get a motion as stated? So moved. All in favor, please say yes. Any opposed, please say no. All right, we will move to executive session. Just give us a moment to switch the recording.