City Council - Regular Meeting

Council member Salazar's maybe running a little late.

I don't know.

Okay, well, we'll just get started. So first we have, do we have anything from the city management?

I do not.

And anything from.

No, nothing from the city attorney's office. I will just note for the record that it's Erica Delaney-Lew, senior assistant city attorney, appearing and not Tammy Elifo as stated before. Thank you.

All right. Okay, well, let's get started with our briefings. First, we have Adams 12 school district update.

And thanks to Chris Godowski, superintendent is joining us here. We talked probably about six months ago. The district has some upcoming engagement with the community and some future decisions to be made. And I think we really value the partnership of the school district. I think, um, The superintendent just wanted to kind of make sure that as leaders in the community, you had a sense of what was coming in terms of future process with the district. So I appreciate him taking time and we'll give him the floor.

Thank you so much for that intro. Thanks for giving us some time just to update you about where we're at, why we're thinking about and are likely to make school closure and consolidation decisions for the 27-28 school year. We're doing these kinds of presentations to all of our municipal partners. So colleagues on my team have been to Broomfield and Northland will soon be in Westminster and then eventually the federal heights. We want you just to have a deep understanding about the why behind closure and consolidation of. To partner together so that any schools that are closed and we can't repurpose for our own needs, we can find uses that really meet community needs very well. I'll apologize in advance for being not very great at PowerPoint presentations. My reputation is that I usually do color commentary that people who do blow by blow on slides and do Q and a, but I'm not so good at following the structure presentation. I will do my best on that. The final thing I'll share is while the focus is around declining enrollment and school closure and consolidation. I'll just say. Two thank yous and give two updates. One of the thank yous is to the city and again to our broader community, the community for giving us $830 million to support a variety of bond projects, capital projects as part of a 2024 election. You're starting to see that come to fruition now. Chief Baird was talking to me before about seeing fences up at a variety of school properties now for summer school construction projects. Very true throughout the system. And the most prominent of those projects is the Thornton High School reconstruction project that we had a groundbreaking ceremony for a few weeks ago. We're grateful to the city's partnership in conveying to us some properties that the Economic Development Authority had so that we can use that site more fully. We're close to concluding the eminent domain process with lots of the small businesses in the southeast quarter of that property, including the Freaky's Tattoo Parlor. We just have to decide in court most likely how much we have to pay for that property. But we've got legal authority to use that property and we'll soon be mobilizing in mighty ways to get that school reconstructed over the next four to five years. Second thing that I would highlight is in November, our voters granted us $39.42 million to supplement our operations, and we delineated out a lot of things that we wanted to invest in. The biggest part of that package was bringing our compensation for teachers, support staff, and principals. to a place closer to the market because we are trailing badly most districts in the region, largely because we've had fewer financial resources than others. Our state more and more has become a place that whatever you have to invest in your community has to come from your community. It's not allocated through state formulas. And so we've made some mighty adjustments to our compensation structures for next year that will make us more competitive and hiring people more competitive and keeping people. And there's a variety of other things that will come to fruition soon, including having more hands on learning activities in the middle school level. Things like using power tools, cooking, sewing, building and making things are coming back to Adams 12 in the middle school level. That was part of my experience long time ago. And then there was a stage where I think throughout the country it was all focused on academics, academics, traditional academics all the time. And we feel like that greater balance will serve kids well. So let me move on to enrollment and to closure and consolidation. Today we'll run through some background on declining enrollment, what's going on here, what's going on throughout our state, some of the impacts that that causes. We'll look at things, for example, that look at capacity and utilization of our schools, elementary, middle, and high school. You'll see a consistent theme of underutilization, especially at elementary and middle school. And then we'll talk more about how we plan to make some decisions, including board policy that guides the recommendations I'll be making in September and our ultimate outcomes of trying to make these difficult decisions in ways that kids and families feel like they're not going horrendously backward in terms of the opportunities they have at school and that we can be more fiscally responsible with declining resources that come with declining enrollment. Declining enrollment, the why behind this piece is starts with low birth rates. I shared a similar presentation with the Northland Fort and Rotary Club earlier today. And one of the things I said that I believe was a surprise to some is ever since the Great Recession in that 2006 to 2010 period, we've never had a reset in our state and our country in terms of birth rates. During the Great Recession, I... What I've heard, what I've read is that many families decided not to have children or to have fewer children because they just couldn't afford to have children. And in this community during that stage, we had 13 to 15% unemployment, lots of foreclosure activity. People were in a lot of economic strife. And things recovered within two to three years in terms of employment, the housing markets, people's stock portfolios. But what hasn't changed is how many children they have. And so right now, in my 17th year as a superintendent, when I go to conferences at the state and the national level, the two most common topics that we talk about, one is artificial intelligence and what does this mean? How should we use it? How do we manage it appropriately? in the presence and looking forward? And then how are you managing across your school districts nationwide declining unemployment? Because school districts throughout the country are closing their schools because they have many fewer kids to serve, and it all starts with a low birth rate. Fewer families coming to our community and fewer families staying as part of our story. We'll see a pretty marked drop off in our enrollment for the school year we just completed and a substantial portion that were families that were likely not citizens of the country. We don't ask that information. We can't ask that information. It's not a valid basis for us to admit or deny admission to kids. But given what we know about many families, Once there was a change in federal administration and a change in enforcement activities, many families finished the 24-25 school year and then over the course of that summer left our country or community or went undercover and just quit coming to school. So that's a factor that we have. Aging population is true that in many older, more established neighborhoods, people are staying put. They have better health for a longer period of time. And so when that happens, there are fewer housing opportunities for new families with children to come in. High cost of living, we hear frequently from families when we do exit surveys about why are you leaving? Where do we need to send your records? Often the message is we're moving to state X or Y or Z because it's much more affordable than what we see in Colorado. So those are all factors that contribute. You see in that graphic there that The younger population in Colorado is going to stay pretty steady, not growing the way that it historically has. And then some of these other populations, especially 65 plus, is growing the fastest. And that has really big implications for school systems.

Council Member Morris has a quick question.

Yeah. Hey, Chris. Thank you for this info. I had a quick question on the declining enrollment. Do you have any stats around... The population that's going to homeschool or homeschool private school, other charter schools outside the district.

Is there anything around that? Yeah, we have lots of data on that. Our district charter schools, we have four that we authorize. We're in charge of. That's New America School, Westgate. Prospect Ridge Academy and Stargate. New America School has seen significant enrollment declines. They serve largely students who are Latino, Hispanic. A lot of their historical mission has been on newcomers to our country. They've seen a significant decline. The other three have been pretty flat, and they're starting to see some challenges in filling every single seat that they haven't had historically. So there's fewer kids for all of us to serve. We do have data that shows where kids go between our district and neighboring districts, like high level. And we're a net importer of kids from 27J, Brighton, Summit, Thornton, Commerce City. We import kids significantly from Westminster Public Schools, We have more kids leave us than come to us with Mapleton. We're about flat with St. Vrain and we lose tremendous numbers of kids to Boulder Valley schools. We're not seeing growth in the charter space. We're not seeing growth in the private school space other than Holy Family did in addition to their school within the last couple of years that has Some fairly small number of kids go in there. And homeschooling is the biggest mystery. We feel like there is more homeschooling. There are some reporting obligations that if you're going to homeschool your child, you're supposed to give us a notice. But we're not seeing in the data that we receive a huge uptick in that space. We suspect that there's more doing that than have notified us, but we don't have the hard data to show it.

Council Member Byrd has a question as well.

To follow up with that, in some of the slides, I kind of skipped ahead a little bit. You specifically mentioned non-charter enrollment in several of them. If you're not seeing an increase in that enrollment, why were they excluded during the data itself?

Can you repeat that question again?

Why were the charter schools excluded during the enrollment data?

Well, our charters are staying flat. And in terms of then they're not gonna have any needs for the foreseeable future to close schools. They don't bear upon our district managed schools and the capacity we have there. So our data has really been focused on the schools that are under my direct control, the board's direct control, and trying to make decisions about which of those places we might close and consolidate. We just don't see that to be a dynamic that's gonna happen for the foreseeable future of our charters. Stargate, Prospect Ridge, Westgate, they are pretty steady and constant with a little bit of softness compared to East Oracle, but nothing that's going to prompt any sort of repurposing of those schools. The final thing I'll say is what we're up here against is If you've been reading the papers and watching TV in this region for years, you know that we're kind of late to the party. So Jefferson County Schools has closed more than 20 schools over the last five years. Denver Public Schools has closed six. They're looking to close more probably for 27, 28. Aurora has closed several schools. Westminster Public Schools has closed schools. St. Brandon has just closed a school. Boulder Valley is going to close some schools for 27-28. They're doing a similar process to us. So for some, they like to theorize that this is about something that's district-specific, school-specific. It's really a nationwide phenomenon that there are fewer kids and everyone's having to confront these really difficult issues right now. There's two things I'll show in terms of enrollment curve. I'll just say historically, I grew up in Adams 12 for most of our existence. We're growing 500 to 1,000 kids a year consistently. We're especially a big boom town and region in the 60s and 70s. And then it started to moderate more in the 80s to about 2005. But we would consistently grow for lots of years by about 500 kids. And you start to see that we turn the corner on that and we start to see some reductions that are anywhere from 500 kids as you go from 18 to 19 to more significant dips on two parts of that curve. The first big dip you see is the second full dot for the 2020 school year. where we went from 35,000 kids to 33,000 kids, roughly a 2,000 kid reduction. That was the hit that every district in the region saw, which was that was the fall in which we were often either doing remote learning, hybrid learning, but none of us in the region were doing full school year long in-person learning because of COVID and public health restrictions. And so we lost a lot of kids at that time. And as you see, they've not come back. And then in this last year, you see that we went from an enrollment of 30,681 to 29,271. So about a 1,450 kid reduction for the school year we just completed. A lot of that is because of migration and immigration and students leaving the community. But we did see an acceleration and just a pretty significant loss to students in our district. And again, that's true of peer districts in the region. It feels like there's been some acceleration recently in terms of the decline.

Council member Martinez has a question. Sure.

yeah now now these uh these reduction in enrollment is leads to the reduction in funding from the states is there um anything that is unique about adams county like will we lose a higher proportion of funding or is it directly correlated to the student enrollment decline like how does how does adam's hall fit in that statewide decline through the statewide funding landscape

You're right. As we have fewer kids, we get fewer resources. The general per pupil amount that we get is $11,700 per pupil. We get another $3,000 roughly from our community through these supplemental overrides. There are different numbers per pupil based on your district and grad. It's based on your size, your cost of living, and a variety of other factors. So if you're a small rural district, you might get $47,000 per kid. There are some in Colorado who do. Most of us that are 4,000 kids or larger tend to be more in like this $11,000 to $12,000 range. There are things that make it more complicated than just saying you've lost 1,450 kids and we're going to multiply by 11,700. There are averaging formulas that have existed for more than 20 years so that if you're declining in enrollment, What has been the rule for most of that 20 years is that you look at your enrollment the last five years and you average that. So it takes some of the sting off of declining enrollment and keeps your resources steady. Under the last several years, that's moved from five years to four years. And for next year, it will be a three-year averaging process. So you start to bear more of the brunt of declining enrollment with three-year averaging than five-year averaging. So the financial impacts are more significant. But the other thing that's happening Is the state has changed some of these factors and weights in the school fine finance formula, and if you're a community that serves many kids were at risk, which is defined by free and reduced lunch status. If you serve more kids who are multilingual learners or their primary language spoken at home is other than English. and lots of students for special education, you get more money for those students. Adams 12, in the aggregate, 50% of our kids qualify for free and reduced lunch. Just to put that into context, that means if you have a family of four, your gross annual income is $59,700 a year or less. And I often just marvel at how people make that work. My mother's Old house, now that she's in assisted living in North Glen rents for $2,850 a month. And you feel like I've tried to imagine it's a very typical house in North Glen, a family of four, make them 59.5. How do you pay rent and all the other expenses? But it does help us to have a community with those kinds of needs and characteristics because that mitigates some of the reductions we're otherwise seeing in terms of declining enrollment. So between all those various factors, we came out a touch ahead by about a million six for next year because the population we serve, the state has recognized you need more resources to serve them well, and that's offset more than a... It's offset roughly with a hair positive, the impacts of declining enrollment.

Okay. So that would explain then why, you know, enrollment's down, but we see the budget grow by a million dollars. That would be the driving force behind that.

Yeah, that's true. I mean, there's some modest investments in some places, even in the midst of cutting. The big thing that you'll see investment in for next year, year over year, is in staff compensation. And that's with a lot of transparency with our community in our election, that we wanted to invest roughly two-thirds of that $39 million into compensation. Our educators were fairly consistently... anywhere from 10th to 13th out of the 15 metro area districts in terms of compensation. Similar things for some of our classified staff. Bus drivers have been the group that are most behind the market, and then our principals have often been lagging the market in a significant way. So next year, our personnel expenses will go up in terms of what we're paying for salary. We'll often have some offsetting reductions because we cut $8 million out of next year's budget in staffing because of declining enrollment. All right.

Council Member Russell has a question as well. Sure.

As you mentioned, they are now going to a three-year instead of five-year average. What is the motivation behind shrinking the timeline when you do the averaging?

It's all about saving the state money. You probably have heard lots of things about the state There were times I heard that the state's budget deficit for next fiscal year was $1.4 billion. There's a lot of Medicaid expense growth that I hear on my reports as to why there's just growing expenses throughout a lot of state government. There's worries that revenues either won't come in because we could potentially have a recession, or even if revenues do come in, do you have to rebate it out to people through TABR refunds? And so the state has been on the spot of trying to find ways to save money. Our governor will sometimes say that, We shouldn't be funded for anything more than our current year count because otherwise we're getting funded for phantom students. And I can walk you through a long winded explanation about why that is just a bunch of BS. Because the bottom line is you're often gradually using a couple of kids per grade level in lots of different schools. But you can't eliminate a teacher, which is where most of our costs are spent are expended in our system each year. You can't reduce a third grade teacher until you can have however many teachers you have with probably 29 or fewer kids in that class. And so there's lots of incremental reduction of kids. You lose the 11,700 per that you still need the same number of custodians, principals. Classroom teachers, art, music and teachers and so that's why, on the school side, we asked for these averaging formulas, because our state already is notoriously known throughout the country for under investing in public education. Two studies submitted to the legislature two and a half years ago that show that compared to other states in the country, we invest 3.5 to $4 billion less per year than other states do to provide an adequate education. And because of a variety of things, including Tabor, we have, starting with the governor, a lot of pressure to try to find ways to spend less on K-12 and to push more of the expense load to local communities and property tax payers as opposed to the state.

I had one more question, but I think you might have just answered that. I was going to ask if they were seeing positives around the declining population as in more money per individual, but I think you've already answered that. Your costs are pretty much staying the same, so it's not more money, unfortunately.

If you ask students, kids, and teachers, I think... students, teachers, and parents. Many of them would say there are lots of things that they like right now because our schools are not as big as they once were. Many of our class sizes aren't as big as they once were. So in terms of like building connection with your teacher within your school community, it's easier to do that if there's 560 kids at your middle school instead of 1400. And it's that kind of change that we see in some places. We've had elementary schools Federal Heights during the peak of the Great Recession when I started that had over 800 kids there because lots of families were doubling up, tripling up, and some of the mobile housing over there, some people were spending the night in cars. They just didn't have a place to live. And for Federal Heights to be now like a 375, there are benefits to that in terms of feeling like the school's not so big and I am more connected to my classmates and my teacher, but the economics are the parts that come along with it that make that really challenging. I think I'd already moved on to this slide as we were working through that question. I'm gonna run through a series of slides about school capacity, and I'll start with elementary school. You'll see that we have capacity to serve about 15,500 elementary kids, and we're only serving about 10,500 right now, so we're at about 70% capacity. As I drove a colleague superintendent around Adams 12 yesterday from Canyon City, he was blown away by the crazy boundaries that we have between municipalities and houses. We have bits and pieces of Thornton, Westminster, Broomfield, lots of places. That's surprising to many. The economic disparities north to south jumped out. But the other thing that jumped out in place is how close schools are to one another. And it's all from, it's largely a byproduct of that Perlmack home building era in the 60s and 70s when they were building tons of houses very quickly. And we go from opening a school, like the one I attended, Leroy in North Glen, that had 600 kids when it opened, Two years later, it was at 1100 kids. So you just had to constantly build schools in pretty close proximity and especially in Northland, but some parts of Thornton too, you'll find schools within two or three or four blocks of each other. And right now, because of those factors, declining birth rates, more people aging in place, we're getting to spots where we have a lot of capacity in pretty close proximity and probably close and consolidate and still provide kids a good school experience. High school, or K-8, you can see we're in a good capacity utilization. We have four K-8s right now. Two of them are STEM schools. One is STEM Launch in Thornton. One is STEM Lab in Northland. One is Holstrom in Northland, which focuses on gifted and talented and advanced academics. And then we have Thunder Vista up in Broomfield. three of the four there are magnet schools that attract a lot of interest. And I think that's part of the reason why the utilization is much higher. And we also have interest as we look to the future to see, are there more K-8 settings that we can create? We often hear from our parents, we want K-8s. We worry about the transition socially and otherwise for our kids leaving elementary and going to larger middle schools where there's a lot more renorming, regrouping with peers. There's lots of behavior that starts to emerge that's more complicated. So K-8s are a very popular model here and throughout the country. Middle school you'll see is where we have the greatest unused capacity. We're at 60% utilization at middle school. And a lot of reason behind that is roughly 25 or so years ago, our demographers and our leadership team would consistently tell you that build out for Adams 12 would be around 50,000 students. That is not gonna be the case. We've already hit our peak and we're on the way down as you've seen on the earlier slide. They believe that just given birth rates and housing construction and just the pace of that that we had seen for a lot of years before. And so because of those dynamics and the steady 500 or so kid growth per year, they built really large middle schools that were designed to handle a lot of kids over time. So Shadow Ridge at 128th and Holly, Silver Hills at 125th and Huron, Rocky Top at 144th and York are all schools that could probably serve fairly well 1,300 to 1,400 kids. We're designed that way purposely to deal with future growth, and it ain't coming. And so there's now places like Shadow Ridge that earlier on when I was legal counselor for the district had close to 1,400 kids and currently has 560 kids. So that's why middle school is a particular place of underutilization. High schools were at 85%. Some of the slow roll from the Great Recession hasn't all the way materialized at the high school level yet, but it's coming. When you compare the number of kids who are seniors in school versus the number of kids that are kindergartners, it's roughly 75%. is the enrollment at kindergarten compared to the senior class. And it's gone down almost every year, just a gradual reduction in birth rates. Every year, we follow a lot of data. And so we know over time, comprehensive high school enrollment will also start to be less robust than the 85% we currently have. So I think this is kind of a summary slide here. This piece, I'll walk you all through. Educators often talk about rounds in an elementary school. And so you see at the bottom, a legend that talks about two rounds, three rounds, four rounds. As a parent, I think about that as how many classrooms are there in a grade level teachers. So a two round school means that there's two third grade teachers, two fourth grade teachers, two fifth grade teachers. A four round means you've got four teachers at those grade levels. And you can tell on that yellow line, which reflects four rounds, that was a fairly common dynamic for us as recently as 2017 and 2018. But over time, it's dwindled to almost none of our schools are four rounds. And it's all because of declining enrollment in our system, where you're most likely to see a four round is in a newer school. like the Silver Creek and Thornton, like a Meridian and Broomfield, where there's still some housing development and there tends to be more families with younger children, but in more aging places, like Thornton Elementary, Coronado Hills, North Star, Northmore, lots of places in the south, you start to see the red line dynamic, which are two round schools. And we're projecting, as you see on there, that in 2027, a year from now, The two curves will meet between having three round schools with three teachers per grade level and two round schools with two teachers per grade level. That's complicated from a student experience perspective in a lot of ways that I will show in a minute. But a really dramatic change in a fairly short amount of time when you look at what's happened over the last seven to eight years. So the impacts behind this, I mean, certainly in terms of school closure and consolidation, there are some fiscal things that you've got to pay attention to. Other districts that have done school closure and consolidation estimate that the savings for an elementary school is about a million dollars a year. For a middle school, it's a million and a half to two million dollars a year. Most of those savings come from not having a principal, an assistant principal, office manager, secretary, health aide. There's some savings that come in utilities, custodial. So the money part is definitely a material piece of balancing out a budget where resources are constrained, but there's also some educational impacts. So when you have a halftime art teacher, music teacher, PE teacher at a school, which is becoming commonplace in these two round schools, Those teachers are away from our students sometimes for weeks at a time. So they may be at North Star for two weeks and then they may come back to Northmore for two weeks. When you're away from your students for a good chunk of time like that, your relationships with kids start to unravel a bit, your classroom routines and disciplinary structures unravel. So it's tough to be as productive because you're just constantly resetting behavior, norms, relationships, that's challenging. It's also difficult to sustain things like an elementary choir. theater productions, after school clubs and activities, because those teachers doing that at two different schools as an art, music or PE teacher is often a breaking point. You just have all the kids in two schools. They often say, I just can't do it at both places. They may choose to do choir at one school in the fall, choir after school in the other place, second semester, but we have fewer things that we're doing for kids, especially after hours. It's tougher for teachers to collaborate with one another and get insights beyond their own. So if you're collaborating with just one peer about how to improve math instruction or how to reach Chris who's not responding to your instruction, it's more difficult to find the right solution if you just have one colleague to collaborate with versus two or three. It's really challenging right now to get sufficient people to coach and to be activity sponsors after school. When I was a kid, most of my teachers, in my recollection, did some of that stuff. Now, most of our teachers don't want to do that extra after hour stuff, even with some additional pay. And so if you get to a two round school where you've got two kindergarten teachers all the way up through fifth grade, you've got 12 classroom teachers. And oftentimes you may have two who say, I'm willing to stay after school. to sponsor the chess club, a Spanish club, a theater club, whatever it may be. And oftentimes what that results in is saying we just can't provide this after school activity because we don't have somebody to offer it and to supervise it. So the more you can grow your enrollment, you can make all the things I just described less problematic if you're at a three round or a four round school. The other thing that's tough about a two-round school is we provide before and after school care for kids in many of our schools. But if you only have 250 kids in the school and a really small group of kids who can afford and want before and after school care, we often aren't able to offer it because the economics of us have us deeply underrun. So that's the challenge of these two round schools and that growing number of them we want to curtail and try to create more three and four round schools for 27, 28 and beyond.

Council Member Martinez has a question for me.

Yeah, so regarding the round schools, that was very helpful. How does that impact innovation schools differently or alternative education campuses that have different models and means? Are they going to factor into these needs like breaking them apart and distributing them throughout the district? What would the impact of those schools be?

So in terms of what the state defines as an innovation school, we only have one right now, which is Thornton Elementary School. And what's largely innovative about them is they have a longer school day. So potentially an innovation school could be a candidate for closure depending on enrollment and depending on some of the criteria that I'll show you down the road. But I don't know that innovation status alone really tilts you one way or another. It's going to be more about how many kids do you have? How are you performing in terms of meeting needs of the community? That's the key criterion there. What was the other part of that innovation? The alternative education campuses. Alternative ed campuses are also expensive to operate. We have several of them right now. Vantage Point is a high school alternative school where you go in person consistently. We have Pathways, which is primarily online delivery, but you come in person for some support here and there. We have Five Star Online, which is primarily for kids, middle school and high school, that for a variety of reasons, whether it's school anxiety, being really competitive athletes, family circumstances, don't want to have to go to a brick and mortar place consistently. So we have a variety of alternative schools. They are more expensive to operate. At this point, Juncture, I don't foresee closing or consolidating any of those alternative options because we feel like they're essential in helping kids, especially at the secondary level, find a pathway other than dropping out from school or giving up. So they can be more costly. Vantage Point is probably the most costly school that we offer. But we have kids who say the smaller setting with a big focus on how to develop better life skills and maturity and some academics has changed my life and given me hope that I didn't have before.

Councilor Byrd has a question as well.

So a two-part question. One is, do you have an idea around how many schools you're looking to close and consolidate down to? And two is, after the consolidation, what are the plans for the buildings and the property that the grounds set up? Leased out or how are you going to handle that?

Sure. So my prediction is that will land on 5 to 6 schools to close for next year out of our district and that will be spread throughout our community. We have kids from all the various cities that attend schools, either in their city, other cities. I believe every city and unincorporated parts of Adams County will have some impacts in terms of kids getting displaced or having change. And then where those physical facilities are located, I think there's a lot of dispersion across the whole district where those things are likely to happen. But I think 5 to 6 is the landing point. We'll finalize that probably in July. Then what was the 2nd part of that? I'm sorry. I'm not good. What's the plan for the consolidation afterwards? That's part of the reason why, so consolidation, we'll talk more about that. In terms of taking care of kids, we have a high degree of confidence that we will do that well. What we will do with facilities next is a big open question, and it's part of the reason why I'm traveling the circuit right now to cities. meeting with the YMCA, Boys and Girls Club, Housing Authority, lots of different people so that they know there's probably some capacity coming. Ideally, it's one of the most important things for me and the board is that we don't have buildings that are just mothballed and sitting vacant and become vandalism targets and eyesores. We don't want to have uses that are incompatible with neighborhood uses and desires. We don't want to just spread our programs into buildings so that they don't sit vacant because that comes with lots of overhead costs that are really counterproductive to what we're trying to achieve. So hopefully down the road, we'll have people say, In one city, for example, I heard city staff say, we probably have a private childcare provider that will have interest in buying or leasing one of your buildings and providing childcare services there. We have some speculation that there are providers of highly intensive special education programs that may have interest in leasing one of our facilities. I'll just explain a little bit more. We have over 100 kids that we send outside of Adams 12 each day on a bus or in a vehicle, often to Denver or other locations to get more intensive special education services that we can't provide even in our most intensive programs. It's often in programs like autism. And so students will go to a place like Firefly Autism, the Austin Centers for Exceptional Children, other programs that on a day treatment basis provide Stronger supports to kids with really high intensity emotional behavioral needs or sometimes cognitive needs. Students with autism are common students who access those things. There hasn't been enough capacity in the Denver Metro region for many years. Lots of those places have shut down because they couldn't balance their books. There's now more state support for those programs because it's often a three to six month waiting period for a kid to get a spot when they qualify. They're very costly. Many of them cost over $100,000 a year for us to place a child. And those kinds of programs in Jeffco, for example, are renting one to two schools to provide that kind of service, not only in Jeffco, but to the region. So that could be a possibility. We'd love to have youth recreation programs, childcare programs. And after school Boys and Girls Club would be great. We're just going to keep working with people about here's possibilities and opportunities. There are some places in Jeffco, there is one property that there's a revert clause for a school site that was vacated, reverted to the city. They scraped the school and just expanded the park. There are a lot of different things that are possibilities. We probably will move programs into one or two schools, but we'll still have opportunities. probably three to four that we need to repurpose with your help and others.

Council Member Morris has a question.

Chris, I just wanted to ask and build on that question. Is there a possibility or have you seen it anywhere in the country where those public buildings become private, privately owned, probably leased for commercial purposes? So like an example would be in Colorado Springs, which I know this is probably a little different. There's a building called the Schoolhouse And it's kind of near the Broadmoor neighborhood. And it's an old school building. And it's been retrofitted. Now it's, you know, restaurant, coffee shop, office, bunch of different kind of mixed commercial uses. Is that something that would be explored as well?

Yeah, what I would expect is... And we still need to have some final direction from the board. My sense is our board's strongest interest would be a municipal user or a recreational nonprofit use in the community. And if those aren't feasible, what districts often do is put out an RFP or an RFI asking for proposals or people that come forward with ideas and offers about how they might repurpose it. And it very much could include a private user retrofitting and changing things around. I'm gonna skip over this slide in the interest of time and just say that impacts at middle school are very similar to elementary. As you get smaller, you lose some of your ability to offer programming Shadow Ridge Middle School, the principal of that school has been on one of our committees and he shared with our long range planning and advisory committee that because they've gone from close to 1400 down to 560, he's had to eliminate some classes like Spanish that many of his students would like and enjoy, but there's only so many dollars to spread that he gets for those 560 students to make sure that you have reasonable sizes in math, science, social studies, language arts, and so electives start to get shrunk and you're also in a spot where you have teachers teaching outside their area of expertise. So instead of being a teacher who specializes in, I'm just going to teach language arts all day long, you may start to teach three sections or three classes of language arts and two social studies classes just to try to economize pieces so that you don't have people full-time on your staff getting paid full-time wages that you only have a need to have teach three classes or six-tenths of a full-time assignment. So there's lots of that maneuvering that's going on now. And so losing out on electives and losing out on teachers who can be most focused on their area of expertise comes with challenges for kids.

Councilmember Algi has a question.

Actually, not a question. I just want to thank you for your presentation so far. Yeah, just like what Councilmember Moore said, down the springs, there's also two other schools, I know, over the years that have been refurbished into like retail, Ivy Wild, near downtown Colorado Springs and up north Lincoln Center. both retail outlets um but still obviously you know if you have to close schools down um whatever use we can get whether it's retail or my preference would be actually if like for child care or for special needs folks but still whatever whatever

the school district needs to do you know i'm i'm good for so that's all i appreciate that and i'll just say in terms of repurposing some of the more creative uh repurposing things that you're alluding to and the threat of the conversation work best when you're right along a major street and there's lots of visibility and traffic and some are more recent school construction places like silver hills middle school rocky top mountain range high school even places like silver creek elementary are off of bigger streets and they're not deeply embedded in a neighborhood but most of the schools that we uh That we have in this district were built in that 1960s to the 2000 thing and they're just they are integrated in neighborhoods. So I'm trying to give an example. I just don't I hate to give examples because people start reading a lot into it. But I just think from your own experiences, when you think about schools in your area, I think about a woodland where. Mayor Pro Tem, Ayala's talked about that school before and being part of that community. It's embedded just deeply in housing. I can't imagine a retail use for it. We have lots of elementaries in that space.

And I can also say, you know, like last year, they invited me for one of their events, and it was trick-or-treat, actually. They personally reached out to me and said, hey, do you want to come check it out? Absolutely. It was a great time. Kids had a blast. It was packed, and it was a very... It is my hope that they stay open because that is a very vibrant neighborhood, a lot of kiddos there.

I appreciate that. We have those similar dynamics in so many places in our community. Schools are the hub of lots of neighborhoods. It's why people want to live there, why they buy homes. It's where the whole journey starts, that elementary and having a great experience. We don't want to close any of them, but we're now in the spot where we feel like we just have to confront that challenge head on.

Council Member Salazar has a question.

I know that there's a decrease in birth rates, but I'm just curious about UPK. Have you seen a large, do you have a wait list for your UPK? Would you be willing to turn one of these into a preschool base? Because I know that it's really driving out the daycare centers and it's driving out the home daycares.

Sure. So UPK, for those of you who may not know that acronym, is Universal Pre-Kindergarten Service. It's part of what the governor has focused on over the last three or four years. It's one of the initiatives to provide a minimum amount of preschool to every child who's three and four, mainly four-year-olds. Some three-year-olds, depending on their needs, can get access to preschool. What we've seen in that space is that we do still have some unfilled space in preschool. We're trying to expand more preschool opportunities into elementary schools. If you look back about 10 to 15 years in Adams 12, a lot of our preschool was based in a consolidated building. So we had an early childhood education center that was over by Thornton High School, Brittany Hill, Bowman, where we had 10 classrooms there. And we had parents self-transport their children there, or we bussed them there, depending on the needs. And what we find to be true is parents want their kids to go to preschool where they're likely to go to kindergarten, first grade, second grade. So we're trying to create more preschool classrooms and more elementary schools. That comes at some cost with toilets, sinks, meeting code requirements. We have unfilled spots in that space. And what we have seen is there's a shift in the profile of kids in preschool. We're serving more and more students with significant disabilities in preschool. with students who are multilingual learners, kids who are at risk measured by family income, And we feel like we are seeing growing numbers in those spaces and those demographics because many of the families who don't choose us, they want before and after school, after preschool wraparound care. So childcare before. So I want to be able to take little Tansy to preschool at 6.30, have her watched. We'll do preschool for a few hours or whatever the stamina may be. And then once I'm done with work at 5.30 or 6, I pick her up. We're not currently in a spot where we've been able to figure out the staffing and the economics of doing the before and after school care for preschool age children. And because of that, it feels like we become the provider that working parents that if I use a stereotype, tend to be more affluent overall, are looking for private providers that can do the whole day experience, and we have a greater concentration of students with greater needs that we're happy to serve. It's important for us to get started early, but we won't grow our numbers significantly, I believe, until we can do the wraparound piece. We're exploring that. It's just really costly, and it's beyond the reach of lots of our parents to pay for tuition or things for wraparound preschool. All right, so in terms of guiding principles, you see some established here. We wanna have adequate staffing, collaboration, lots of things that I talked about as deficits and challenges with two round schools and small and middle schools, we want to try to improve those things. And we also want to be really purposeful to put communities together that we feel like fit together and that we can emerge with people feeling that they're in the same or better spot overall compared to where they were before. It's not an easy thing to do, but that's the objective or the interest that we have that's driving lots of our conversations. Our board adopted a policy last month that talks more about the criteria they want us to look at. So there should be, needs to be cost savings to make this whole exercise worthwhile and cause all the change and angst in the community. And as I said, there are some times in this transition that you will have some short-term one-time costs as you do some building renovations perhaps, or there's other supplies, materials that you might need to buy as you expand a school, shrink a school, move a school, but ongoing cost savings are important for us to achieve in this. The piece about having similar expanded learning opportunities has been a consistent value the board's articulated all the way through. And one of the pieces in there that's important to emphasize is comparable to schools funded at or near the average per pupil funding. So if we spend $10,000 per kid on average at an elementary school, if you're at a school currently where we spend $16,000 per student there, we may have to, if your school's on the closure list, offer some things that are not as robust as you had at a school or a $16,000 per kid. But the commitment and this criteria is to say, we want you to have all the same things at a minimum that kids at an average funded school in our district have. So it's an equity sort of value that you see expressed there. We want families to have plenty of notice to explore other choice options, other school options for 27-28 if they feel like they're being affected by closure and consolidation in ways that they're not convinced is best for their kid or their family. So that's why we have interest in making final decisions at the board level and October, we're going to have a big community wide expo at mountain range high school in early November before election day to highlight and showcase all of the options we have in our district. As possibilities, including our charter schools, and then there's a choice enrollment period that starts each year in December and goes into January. We want parents to have that option in a timely way if they want to explore that. We don't want ideally. Ideally, you move one school into another school, and that's a 1 to 1. So you take school X and you move, you pour that school in the school Y, and you have that sort of transfer. It's much easier. I think, in terms of that being a smooth and efficient transition. There may be times where there's 2 schools. just because there's not enough room adjacent to port and entire school land. But ideally, our board wants us to do a one-to-one transfer. We want school boundaries that are compact, contiguous, maintain neighborhoods. Back when Federal Heights had 800 kids in the Great Recession, and we had lots of students overpopulating lots of our schools beyond what the reasonable capacity was, we made a lot of boundary adjustments. And now we have some situations where a student may be bused by two or three other schools to get to their school of assignment because of boundary changes that made sense before. We're just trying to find places for kids to go and not be crowded. But because of this shrinkage over the last eight plus years in particular, it doesn't make sense to say you're getting on a bus driving past other schools to go to a school a mile and a half away where you're not gonna play with those kids after school because they're too far away. You can't do after school activities because it's too far away. So we want to like redo some boundary stuff and bring kids to schools closer to where they live is an important value. We don't wanna play the reshuffle game For people a little bit more senior than me, a little bit older than me, who are in their probably 63 to 65-year-old range, when they grew up in Adams 12, they will often share that I was at three, sometimes four different elementary schools during the course of their time because we were growing so fast, built a new school, boundary change, go to the new school, Okay, for one year, next year boundary change, new school, new friends again. We don't want to do that in reverse as we're declining. And so if we move you somewhere, we want to have really strong belief and some analytics behind it that you're going to be there for at least five years so that it's not all these shifting relationships constantly. Want kids to go to schools with the same or stronger accountability rating. Currently, the state of Colorado gives schools a rating of turnaround, priority improvement, improvement or performance. largely based on achievement and growth on English language arts and mathematics assessments in the spring. High school is a little bit more complicated because we also look at things like dropout rates and graduation rates, but we want kids to go to a school that if you're rated performance, you're at a performance rated school. And ideally, if you're in a party improvement rated school, you're going to a place that's improvement or performance rated where achievement and growth is better than the school you've been at. And then finally, it's the piece we've talked about before. We want to be good partners with you, get neighbors to our communities and find new uses of schools that are compatible. Don't leave things open and that add value to the community.

Council report has a question.

Yeah, the the slide you mentioned, like. The ability for parents to be able to. explore school enrollment choices that are affected by what's happening. But you mentioned that you weren't going to announce the school closures until October. That's after the state already issues its funding for the schools. So if the parents choose to go to a different school, let's say outside of Adams 12, now doesn't that school lose their funding ability from that child?

No, and I may not have been clear. So we want to announce an October final decision so that people in November can explore options and then apply for options either with Adams 12 or other districts in December and January, but for the following school year. That's the timeframe that people are looking as they're looking ahead to the next year. So we won't make any of these changes until August of 27 in terms of kids going to school. There are things that we have very much in mind after October, whether it's school tours where you can come see the new school of assignment. If you're somebody who might be relocated, you can meet the teachers. You could, if you're a student second semester, if there's a theater club at your new school, you could start to participate in that theater club at the new school. So you start to build some friendships and connections. There are a lot of things that we want to do So really have a great customer experience for people who might have to make a transition.

Do you see any more enrollment droppage from forcing of school closures and transfers?

And then there's always a risk of losing kids. So the ones that are most on our mind, we have a lot of kids that choose Adams 12 over other neighboring districts. They leave their place where they live and they come to us. And at every single school in our system, we have some of those other than maybe Legacy High School that's always packed historically. So you're worried that if you're offering something that's unique, those people will leave. You also have the risk of some people in district, especially if they're around 20, Borders of the district, and they're closer to neighboring districts and schools that they may choose to make another choice. I know from other districts, they tend to close schools over time. They've. Learned a painful lesson that if you choose close schools on your boundaries and your periphery, you often bleed more kids into a neighboring district. than if you close schools in the center. So there's lots of things that are possibilities. Our hope is if we follow these criteria and we're moving into a school closer to your home and you're not on a bus, if you have an art or music or PE teacher that can do the pumpkin run, support the choir, do the art show every year robustly instead of every once in a while. If you're moving to a school with a better performance and accountability rating, if we do all of the things that these criteria are saying, we hope we can minimize those losses, but it's really a TBD. There's some districts that I think as they've done school closure and consolidation, Douglas County be an example. There are lots of parents who are really hot and angry, but in the end, they're not reporting significant enrollment loss. There's other places that if you have more people on your borders with capacity, they might lose some more kids out. So we're committed to doing our very best to minimize that dynamic.

Council Member Morris.

Chris, I appreciate all the info tonight. Super helpful. Is there, or are there questions that you, I mean, this is, I know this is more informative, but are there questions that you want us to be considering as, as a city council?

What can, I guess I'd say a couple of things there. One is that I hope that no matter how much time it takes, I'm happy to come back. I'm happy to meet people in small settings one-on-one. I know from some other communities, Jeffco being a good example, that there were some city councils That felt like they really were blindsided by closure and consolidation. They felt like their communities were disproportionately targeted for closure and consolidation. They felt like they were out of the conversation about repurposing schools to mitigate neighborhood impacts. So my hope is. that you'll ask whatever questions you have pending so that we can give you the best explanations and information that we can so that you may say, when it all gets hot for all of us in a couple months, I wish this wasn't happening. You might even say in some cases that you might make slightly different decisions, but you'll understand at the macro level why we're doing this and the thoughtful approach we're trying to take. And then the bigger ask is, and it's probably the reason why I met with Tansy and some of the staff earlier on, if there are city-based uses or partners of the city that you feel like would be really desirable users of a vacant building. I know that's a little tough to come up with right now because a lot of it depends on where is the location. But whatever the city might have interest in, if anything at all, if you feel like, yep, we really need A library that might be, you know, put into an elementary school. I'm just making stuff up. Or a rec program or a dance program or a child care thing that you sponsor in partnership with the county. Whatever it would be, if there are possible uses that you feel like, depending on where, we might have interest in talking further, it's great to know that. Because it's a real strong common interest I sense in your questions and the questions and discussions I've had with our board.

I have a question. How has the conversation been going with Boys and Girls Club?

So Boys and Girls Club, a lot will depend on location. Historically, they've had the strongest interest in doing something in southeast Thornton into Mapleton and that region. So a lot of them is a little bit of a TBD. We want to see where you make your final decisions. And we feel like we're just not in a spot to get really site specific yet until we finalize our plans.

I feel like that would be a really good use. Just a lot of kids I've heard from the community go to like the libraries and just hang out there and ask librarians for snacks and things like that, you know, the rec centers too. So just thinking about lots of different things in the community as far as like, you know, getting ahead of homelessness before it turns into that, those kinds of things. Those are, it's a great, a great program to have. And I just, It was kind of funny when they did the ribbon cutting at Murphy's and they were like, oh, we're giving money to the Boys and Girls Club. And I was like, but it's not in Thornton. It's going to Denver. So something like that would be great. And then also I just wanted to add that I actually work in Witt Elementary, which is the Austin Centers. I'm a special education teacher there. And so I'm very much aware of like what because I feel like Witt Elementary is It's a lot like Wood Glen. The school's right in the middle of the neighborhood. It's been an interesting fit because our kids do venture out and do things that are not always appropriate. But I think it's been a good fit for the community and for the kids, too, because I've worked at another facility school before. And Witt Elementary is a site that's just more of like a traditional school environment. rather than Laredon, which I love as well, but it's more in a really urban place with a lot of industrial stuff around it. So it's been nice to work at a facility school that has that neighborhood feel.

Thanks for doing that work. It's an important need that I don't need to belabor with you or probably the rest of your group given what I shared. I do think for others, your school probably has somewhere between 60 and 100 kids, I think. So there's a lot fewer kids than you might see like at a Woodland Elementary, but their needs are significant. There can be elopement where kids like just get dysregulated and they want to run off. And we'd want to be really open and honest with families about the pluses. You might have less traffic. You're fulfilling an important regional need. You're often serving kids who otherwise are going to have to wait for months to get their needs met. But you might see staff chasing after kids more often than you may have before.

Yeah, it can be interesting days, but it's a really nice campus. So I imagine like something like that being, you know, someone in Thornton or North Glen or wherever, it could be a good addition too, so.

So many of those facility schools are Denver centric. And so I think lots of groups are starting to say that transportation burden is significant. And given how many kids have those needs throughout the whole region, putting more of those facilities in a Jeffco and Adams 12 will just help everybody out. So that's a possible use. I think it has a lot of potential.

Yeah, I have a handful of Adams 12 kids too, so. All right. Thank you. Does anybody else have questions? We're good. All right. We'll move on to. Thank you.

Thank you all very much.

We'll move on to our drone delivery presentation letter here.

So Adam Kruger will be coming forward as an outside partners. I'll leave it to Adam to introduce those individuals. Just a reminder for the council and a framing for any members of the public. that might be listening. So you previously talked about increasing interest. We're hearing from commercial partners about engaging in these services locally. Just a reminder, I think that the council did give direction to staff to look at some land use regulatory considerations in the areas that the city has jurisdiction. So That work has begun on your outlook. We do have on the look ahead anticipated to come back on October 6th to talk through that framework. So tonight, different than that, I think there was some interest in the council just to hear from the partners and understand a little bit what striving is, what the business practice is, so that you can anticipate what those partners that are coming, what would be their practices and their commitment in terms of that service. So we won't be getting too much into the regulatory. We won't be getting into the regulatory stuff at all tonight. If there are questions or comments that come up, we'll certainly take notes and pass that off into that process. But largely tonight, the idea is to hear from and learn from some of the commercial partners in this space. So with that, I'll give it to Adam.

Yeah, thanks, Tansy. Good evening, Mayor Pro Tem and Council. Tansy actually did the majority of the intro for me, so that makes it pretty easy. But I do have a guest here tonight I want to introduce. Our first guest is actually Sam Bailey. He's the Economic Development and Public Policy with Amazon. So excited to have Sam here. As Tansy mentioned, when we met on June 2nd, Council have asked if we could have the companies that are actually doing drone, that have reached out to us to do drones in the city, come and present. And so that's why we're here tonight. So with that, I'll turn it over to Sam. Wonderful.

Thank you, Adam. Mayor Pro Tem, members of council, thank you for having me this evening. My name is Sam Bailey. I'm the Senior Manager for Economic Development Policy at Amazon. I support the expansion of Prime Air across the United States. Here to talk to you about our site locations here in the city of Thornton. We operate two sites. It's our DEN 3 Amazon Roblox Fulfillment Center and our DDV 2 on Delivery Station, both located in Ward 4. We are interested in bringing Primair drone delivery to this community at a later date through the appropriate process that the city defines. But here to talk to you about our operations, what it looks like for us to deploy it, the customer experience, and give you a little interest into Primair. A little bit about Prime Air. So Amazon manufactures and develops our Mark 30 drone in Washington state. So this product is built, this aircraft is built by Amazon. It is deployed by Amazon. It is flown by Amazon and it carries Amazon orders from our fulfillment centers. We take a safety first approach delivered to customers in 60 minutes or less using this FAA regulated vehicle. Our fastest click to delivery time was just under 16 minutes from when someone clicked buy now to it arriving in their backyard. Happened in Texas. Our current operations span Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Michigan, Texas. And then we have a test site in Pendleton, Oregon. That's where we can test new innovations with the drone. And we have sites currently under development and construction in Illinois, Idaho, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, and other sites in Texas with more coming online just about every month. A little bit about the drone. This is the Mark 30 or the MK30. Amazon is a Part 135 air carrier certificate holder, so we can conduct commercial drone operations leveraging our drone. This was put into service at the end of 2024 and has been in service since then, delivering for customers, conducting thousands of flights daily across our sites. The drone itself is 5'6 by 4'11. It weighs 83 pounds when loaded with a lithium-ion battery and a customer order That customer order maxes out at about five pounds, about the size of a common shoebox, and can be delivered up to seven and a half miles from the point of origin, which in this case would be a fulfillment center like the one at 146 N France Street. It is fully autonomous, though we have drone monitors who are based locally that monitor every flight that goes on. Our flight monitors carry their Part 107FA certification to conduct and monitor those flight operations. We do possess onboard detect and avoid technology, so we can identify things like hot air balloons, aircraft, and helicopters. helicopters and conduct an invasive maneuver. We operate in wind and light rain, and we have a perception system. So as we come to deliver to the customer, which I'll show you, we descend to about 12 to 13 feet. We are scanning that delivery point to make sure kids, dogs, humans, obstacles aren't at that point, so we're not dropping a package on them. And then we safely drop that box from about 12 to 13 feet. That box is custom-made and could so that it lands safely so the customer can retrieve it. These drones do not have any onboard surveillance technology. So unlike that of a police type drone or drone as a first responder program, we can track license plates, people's faces, things like that. It's certainly for the purposes of customers. A couple things regarding the approvals that we as Amazon go through at our sites. So again, aerospace approval is under the authority of the Federal Aviation Administration. We go through an approval process with them based on the service territory that we are looking to conduct deliveries in. We work with aerospace partners, whether it be commercial general aviation airports helipads other operators in the area and then we're also required to conduct environmental assessment as required by the national environmental policy act and so we go through an assessment to ensure that our drones don't create a negative impact on the environment so that's the federal process we go through which is the longer lead item often when we are looking to bring a prime air to a site like the one that we operate in some of the other states. What we're looking to install at our fulfillment center in the future is what's called a paddock or a prime air drone delivery center. This is about a 20,000 square foot fenced in location that would be located in the parking lot of our fulfillment center. In this example, you can see there are six launch pads and one divert pad for space since we have drones coming in and out. We conduct our drone storage, our battery charging here, but the building itself, the use is not changing whatsoever. Our fulfillment center will continue to operate as it currently does within that light industrial zoning. The only difference will be for those who opt in to utilize drone delivery, they will receive their packages from the primary drone delivery center. So an important thing to point out is that we never surprise someone by showing up with a drone. Those who want to receive their packages in the way they currently do can continue to do so. You have to opt in to utilize that service every time that you check out.

I'll tell my wife that.

Within that building, about 67% of the items in our fulfillment center can be transported by drone. Again, this is a little bit about the profile. We operate between 200 and 400 feet AGL, and the drone transits to the customer through a direct path at about 70 miles an hour. Again, about the customer experience, the customer has to go through the process to actually opt into it. So again, they have to select it. If they decide, hey, drone delivery is not for me, they'll get a deal fast way through one of our Amazon branded delivery vans. We create a world model of all the eligible addresses that we can deliver to. So for example, if you're located next to St. Anthony's Hospital that has a helipad, we install a no-fly zone. So our drones will not interact or interfere with hospital operations. Same with Children's Hospital up north that's in Broomfield, but still within our proximity. So we install a no-fly zone. So not everyone will be eligible for drone delivery, but those who are, We work with a mapping system to map eligible delivery points. In some cases, that may be as many as three or as little as one to make sure that we can safely deliver to you. In this example here, you can see someone has a backyard, a driveway, and a front yard delivery option. So when they check out, they can select where it's going to be delivered to, the backyard being the most popular just based on porch piracy and things of that nature. This is just a video, that same home that you saw in the picture below. Let's see if this works. Here we go. Of us conducting that delivery. So again, package drops. Customer can then retrieve it as the drone ascends and returns back to the fulfillment center. So every flight is one order and one fully charged battery. The drone will then go back to the fulfillment center, receive a freshly charged battery at 100% and new customer order. These deliveries only occur during civil twilight hours as defined by the FAA about 30 minutes before sunrise and 30 minutes after sunset. So not 2 a.m. deliveries coming to your door to surprise you. We did conduct a third-party sound study of our drone at a sister site in Tulsa, Arizona. We both measured the paddock, where our fulfillment center is located, as well as a home, like the one you saw there. And we measured what the decibel level is for that brief exposure, talking about 68 decibels during that delivery at that. at the house. What's great about our DEN-3 site, it's in a zone to light industrial location. It's also located in a naturally industrial and commercial area. So the sound exposure at the paddock would not be a nuisance to surrounding users. Again, just to show you kind of an example of where we would envision locating this, this is our DEN-3 fulfillment center. Just to zoom in here, quite a substantial parking lot. I believe the largest commercial solar array on a rooftop in the state of Colorado, if that stat has not changed. We would look to install the paddock in the northern portion of the parking lot. So again, off the kind of main east-west thoroughfare and on the other side of the building away from the interstate. That would allow us to, again, do what the building does already in terms of conducting the fulfillment of customer orders, take it out to the lot where it can then be put into a drone and then delivered on to customers.

HAB-Masyn Moyer- Council remorse has a question yeah hey Sam thanks for this info super helpful I had a question if we go back to the sound testing is that. HAB-Masyn Moyer- I saw the 500 feet mark is that does that test the only have it at 500 feet or were there like was it like 50 feet and. HAB-Masyn Moyer- yeah wasn't feeling like what did that look like.

Yeah, Councilmember, this is a summary of that study. We measured, if you were saying at the primary drone delivery center, so at the launch pad, measured 200 feet, 500, 800, 1,000, I think up to 1,200 feet as well. And then at the home experience, we measured in the backyard, the front yard, and then across the street, if you were crossing your neighbor's front yard. So this is a summary of that. But beyond 500 feet, ambient noise often in these areas kind of filters in, so it's hard to have precision when you're 1,000 feet. from the paddock standing away.

So you do have data on 1,000 feet? We do. So it's less than 55? Yes. But do you know approximately what that number is?

I don't off the top of my head. It's an extensive spreadsheet, but I'd be happy to send some follow-up regarding those 800,000 feet measurements that we look at. Anyways, we're developing our land use kind of regs around that. I'm sure that'll be super helpful information to explore.

Absolutely. Thank you for your presentation so far. So how many employees would be manning the paddock?

Council Member, we currently at the Fulfillment Center employ over 3,000 Amazon associates. This would be a net increase of jobs. We would imagine an initial launch of 30 net new positions related in the flight monitors and drone operations and maintenance staff at the site. In our locations in Texas, in some cases, we've scaled up to 50. So it's a net increase of jobs at the site. There's not a net, there's not a decrease in opportunities. And it's a higher skill set based on the FAA certification that's required.

All right. Thank you.

Council Member Russell?

Yeah, I'm sure you're aware, last night there was a news story on the nightly news, and it was talking, I think, about your Richardson, Texas. A lot of neighbors upset about the noise, and this looks fine from around the warehouse, but my question is, you know, it is a higher decibel. You measured backyard, front yard, and across the street, but as they're approaching and going over neighbors, the first thing that comes to mind is where your facilities live. going right across a neighborhood called Hunter's Glen. They mobilize very well. And seeing the news article last night obviously grabbed my attention because we had just discussed this. So is there any technological improvements? I mean, you're already making noise and you're not national to a large scale yet. So that does bring a little concern that residents might be PB Harmon Zuckerman, Set about, you know, the constant traffic. Well, just because of where their housing subdivision is in a lot of housing is in that direction. So they would be directly underneath those flight patterns.

Council member, I had the pleasure of working on that specific project in Richardson, Texas, and was there with city council members and city manager doing a tour as of Thursday of last week. I've worked with those HOAs, the Creek Hollow Estates, Woods of Stream Creek, Crowley Park HOAs. I think what we have found is that when we first deployed the service in December 3rd, 2025, is that we saw immense demand and traffic. One of the things we routed around is a nearby hospital similar to St. Anthony's that has a heliport nearby and so our routing was concentrated over a select couple of areas. We worked and met with the mayor as follow-up after launching in January and implemented changes in February to do a couple of things. One, we augment our flight operations to transition to higher altitudes over the commercial area before we ever enter the neighborhood associations. We also elevated our average outbound flights up to over 225 feet. And then we installed the no-fly zone over a greenway area that was of importance to the city. So we took that feedback to heart, augmented those changes, informed the community during a council meeting in March, as well as a community meeting thereafter. We're continuing to get feedback and look at changes that we can make. That's part of what I'll call the service after sale. I would say that that is our highest performing site since its launch. It's delivered over 26,000 items via drone. And then we're continuing to work with the community to figure out those changes that we can make. Some of the response is just feedback that is I'm not interested in Amazon in the community or in drones, period, full stop. And so we do as much as we can to engage directly. Those residents all have my email address, cell phone number. email address. So they have reached out proactively. We have an ongoing and working relationship with the city to augment our operations. That isn't the case at other sites where we do operate. This site in particular is also somewhat closer into residential based on how cities in the state of Texas plan development districts and that we have nearby residential, the closest homes less than 1,200 feet away. But we are continuing to make those changes and we take that customer feedback very seriously.

So are those changes now new standard operating procedures as flight patterns and stuff, or is it just able to adjust as on the basis?

Councilmember Dupay, on the geography, we will adjust on a basis. In some cases, we will augment those across our entire network in other states where we are operating. I think in that feedback with the mayor, the city manager, community members, we're able to implement those changes quite quickly in terms of increasing our average flight altitudes and then leveraging that that location is part of a commercial area to route our drones over the commercial area before they would ever turn into a residential area. that you're open to working with us should there be issues? Absolutely. And that's where we continue to work with our communities as well as, for example, they hosted their recent community festival. And so they reached out to us and say, hey, we've got operations over this area for these days while we have our community festival. We're happy to cease operations there. And so we're happy to interrupt our work to make sure it aligns with the community. Just as well, we partner with, and this is part of our alignment from Deconfliction, with police departments and fire departments. So we're always meaning to be a good steward, whether it's our ground fleet, our associates, or our drones. Yep.

Councilor Martinez? Yeah, on the Richardson, Texas issue, what kind of engagement did Amazon do with the community before the program went up? To what extent, how often, and what kind of feedback were you soliciting before you went online?

Council member prior, so I introduced the project to the city's city manager and city leadership in December of 2024, January 2025. As part of that plan development amendment process, they had some requirements that we do community outreach and then we had some requirements of our own. So we did engage all the commercial users within a 300-foot notification period. We then did outreach directly to HOAs surrounding our site. I hosted virtual meetings with their boards as well as their members to do a similar presentation as to what I'm doing now. And then in May, prior to City Council voting on our project, we actually brought a static drone into the community. We rented space at a hotel convention center and did a public venue where we could bring people in. We hosted that for about six hours. It was myself, leaders from Prime Air, and others. So the community could come and see the drone, learn about it, learn what drone delivery is, what it isn't, how it's regulated, ask questions before we ever went to a vote of the City Council, which occurred in June of 2025. And so we do a lot of outreach, and that usually is a blend of both the public hearing piece, the direction from city staff as to you're required to engage these community or neighborhood associations. Then we generally take it upon ourselves to do outreach directly. In the case that you're looking here, this is our site in Waco, Texas, an identical site to DEN 3. This is our OSS 3 site. As you can see, we love acronyms at Amazon. We rented out the Waco Convention Center and did the same thing. We had over 300 residents come out, media as well, to learn about it. We've done the same thing in Mattson and Markham, Illinois. We rented out the Tinley Park Convention Center, brought out a drone so people could see it, learn about the job opportunities. We had everything from people interested in jobs to citizens to students coming to see about it. We market that on Facebook. We market that in the local newspaper. We market that with media so that people can come in and learn, again, what drone delivery is as well as what it isn't because there's always perception of what it may be. So we do extensive outreach through our community engagement efforts.

Okay. And then at the DEN 3 facility, what's the scalability opportunities there? So obviously, if this is a success, AMA's operations expand. What are the limits of scaling at that facility?

Council Member, to that point, at this point, we reviewed what we believe that site would support and what we believe the potential demand would be. That's all based on what the actual organic customer demand is if the program does launch from here. But our goal is that we'd have a six-pad launch pad with 15 drones based at the site that could operate between 200 and 300 flights. daily. That's contingent upon a variety of factors, including things like weather, available airspace and deconfliction. You're going to hear from another airspace user that we often coordinate with in other markets. And so there's a variety of factors as to how many flights daily would fly from there. Amazon also operates about 23 other sites in the state of Colorado where we are also considering potential operations. So we'd also look to concentrate our services in one market and then be able to expand additional drone delivery opportunities elsewhere.

The pad that you have planned out 200 flights across all the different drones per day.

Council member review between two and 300 flights in total of all the drones that are being utilized.

So that seems like a very small percentage of deliveries per day Amazon region. Great.

Council Member, it represents a small portion of our overall output of that facility that during the peak holiday season can do over a million packages. And so this is a small number, but again, it's for customers who are seeking an item that they may need at a moment's notice and for convenience. So it might not be that every order is a drone delivery. locations, I think, especially as a parent. I have three little boys under seven. Last-minute item, someone decides to pop a fever, children's Motrin is expired. You need that now versus trying to get in the car and get somewhere. There's a convenience factor there. In the state of Texas, we actually partnered with the Texas Pharmacy Board to conduct drone delivery of pharmaceuticals. That's something that we don't currently have active at our DEN-3 site, but in the future, that might be a benefit to those who might not be able to leave their home or require something after a medical or healthcare appointment.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I think we can move on.

Great. Well, we have another company I'd like to present to. So Sam, we'll stick around here for questions. Yes?

Anything else?

Thank you, Sam. I'm going to grab one more chair, and we'll bring up our chair. I'm going to grab this chair.

I want this one up for you. Excellent. All right. Good evening, everybody.

My name is Matt Philpot with Walmart on the drone delivery team.

Appreciate it.

Absolutely.

Thank you all for taking time to meet up with us. We're excited to talk about this as well. As you know, Walmart has has made its way, our company goals include helping people save money and live better. And we're constantly looking to innovate and grow from adding grocery in the 80s to express delivery and more recently, And in addition to helping people save money on products with our everyday low prices, we also are seeing that people need speed. They need the items quickly. Whether it's a forgotten ingredient at home or, as mentioned earlier, kids sick and needing some Tylenol or whatnot. So that's where we've been working with with Wing since 2023, beginning with our initial pilot down in the DFW area. From there, we've seen it grow across DFW. We're now operating in the Atlanta area, Houston, Charlotte, continuing to grow in many cities. You may have also seen the recent announcement where we're looking to go coast to coast from California to Florida. Within the last several years, since initially working with some other partners as well early on, Walmart has achieved over a million drone deliveries just in a few years, many of which have come just within the last year. So we're really seeing adoption as we're established in some of these cities. And that's really where we see the growth take place as well. So while we're continuing to focus on how we can best serve the citizens of the areas that we operate, we also partner with groups like Wing, the aeronautical experts, With that being said, I'll hand it over to Josh to explain the tech.

Yeah, thank you guys for having us. It's kind of fun to get to see that I'm not a crazy person selling drone delivery. There's clearly a commercial demand, as you can see by multiple providers being here giving similar presentations, which is great and validating. And to Matt's point, yeah, Seems like they were having some. Maybe this is a video, so it didn't get passed through the PDF, which is OK. But yeah, I'll just say we've been working with Walmart since 2023. So serving thousands of customers every week from dozens of Walmart stores. So like Matt said, operating DFW, Atlanta, Houston, a couple stores in Charlotte, and hopefully soon launching the kind of Orlando, Tampa market as well. We're very excited about that growth. Like Matt said, again, he stole some of my thunder. But we've really seen an adoption, right? We started in 2023 in DFW. That was kind of the perfect market for us from a validation perspective. Very congested airspace. lot of sprawl and so it gave us an opportunity to say hey can we operate in kind of the hardest conditions from an aerospace perspective and validate it there since we've been able to validate kind of make sure it works in that way we've been able to expand over a million commercial deliveries on the wing side a lot of that again being with walmart which is awesome and those numbers continue to grow we continue to hit monthly records which is great because Just like having two providers here validates the use case and that people want to use it, the numbers validate that use case as well. Consumers have been very excited about it, which is great. I guess note on delivery time there. So we usually say our deliveries are five minutes or sorry, our, our flight time is five minutes or less. We usually say deliveries are to your, you know, delivery zone, not necessarily to your door, but backyard or front yard, depending on where your delivery zones are in less than 30 minutes, which is awesome. So again, you know, several people have mentioned, I have little kids, seems like they are constantly sick and we never have child's ibuprofen or Tylenol for some reason. And so again, Getting those types of items very quickly is very beneficial. This is usually video, which is a bummer that... I don't know if we have access to the video. That's okay. I'll make do. And maybe we can follow up sending across this video. It's really nice. It walks through kind of how the process works. Ours is slightly different from some competitors in that we have a tether that drops down out of the airplane. So basically, our drone... operations um are in you know in this case a walmart parking lot um and i'll have some pictures later on but essentially the drone hovers up to about 25 feet and associate puts the package on a tether that drops down from the um once the package is on that tether the drone retracts it up into kind of the belly of the drone as you can see here in this this photo of the video um It goes about on the delivery. On the other side of it, at the residence, it drops that tether down so the drone does not have to lower as low. We're able to hover a little bit higher, again, reducing that kind of sound profile that people are often worried about. So it lowers that package to the ground, gently places it on the ground. What's awesome about that system is, you know, we can deliver a full cup of hot coffee. We can deliver eggs. Uh, very stable, um, in that process. Um, and again, there's, there's tons of YouTube videos I can send with that stuff where we have clear packages with a full cup of coffee in it. Um, which is great because, uh, it means whatever is in that package is getting ultimate care, um, you know, from the Walmart facility all the way to, uh, to your residence.

We definitely need to see you deliver that video, that full cup of coffee.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh, it's, it's pretty awesome.

I'm sure I can deliver a full cup.

That's right. Um, So again, Part 135, you know, some of this stuff is regurgitated from the presentation you guys just heard. So I'll try to move quickly and kind of call out any differences there might be. But Part 135, air carrier certified. So, you know, similar certification to much larger airlines that are flying much bigger things. We've had to work with the FAA kind of hand in hand to make sure that we can meet those needs and that their kind of requirements are applicable to the industry. So wing has existed, you know, for over a decade as a company and, The first kind of 10 years of that, I think it's 14 years now, first kind of 10 years of that was just in a lab designing drones, working with the FAA, really building those relationships and making sure when we come to market, you know, nothing's perfect, but we've spent a lot of time really thinking about the product. And I'll show you guys the drones here in a second. So our pilots, the people who observe the aircraft are certified by the FAA. And all of that time spent in kind of our drone lab, was prioritizing safety and redundancy to make sure, again, the final product is not only able to deliver your cup of coffee, but it's also safe in the process. So obviously, benefit to the community, supporting local economy, reducing traffic congestion from a delivery driver having to go drive and get that thing, efficient transportation, and delivery with speed. So these are our two drones. We have kind of two models that we work with right now, the smaller one being about 12 pounds, the larger one being about 17 pounds. So our larger drone at 17 pounds can deliver up to five pounds package weight. So again, you're not getting your week's worth of deliveries. It's really more of those urgent items that you would need. The awesome thing about being partnered with a Walmart is that can be anything from a pair of AirPods that you need for a meeting to limes and salsa that you need for your dinner. There's really such a diverse offering in their stores. It really fits the model really well, which is awesome. Our drones have built-in redundancy, so you can see a number of propellers on there, both vertical and horizontal propellers, which again speaks to that safety. And then the other cool thing, being so lightweight at 17 pounds, they're made primarily out of styrofoam with carbon fiber core. So again, prioritizing that safety. If something were to happen, that lightweight really is a benefit from our side. Privacy, you know, we like to be up front with this. Our drones do have downward facing sensors on them, as was mentioned in the previous presentation. You know, we want to make sure we don't put your hot coffee on top of your car so you can't reach it. Right. And so when we're coming in for that delivery, we use these sensors to shapes. If there's someone in the area, those types of things. But we always relate it to like a 90s flip phone. If any of you guys have those very low resolution, you can see this is an actual photo from one of our test sites from one of the downward facing sensors. So very low resolution, just picking out shapes and things like that. And then noise, again, similar to what we talked about, kind of that 60 decibel range at delivery at the property. In overflight, around 40 decibels. I'm fortunate enough to live in an area with delivery right now. And they're basically imperceptible during overflight, which is awesome. Community outreach is something we're very passionate about. If there's any events you guys want us to be at, you know, if it's your Easter egg hunt, if it is your STEM convention, whatever it is, we like to be here and be in the community. It helps people get comfortable with the drone. Again, touch and feel one of these things. They're not as intimidating as they may sound when you hear the word drone delivery with how small and lightweight they are. And so it benefits us from getting people comfortable, but also hopefully benefits the community as well. and getting down to what our sites look like. Our infrastructure is very lightweight, allows us to be able to mobilize really quickly, which again is important because the demand we've seen has been robust. And so we want to be able to go to areas quickly that people have shown that demand and that the Walmart metrics have identified demand as well. And so most of our infrastructure is attached directly to existing pavement. We have a small area fence that kind of unclosed our area, but ultimately not very obtrusive in the space. It's just a slide that got passed through. So yeah, love to answer any questions you guys have.

Council Member Algi?

Yeah, thank you for the presentation. So I'll ask the same question is how many employees would be utilized by Walmart too?

Yeah, that's a good question. It's kind of a balance of some existing Walmart employees and some wing employees. It also depends on the number of locations that we have in the space. I don't have a great metric off the shelf. A lot of times a lot of those employees are are going to be Walmart employees that are picking and packing. A couple employees per site would be typical. Our sites are pretty small scale, and so it's not a huge operation. Okay, thank you.

Any other questions?

Honestly, no. So my question is before with Amazon's, what kind of community outreach was done by Walmart and Wing when you introduced the in these new markets and what would your plans for Thornton be if we came to that stage?

Yeah, I think we want to be at anything and everything that you want us to be at is what it comes down to. We've done everything from just you know, limited outreach in terms of the approval process to all kinds of meetings. And again, you know, you saw us at an Easter egg hunt there. Like we want to be at all the events that the city wants us to be at. And so that varies. We've talked to hundreds of cities now that we are in various stages of approval at. A lot of them approved and just waiting to be built. And so it varies so much by community, but essentially it's, you know, whatever you guys want us to be at, we will be at. With that said, once we are kind of approved to be in a community, we're sending out mailers, we're doing events on site. So really making sure that people are comfortable with and know the services available, because a lot of times that's one of the biggest challenges, letting people know they have this available to them to use.

Bird.

Councilman Russell had pointed out that there was the incident with the Amazon crash back in February with theirs. It looks like you guys have had one as well in April. Yours resulted in a fire. Is there a difference in like, are you using a different kind of battery system or using fuel?

It's a good question. I don't know the complete specs of our competitors' drones. And that, you know, crash is a sensitive term in the industry, right? We would refer to that as contingency landing. So if there is an issue with our systems, you know, FAA, when you say crash around the FAA... It means one thing. So in that example, it was a contingency landing. And so the drone identified an issue shortly after taking off, and it looked for a place to set down. A lot of times, our drones are looking for an area that's not very populated. So I think in that example, it found a tree to set down in, which might have made it worse in that circumstance. But the batteries on our drones, again, because they're so lightweight, You know, you think about like some of the smaller 40-volt Ryobi batteries that you can get, quite small. And so we really haven't had many issues. Again, I can't speak to kind of our competitors, you know, what they're using.

Council Member Morris?

Can you remind me your names?

Josh Bucci.

I'm Matt Philpott. Josh, Matt, and Sam, quick question. There's some great things here, great features and some very exciting technology. I think we'd be curious to hear some of your, I know we mentioned a couple with the contingency landings. But I'm curious, tell me about some bad experiences in communities when you're entering them. I want to know, what did you experience? And be totally frank, because we're going to be dealing with this too, right?

Yeah.

Tell us about experiences. Tell us about how you approached it, what you saw, and how things are going now, because you guys are operating a bunch of communities. So there has to be some good examples for us.

Yeah, I think there's a couple things that come to mind when you say bad experiences. I mean, the contingency landing example, which that's the only one that I'm aware of in my time at Wing and in our partnership with Walmart, which is great. You know, Uber. a million commercial deliveries, like we said. I think there's two types of bad experiences outside of that that I think about. There's the initial kind of hard conversations that we have in these rooms of city council members trying to make decisions on behalf of their communities, you know, oftentimes without... full understanding of what their communities want and what their communities don't want. And so that gets tough, especially when we're hearing from community, which is kind of the other bad experience of, you know, we are getting people messaging us constantly in the DFW area of just like, hey, you keep telling me i have drone delivery i don't have drone delivery that's one of our worst experiences because they pester us like to no end uh because they want the service um uh so those are and then having to take that and sit in city council meetings where again it's a it's a hard place that you guys sit in to make these decisions um and the other thing i think we've run into is the noise when we first launched launched commercially um in 2023 um We had a lot of initial pushback on the noise. Part of it was just very new. We knew what we were doing, but kind of to some of what the Amazon presentation spoke to, we had to refine some things. So in our initial site that we launched in 2023, we took that back. We re-engineered propellers on our drones to change kind of the noise profile of what you're hearing. We altered kind of how we fly and where we fly. So making sure we're taking off completely vertically before we go horizontally. And so that was one bad experience that sticks out very early on. What's been great is we haven't really heard that feedback since we've made those changes. That was site one. We've launched over 50 sites since then. And so we haven't really gotten that feedback, which just goes to show that those changes really had an impact and changed that sound profile to really reduce the impact on customers.

Great, thanks.

Council member Salazar.

Oh, hold on a second. I wasn't sure if Amazon had any. I'll see if you have anything that you could share about some bad experiences and how you guys overcame it and how things are going now.

Sure. Council member, I think privacy is the big thing that comes up, especially with the prevalence of long term. There's the assumption that these drones have the ability to spy on your kids, on you, your kids, your family, and that we're taking pictures through the window. We operate in the state of Texas, which actually forbids commercial companies from conducting drone surveillance. And so the same drone that we would be operating here is the same thing. We just brought Richardson City Council members in to see actually what our flight monitors see. They're not looking at a video of the drone flying. They're not looking at what the camera is seeing. They're looking at the drone pass-through radar. And so while there is the perception, oh, it's Big Brother, you're spying on me, that's a drone, that's not the case for a lot of reasons. It's not our core business. It's not what we do. And so getting over that privacy discussion can be really hard. So that's why we really highlight what it does and what it doesn't do. I think the other thing that's challenging, which is why we're here today, is we often go to cities and for example like we're an industrial user um where in some communities we are permitted by right to operate in other places we secure a special use permit conditional use permit file development review we've been through just about every approval process there is um cities don't have definition as to how do we permit you how do we zone you and that comes in two different flavors i will say is um the city is responsible for the land use You don't have authority over the airspace in which the drones are flying through federally regulated airspace. So also educating the community that discussions here do involve airspace, but it's a land use decision made by council, but that we also have to secure FAA airspace. airspace approval to conduct our operations. And so the onus is also on just the operators, but also the community to say, you didn't permit us to fly through the airspace. We could easily set up in Westminster and fly into Thornton all day, and you might not have authority to intervene. That's not what we want to do. That's not appropriate. We want to be really good partners. But explaining the harmonization of local land use and federal airspace, that can be a difficult conversation with the community when you're outlining, we approve the land use component of the project. What happens above a blade of grass is out of our jurisdiction. There are certain things you can regulate regarding land use, hours of operation, things of that nature, but the federal regulatory framework doesn't. explain that the city's limits of its jurisdiction stop into the airspace and that's where the fa takes over so that's been a between privacy and then authorities of approval i think that's been a challenging part to educate communities on but also to work with councils planning departments um on um what's the right way your community wants to regulate identify um how to interpret drone use right thank you okay were there any last questions

Salazar said her question was answered. Okay. All right. Well, thank you for the presentation. Thank you all so much. All right. Next, we have the Thornton Area Chamber of Commerce update.

They are here. I'll go grab them.

So just a reminder, so we will provide some staff updates in terms of ongoing conversations between the city, kind of where we are, kind of the... future work around the MOU, but largely tonight's presentation, the mayor asked at a previous meeting for the chamber to come in and give an update. So there will be some, a slight staff introduction and some updates in terms of interactions between staff and the chamber. This is largely the chamber's presentation update on their operation. So that'll, I'll give Adam the floor, I think, for a very brief

Yes, thank you, Tansy, and I missed most of that walking in and out, so I get to do my introduction as well. I do have some more special guests for us here tonight. I know you guys are well aware of Corey Potter, the Executive Director for the Thornton Area Chamber of Commerce. You probably know Juan Evans, but if you don't, he's the 2026 Thornton Chamber Chair. here tonight. Thank you. Thanks for taking some time. So as Danzy mentioned, the purpose of tonight is really to give an overview of what the Thornton Area Chamber of Commerce has been doing from a services perspective, but then really start talking about some possible components of a multi-year memorandum of understanding. So we're going to talk a little, spend a little bit of time in the beginning, kind of an overview of all of the services that we provide for businesses in the city so that council can get a good sense and people listening can get a good sense of all of the partnerships that we have with the goal of all of our groups of trying to service the businesses in Thornton as best as we can through community connections, resources, making sure that we're being proactive and pointing businesses to operations and services that are out there. And then we'll spend some time, turn it over to the Chamber after that, and they can talk about their successes and then talk about their vision moving forward and opportunities for further collaboration. So I'll briefly run through, I know Council's familiar with this and seen this slide, but I'll briefly just run through some of the services that we provide in economic development. So primary employer traction and retention, so bringing in those good jobs and the revenue that comes with those businesses. Retail attraction retention, St. Peel trying to bring in good amenities for residents as well as the sales tax. um small business support i'll touch on some of these partnerships a little bit later but um we do that on a proactive uh basis with the alliance business assistance center we'll talk about that and then redevelopment is another area that we focus and then business climate so um best make sure that thornton is competitive from a business standpoint in the market uh and nationally an example of that is just continuing to look at ways we can improve like the work we're doing with the regulatory justice initiative and looking at where there might be barriers that we need to overcome from a business policy perspective. Just touch quickly on the Alliance Business Assistance Center. I know you guys are familiar with this, but this is our kind of one-stop shop for businesses. So we have opportunities for in English and Spanish here, both outreach from our business outreach specialists and businesses that come and utilize the center for various things, consulting and technical assistance. I'll talk a little bit more about that briefly. We have space for folks to utilize. We do workshops. We just did, we're in the middle of a food safety It's actually the third time we've done this workshop. So people, it's a three-week course. We've got folks that graduate from that with a certificate in food safety. And we have 19 different folks in this current food safety class, which is pretty great. We also have an AI for business one. I think that's tomorrow. That one's online. Just some examples of workshops. We've got cybersecurity and fraud next week. So lots of exciting workshops that we're doing there. And then access to capital, we'll talk about some of our partners on that side of things, business networking, and then site selection. So this is a list of our partners. I will talk about all of these in a little bit more detail here, but with obviously most of the detail tonight going to the Thornton Area Chamber. But we do have a number of partners that we've worked with to help support our business community. And the intent of this is to show kind of a larger scale of our partnerships and the total investment that we have in those partnerships. It's about $69,000 a year. This kind of small font, I apologize for that. Small Business Development Center is one of those partners. They come in one day a week to the Alliance Center, as well as they do some various workshops for us. And they actually have scheduled counseling sessions with businesses. Colorado Enterprise Fund, same thing. They come in twice a month. And then they do some quarterly trainings with us as well on loans and micro loans and things for businesses. SCORE is another group that we partner with. They do two workshops per quarter, and then they do mentorship for our, and all of these are businesses that when they have scheduled time with businesses, but then we also can refer them, refer businesses to their different services. And then 3i Law is our free legal attorney there. We can direct businesses to them with questions, primarily when it comes to a lot of the work that they do is on. you know, leases and looking at leases that businesses might have, preferably before they've signed one, but that's not always the case. And so those are some of the partners that we work with there. BTAC, I know council's familiar with BTAC, but this really does serve as the business voice for the city. We want to make sure that we're balancing things that we are looking to do off of the business community. And so we leverage BTAC for that business voice. They do manage our business agreement grant, but they also provide feedback. And you can see, I won't run through them all, but a list of a lot of the things that we have brought BTEC in to weigh in on over time. They just had a legislative update last week. And then they are also, they were also a part of the regulatory justice initiative in providing feedback on that. And then I know you guys are familiar, they come in every year and talk about the accomplishments. And then they do the two networking events and then the business awards with our office. Adams County Regional Economic Partnership. This was a merger of Adams County Economic Development and the Metro North Chamber of Commerce. And they do broader marketing for the entire county. I know council's on a number of the boards that they offer. They also have educational opportunities. Lead Metro North is a really great program that I know you guys are, some council members have gone through that in the past. I've had a couple of staff members actually go through it. And then various other marketing events for the county that we are involved in. promoting the entire Adams County region.

And then the Colorado Hispanic Chamber of Commerce running through all these folks.

So this is another partner of ours. They actually, they work primarily with Hispanic businesses. They do a number of events. I know council has been a part of some of those. They also have a leadership program. They utilize the Alliance Center actually four times a month. So almost every week they come there with a networking event. And then we do the one co-branded networking event. with them every year. And now for the star of the show tonight, we've got the Thornton Area Chamber of Commerce. I'll let Courtney and Juan run through all their details, but I did just want to mention, Council's seen this slide before, Chambers, an independent entity, they've got their own board, as Juan is representing tonight, and programming. We are a member of $10,000 a year. This year, we also partner with the state of the city. We do some joint networking and holiday campaign for around $21,000. You can see some of the membership benefits we've got listed there. So I ran through that really quickly so I can turn it over to Courtney and Juan so they can kind of run through their stuff. I'll hand it over now. Here you go.

Thank you. Good evening, Mayor Pro Tem and Council. Thank you for having us today. I think I want to kind of set the stage. This is not really a discussion about the role that the chamber plays in Thornton today, but we're trying to get an understanding of the role that it could play in the future. Knowing how rapidly Thornton is growing and where the chamber is at, we really felt it was important to get in front of you guys and better align kind of where we are going and where the city is going. The goal for today is to introduce the chamber, share our impact, discuss how chambers are evolving, explore partnership opportunities, and begin a discussion for a future vision. As Adam has shared, we do have our own leadership, so we have a board of local business owners of all sizes. We try to keep it diverse to have a great variety of opinions. I am the CEO, and we also have two or three other staff members. And then we also heavily rely on our volunteer base as well. So a lot of people ask me what a chamber of commerce is. So I thought it'd be important to touch on this real quick. Many people think that we exist to host networking events and parties, but in reality, we exist to connect businesses, governments, education, and community entities, and really kind of support our community as a whole. by supporting our businesses and encouraging them to get behind the vision of this city. Our work today is organized around four different areas, or what we call pillars, advocacy, marketing, workforce, and events. These pillars drive every program and initiative that we undertake. When we make a decision about what to do, we will ask, does it fall into one of these areas? Our advocacy work focuses on elevating concerns of the business community to elected officials and departments at all levels. Marketing is where we help our community members find businesses, whether it's for services, products or special events. Workforce is our most prevalent pillar. We partner with organizations like Rocky Mountain Partnership and others to help ensure that today's students are prepared to enter the workforce in areas that our employers need. And our last pillar, events, we have a blend of business to business and business to consumer events that help connect our community in a variety of different ways. Some examples of how we conduct some of this work to expand on The lovely slide that Adam had put together earlier. When we look at our advocacy work, that's legislative engagement. Again, that is at all levels. We work with you guys, school boards, all the way up through congressmen, U.S. senators, the U.S. Department of Labor. We try to work with all levels to make sure that the voices are heard and we bring the concerns to the right departments. You guys are all familiar with our candidate forums. That's something that we love doing and our community loves seeing you guys at. And then we spend some time on policy education as well, educating our businesses on what the policy changes are, what that means for them. We are not a lobbying entity. We do not endorse candidates. We do not donate to candidates or causes. We do not take stances on legislation. we prefer to have healthy, robust conversations with our elected officials across the board and kind of let them know what's going on so that they feel informed when making decisions. Our marketing work, like Adam said, we do a holiday campaign highlighting local businesses. We have event exposure. It's pretty basic marketing efforts. And then in workforce, a lot of our focus this last year or so has been around the big three, a big change that is coming down from the state legislature that says every kid that is going to graduate high school will be required to have college credit, a meaningful internship or trade certification. And so we were able to lean in at the state level and give them feedback around reporting, what some of the concerns are on the business side, how we can make sure that we have enough partners. Right now, one in every 27 students completes one of those three things, and so how are we going to move that needle in a meaningful way? That's also giving our businesses support when they do take on interns and apprenticeships, and Again, that's, you know, how do we make sure that our employers in the area have the workforce that's needed? And finally, our events, again, that's ribbon cuttings, networking events, state of the city. We do a lot between all of our events. You know, we have a large range of people. I feel like every event we do host leans into a different kind of demographic and hits a different purpose. Here you'll see some of our impact from 2025 and our overall report. So before we talk about where we want to go, I feel it's important that we understand what we've already accomplished. Like I said, we do 200-plus events. We've had 7,100 attendees over our major events. On any given year, we do between 20 and 30 ribbon cuttings, although I feel like this year we're setting a record, so I apologize, Council, for the amount of ribbon cuttings, but it's a great thing to be a part of, and we're excited to have so many new businesses opening here. And then we're increasing partnerships and... You know, when I look at some of this data, it kind of tells a story of who we are, but when you really look into each of these things, you know, we think about the 3,300 students teach, or 3,300 students reached. We have had the opportunity to guest teach and mentor and intern students across all three school districts, Mapleton, 27J, and Adams 12. And we've gotten resounding feedback. One of our bigger employers said, what did you do? Because if I could have more students like your intern, like I would have a perfectly operating organization. Their soft skills were where they needed to be. They were on time. They were organized. They were good communicators. I mean, we were proud to say that we had put them through kind of our student leadership program to get them prepared for the workforce. Similarly, we've had students say, you know, I believed that I needed to go on this path and go to college, and I didn't realize that I could get a trade certification. and accomplish the same thing in a lot shorter of time without taking on the crushing debt. And they said that not only did they feel inspired, they felt inspired past the trade, but to be able to say, I know that I'm going to graduate, make good money, buy a house, have a family, and I'm not going to be like some of my other family members who are living with mom and dad unable to support themselves. So there's a lot of meaningful work that goes on and kind of stories behind the numbers. But we're really proud of how far we've come. And 2025 was our second year as an organization. So now shifting to kind of where we are going, when we look at chambers across Colorado and the country, we found a consistent theme. While traditional chambers focus on networking events and referrals, think like the average leads group, modern chambers have grown and evolved to solve real problems. When their community has concerns, they can react pretty quickly. So you'll see things like workforce leadership and really being kind of a leader in that space, not only in their community, but across the state, region, and nationally. They provide, they're a great hub for research and data and other areas. So again, why this matters is when communities face issues, it forces the chambers to change. And it's not because they want to, but because they have to. When you have workforce shortages or primary employers looking at you saying, I'm short staffed and I don't know what to do, organizations have to flex and say, okay, how can we help meet that problem? Thank you. The same thing goes with rapid growth resulting in updated business information and research. A great example of this would be a local business that has been around for 20 years is not always going to understand what it means to experience rapid growth in the community and therefore can have missed opportunities. Modern Chambers aim to eliminate those missed opportunities. We aim to fill those gaps to make sure that our businesses not only are supported in getting opened, but they're supported in staying open. One of the things that we have had... One of the things that we have heard quite a bit is people don't understand what it means when you have to close your doors. It's not simply we're not here to serve you pizza anymore. It means that I'm likely selling my house to pay off business debts. I'm moving. I'm making sacrifices that they never thought that they could make. And so when we look at businesses that have invested in their businesses to invest in turn in our community, we want to make sure that they feel supported in every way possible and that we fill those holes so that they don't have to stop living their dream and give up and face some of those challenges. This side surprised me, and I know that we've gotten questions about this over the last couple years about what does our organization do compared to neighboring cities. I expected that there would be differences between the communities, but what I did not expect was the difference in how communities partner with their chambers of commerce. As I dug deeper, I realized this wasn't really a conversation around funding as much as it's how Many chambers still conduct ribbon cuttings, host networking events, and provide business promotions, and go above and beyond. Many of the chambers that you see on this list are VATO Westminster Longmont. They've also become leaders in the spaces we just talked about. Leaders in workforce development, business retention, community activation, business concierge services. And that caused me to start asking kind of a different question of not why are these communities investing more in their business organizations, but rather what are these communities asking their chambers to do and what are we not currently being asked to do? Where are the opportunities for strategic partnership to allow us to help support the vision and mission of the city as a whole? When you look back at the previous slides, you kind of begin to see a clear answer to this. Chambers are solving workforce challenges. They're being asked to activate communities and commercial corridors. And they're being asked to activate community spaces to serve as a bridge between business and government. And they're asking chambers to help retain business, support entrepreneurs, and strengthen the overall business climate. Now, what excites me about Thornton is that we're in a unique position. Unlike organizations that have spent decades building these partnerships, to help put this into context, most of the chambers listed on this board are, I think Arvada just celebrated their 100th birthday, Broomfield's 100 years old, Brighton's 100 years old, Westminster I think is 13 or 14 years old. And so for us being three years old, Again, it puts us in a very unique position that we have an opportunity to intentionally design what this relationship should look like moving forward and what the relationship and goals of the partnership should be for the long term. So I want to reassure all of you, this is not a presentation to request a six figure investment. It's not even a request to replicate what another community is doing, but to better understand how we can build a meaningful partnership that lasts years and years to come. So what I would like to leave counsel with is what role do you believe the Thornton Chamber should play in helping our community achieve the outcomes we've discussed tonight? Oh, I went the wrong way. Again, this is an opportunity to not become another community. We're not looking to be the next Westminster or Arvada. This is an opportunity to build out a strategic partnership. And part of the transition from a traditional chamber of networking events and parties to a more modern chamber is changing our pillars from workforce events, marketing and advocacy to workforce leadership, community activation, business growth and visibility, as well as economic leadership. We really want to position our organization as a trusted ally in the community for businesses to rely on. As I looked at the communities we benchmark, one thing kind of stood out to me, the strongest chambers are not successful because they're working independently from their cities. They're successful because they've built meaningful relationships and partnerships around shared community goals. Regardless of what areas these goals fall into, these communities have found ways to leverage the unique strengths of both the City and the Chamber. For Thornton, the opportunity isn't about replacing existing efforts, it's about asking an important question about what level of service does Thornton want from the Thornton Area Chamber of Commerce. If the expectation is networking events, ribbon cuttings, and business promotion, then we're already providing those services and we'll check it off as a win and move forward. But if the expectation is deeper engagement around workforce development, business retention, community activation, and business support, then that's a different conversation. So as we look forward, as we look toward the next MOU, the question isn't again, what does the chamber want to do? The question is, what level of service does Thornton want, and where can a stronger partnership between the city and chamber help us achieve these goals together? This is a list of different areas that cities and chambers have partnered. We are by means not doing all of these things right now, nor are we aiming to do these things tomorrow. But it was just an example of each of the categories and what kind of services and agreements are in place with other chambers in their cities. So again, the point of benchmarking isn't to compare budgets. The point was to compare outcomes. If Thornton wants a stronger workforce leadership and business retention, community activation and business engagement, then the next MOU should reflect those priorities. Again, tonight is not about funding. We're not here to ask you for more funds. It's about programs and partnership. And so the question is really, again, what role does council want Thornton Area Chamber of Commerce to play in the future of the city of Portland?

Thank you. Maybe I'll just add, thank you. Thank you, Courtney and Juan. Maybe I'll just add, you know, as we're putting this, working on this multi-year MOU, the Chamber's been around, as Courtney said, for three years. We are interested in working with the Chamber and all of our partners to kind of see, as Thornton continues to grow and our services continue to grow for businesses, how can we best partner on some things moving forward. And so, as Courtney mentioned, did a great job of running through kind of what they're doing and kind of where they'd like to go. What we wanted to do was take some time with council while we're working together on this multi-year agreement. You know, what are your top priorities from some of the things that Courtney mentioned? Is there things that aren't on there that you guys want us to focus on or want the chamber to focus on that we can incorporate it in this MOU? And then ultimately we'll take that feedback as we negotiate this multi-year MOU and work on this multi-year MOU. So just to kind of put a pin in and kind of the asks, that's what we're looking for there. So I'll shut up and let you guys ask your questions.

Council Member Morris.

Morning, Juan. So good to see you guys. Thanks for being here. Thanks for preparing this. You know, it's been something that I think since, you know, being elected, talking with Tansy and some other staff, like it's been a really interesting topic, talking about economic development, talking about where we're at as a city. Looking at kind of what the future looks like. And we know that, I mean, we have our sales team rock stars that are out there, you know, selling our city. They're trying to attract businesses. But as we're growing, as we're doing things, it's really great to see this conversation happening where we're We're looking at how do we, how do we grow this thing? And I know we talked about Westminster, Nevada, Longmont and saying things like, hey, we don't want to be them. But what I'll say is we have a community survey that's very real that says, hey, we want more of this. We want more restaurants, small business, all those things. And so when we're having this discussion, I mean, we're looking at how are we responding to the community? How are we And how are we going forward as you're talking about how do we leverage partners? How are we aligning capabilities so we're most effective and efficient? So I guess to round that out, I'm super excited that we're actually doing this. We're having this conversation. Gives us all a chance to kind of share some things. So with Westminster, we've had a long month. You mentioned them. What are things that they're doing as a chamber? You briefly touched on this. If you can, talk detail. What are they doing? What are we not doing? From, I guess, comparison's sake.

Yeah, I think that's a great question. I know that Arvada has a BOLD initiative, which is where a bulk of their funding comes from. That BOLD initiative covers a lot of different areas. I don't want... to speak on their behalf because I don't want to get it wrong, but it does focus on, um, activating communities, housing shortages, uh, horrible daycare. And, you know, when talking with them, they kind of highlighted like where the areas that the city is doing work and where we can come in and support that. And so that's where they kind of built out their bold initiative was to support the goals of the city. Um, one of them is like, I think, um, specifically around workforce. They are a great workforce partner of ours. And so I know that that's a big investment for them. Westminster, I believe bulk of their funding is coming from the activation of their new downtown space and activating some of the business community. And then Longmont and is similar in community activation, workforce development, and being kind of that sounding board for business. What we have found is that oftentimes businesses feel a little bit more comfortable expressing some of their opinions with us as not being a city entity. And so it allows people to kind of create policy recommendations and feedback and eliminate some of those barriers.

As far as outcomes in those communities, what are you guys seeing? If you're talking among the chambers, talking among cities, anything there you could share?

Yeah, I think if you, I have the privilege of traveling around the Denver Metro a lot for children's sports. And I would say if you look at the economic growth in some of those communities, it's really outstanding. They're having a lot of new development, a lot of new activities. great community engagement, great parks and rec spaces. And, you know, I can't say I've been going to these places for a decade, but I have noticed a significant increase in the kind of the quality of life of their communities when the chambers have kind of invested in meaningful ways.

One other quick topic. I know there's probably a bunch of questions here. On activation, you touched on it briefly around, and this is actually a really great example of how the city and the chamber, I think, kind of teed off or teed up some things. And then the chamber took it would be Eastlake Street Fair 2024, economic development, kind of led that initiative, brought in nonprofit, helped create this idea. made it happen and set that kind of groundwork for the community and for what was possible in terms of activation. The next year, for whatever reasons, funding not available, political reasons, whatever they are, like it couldn't happen as a city in 2025. So the chamber took a event and kind of combined some things and then created Bites on the Block, which from what I saw was even more successful. It was building on the success of the previous year that the city launched. you know, quadruple the vendors, you know, double the attendance, all really good things from the community side. So from an activation side, where do you see, is that something, first of all, that you want to continue, and then where do you see, how do you see that expanding, and how do we work with the city, or how do you work with the city to kind of make that happen?

Yeah, great, great question. I think that was a really fun event that we're looking forward to doing again this year. There was some city partnership involved, but it was a very low cost kind of partnership where we needed, you know, road closure permit, electricity to the pavilion. but most of the cost was absorbed by the chamber and our different revenue streams. When we look at different community activation opportunities, I think there's a lot of excitement and interest from the chamber leadership, and correct me if I'm wrong, around Eastlake and just the potential there. Because we have a smaller team, it's a smaller space to kind of control. We don't have some of the same concerns about Eastlake as we would like the Larkridge Shopping Center, like controlling the flow of traffic or the speed of traffic. It just becomes a heavier lift. So that's why Eastlake kind of being tucked away makes it a more ideal place. It would be really great to continue to activate that space throughout the year, expand it to things. I know that BTEC had shared there was some interest in like a 4K like marathon type thing that goes through Eastlake, additional like vendor fairs. that would do things like have craft markets or artisanal booths, things of that nature, as well as opportunities for kids. But we're not limited to Eastlake. Really, we would like to find where the city would like to activate. One of the, I think, greatest missed opportunities is our Riverdale ball fields over there. I'm like, oh my gosh, I have so many ideas of how we could bring that community in so that we're not only focusing in one neighborhood. When we look at our four or five signature events that we do, we try to spread it out around Thornton the best we can, but having a better, closer partnership with the city to understand what communities need some of these services. Our holiday cookie exchange is a great example. It is a event where our businesses come together. They bring dozens of cookies. We have Santa, the Grinch, movies, crafts, like the whole nine yards. And basically families come in, they get a box and they get to go around and collect cookies. And that is at no cost to our community. And so we can kind of utilize the spaces that we have, but being able to work with the city to say, okay, what communities really need this extra community chair, um, and where can we go to, to spread that as much as we can. Awesome. Thank you.

All right. Councilor Russell.

You had some great numbers there on the 2025 impact slide. Yeah. I just had questions just so I could fully understand some of these numbers. Like, for instance, the 7.2x on the average ROI, is that like a member? Like, David, they bought a membership and, you know, whatever, they spent $5,000, they saw $35,000 in revenue, or who are you talking about?

Yeah, so it is our membership.

Okay, so the same thing then with the 32 new jobs, those were people that are... within the chamber and they found new employment or?

I would say those are businesses that were looking for employees that we helped match with employers, helping match employees with employers. And that is not limited just to our businesses, although that is most of the work that we've done.

Are there any other questions? Council Member Morris, again?

You mentioned business intelligence data. Talk about that a little bit. So I know we have BTAC, which, you know, we have Relay, and I served on BTAC, and I understand kind of some of the the struggle sometimes and finding the correct way. And, you know, I would love to see them become and enter more of this advisory, even more in an advisory capacity for council or staff. It's kind of going towards the policy direction. That's one thing that we're seeing and hearing a ton. Like you said in the session, there's, you know, X number of bills that are making it more expensive or more difficult for businesses to operate in the state. And we don't really talk about it. much yet in our council legislative updates. I imagine that'll be more of a topic in the future in terms of priorities. But, you know, so there's this big gap that I feel that happens. And so But we don't know, we don't get a lot of input as a city, well, as a council member from businesses in terms of like, hey, here are like maybe the specific things, usually it's in some sort of forum or like an event that we attend and we hear this from panels. And then maybe one-on-one, like you're talking to a business that you go to and you're just kind of chatting. So I know that we kind of collect data as a city, but like from a chamber perspective, like what does that look like? I see there's a value there because again, having an independent entity looking at this, there's probably some benefits from not having to talk to the city, but maybe you can talk about that a little bit and what that would look like and how that could be evaluated potentially for, from a policy perspective, what you can do for the city. So I'm curious.

Yeah, so... couple thoughts there. So one, we do have a seat on the state chambers government affairs committee. So we do kind of hear all of like the bills that are coming through. And we usually hear from the legislators that are running them as well as some other policy experts to just kind of stay informed. And we do have a bill tracker that's available to our members. And so you can log in and see that and see like all the different um, business bills that are coming down and kind of a summary of what they are and what they mean. Um, we are happy to kind of give an overview when we look at our business advisory council that we have. Um, one of the things that they're going to be tasked with, one of the things that we've kind of struggled with over the years is that there is so many bills that are coming through that it's hard to kind of keep up with all of them. Um, so we, of have shifted them a little bit to these are the bills that are coming down but which ones are we hearing from our business community are of the greatest concern and so we'll take some of that feedback from our local community as well as get a little bit of guidance from the state chamber and then ask our business council like how does how does this impact things get their feedback and then send that back to the legislator and bring their voice also to the state chamber. Another one is in the data space, we get a lot of different reports and there's so much different data that we kind of filter through and pick out the things that are going to impact our community the most. and we'll kind of put them together and, you know, we are working on a more meaningful way to have this committee look at some of those different reports and say, okay, what makes sense for you? Um, and, and push that out to our members. And then finally, um, there was a lot of, um, feelings around, um, when something happens at any level of government, businesses are going to tell you about it. And so we needed to kind of create, as we grew, we needed to create kind of a group that could take charge of those things. And so when we hear about issues, really at any level, they can then pull it together and say, this is why this is a problem and kind of compare and look at what do different cities or states do and how do they handle this? And this is kind of our recommendation that we can then pass along to Adam's team or you guys. This is an area that I firmly believe that duplicating the efforts of having BTAC and the chamber both make recommendations on policy isn't a terrible thing because ultimately the city staff can pull from both of them and figure out what is the best solution because we don't know all the inner workings of the city, but we can also that way make sure that the city is hearing from businesses through an independent organization that can speak freely.

Yeah, and on the BTAC front too, I mean, we were limited, I think, to 17 members or so. 15. 15 members. So, I mean, right there, there's a limitation on reach and knowledge base. And adding the chamber, we're diving into a network of hundreds, thousands, essentially, of potential data points that could be supportive. So, I appreciate that input.

Yeah.

Yeah, let's go to Martinez.

Thank you for the presentation. I do share your excitement about future roles and expansion of what the chamber can do. And I like appreciate the forward thinking. I think I'm just, you know, feedback you're asking what are some of the priorities. I really like the idea of the activation that Council Member Morris had on and that there's a lot of opportunities there. You know, all the ones you listed are fantastic. And I think that augments your events side of things. And then you mentioned there's the work that you've already gone on matching applicants with businesses. I think there's a lot of opportunities there because there's, you know, you're building trust within the community. You've already established yourself. And I think that could be a really good role. I don't know to what extent other chambers do that, but I'm very supportive of that. And then the one thing I would caution against is, you know, overlapping or overextending into services that the Alliance Business Center is providing. And I know there's a lot of excellent partnership that's going on right now. And I think that that can certainly grow, but I would just hate to see, you know, an overextension end up competing with each other. So that would be my only, you know, caution against, and I'm sure you're already aware of that, but You know those activation and labor market matching. I think those are great areas to go down and I think everybody around Thornton businesses and employees would really appreciate continue efforts on that.

Thank you. Council member bird.

Yeah, um, I'm gonna love notes. Um, Couple of things. One, thank you guys for coming out and speaking. Well, one, you didn't say a whole lot, but I appreciate it anyway. You know, I want to hit on a couple of different things. One thing is it's kind of interesting in the way that the slides and things were kind of presented. from at least since I've been on council, this is the first time an outside organization was using Thornton's slide deck and opened up with a Thornton team. It seems, because the tension is almost palpable, but the things that really kind of hit that I find kind of interesting. Councilman Morris mentioned one. I don't see this as a chamber versus city situation. I think of it more as an efficiency discussion. To Councilman Martinez's point, I do see that there's a lot of overlap there, but I think that We, as council members, should be able to look at this and take responsibility around the taxpayer dollars being spent efficiently and that all organizations are getting the same kind of opportunity to kind of go through that. Some of the things that stood out, Adam, during one of the first slides, you have a partnership slide on there. And you mentioned that we're paying out partnerships of $69,000 to some of the organizations that are there. It's interesting that we're kind of paying out these bigger partnerships when we have somebody in our backyard that we're only giving a fraction of that amount to. And I'm also curious if that comes out of the contractual services, because I was looking in the budget already. I didn't know where that's being deducted from. I think that as a model that we should explore more broadly is and I'm not going to put words in your mouth, is looking to see what opportunities we can move from the city and the taxpayers pay from this side of it to the chamber and what that level of endorsement and increasement would efficiently be able to be held. To your point, do I think that the chamber could do everything that Westminster is doing right now? maybe, but you're probably all going to hate it and you're all going to quit within a year. And I don't think that that's the best way to kind of approach it as an all or nothing situation. But I think that if we could offload some of that information, I think that's a good idea. I think that's maximizing value. I think that there's also value in the fact that being a third party entity, it kind of gives you insight and tools that we don't have from a government standpoint. um and also from a critiquing standpoint if the city does something the businesses hate they're not going to come tell us um regardless of what people believe in that sense they're going to be like no i'm just not going to say anything because i don't want you know future issues to be a problem so i think it helps to have a middleman in that situation um with all that being said uh the Organizations you put up for Longmont, Nevada, Westminster, they're providing a lot of service and kind of resources that are there. Do you see opportunities there that would be two or three responsibilities that would be easier for the chamber to take on in that time frame for us to start looking at now and kind of give us a rolling start towards some of those other areas?

Yeah, I think there are several different areas that I think we could be really impactful really quickly on a tight turnaround and others that would have to grow over time, right? So if we talk about events and activating communities and smart networking opportunities, those are in some ways we could go really quickly and activate communities by just moving an event from one neighborhood to another. and expanding on those opportunities. But then other things such as some of the work around workforce development and connecting businesses with students and businesses with employers, that is something that would have to grow over time, not necessarily because of a lack of capacity, just because it takes time to educate businesses and get school districts and everyone kind of moving in the same direction. So I would say from where we are today to where we could be next year We could take on a significant amount of events. That is something that we are very confident with. We already do a lot of events, and we could just shift and adjust. And that includes, again, activating different communities, as well as policy recommendations from all levels to you guys. And then... workforce, we do have some meaningful work that can be done pretty quickly. But that is something like that's more three year and then anything above that, we would just have to see what kind of that cost looks like, what our capacity looks like. We think about things like a shop local campaign that, you know, it just kind of depends on where the priority is and where we need to redirect staff and our expenses.

So With that, what kind of level of partnership do you think would be feasible in the sense of being able to kind of help push for that kind of delivery around areas? I ask in the sense that I know you don't have a direct number right off hand and you weren't coming to ask for money, but it's more of a should council look at it and say, hey, we're interested in shifting things around. To be honest with you, I don't see a $300,000 check coming to the chamber anytime soon. But what kind of true number would you actually be looking at?

I think that's really difficult to say without understanding some of the costs. One thing that we want to be very mindful of is if there's that conversation around shifting like who's responsible for what. So like, let's say for example, networking events, we wanna make sure that we can provide the same level of service to our businesses. And so what kind of investment is the city making in that space right now? What is it that we are capable of matching without additional investment from the city? And so that would just have to be, we would need more information before we can get you a solid number. What I can tell you is a great example of this is the state of the city where we were able to partner with the city and our school district partners to kind of bring the cost down for everybody and still provide a high value event. As a third party entity, we are allowed to accept donations and sponsorships. And so for example, all of our networking events are at no cost to the chamber. actually to the state. We've never been in the red for a single event that we have had. And so we try to utilize those partnerships, utilize the goals of organizations and businesses in our community to uplift the event as much as we can, while also keeping it affordable to our taxpayers and our community members.

You're speaking to my heart. The I guess another question I have, and this one's more for you, Adam, is do we know what we spend offhand on what the alliance, what we spend on the alliance side of things for a yearly cost right now?

We do have that. I'd want to get you better numbers. I can follow up with those numbers for sure. And I do want to address your question on the budget side. So we do have in our budget are the Fortinary Chamber of Commerce, Adams County Regional Economic Partnership, and the Colorado Hispanic Chamber. The other entities that we mentioned are in the Alliance Center budget as part of our contracted services area. So it's all in there for that $69,000.

So the Alliance is part of the $344,000 then? Yes, part of that.

And so it's all broken out in there. I just want to address that question. But yeah, I could give you the exact number. I'll just send you the line.

If it's something to the contractual, then I know that it's roughly $344,000, not the

But with that, because it's a high level view of that. So do we pay the Thornton Chamber the same as the Hispanic Chamber currently?

We do. Does the Thornton Chamber currently use any of the Alliance resources?

Um, we do not currently use any Alliance resources.

Okay. You had mentioned that the Hispanic Chamber uses the Alliance buildings and stuff monthly too. So, um, I think that from my personal opinion on this, you know, I think, I think we owe it to the residents to really look at an evaluation around diversifying some of the priorities and the workflow that's in place there. I think that there's a lot of overlap that can be alleviated and deduped by also sponsoring our local businesses in a way that clearly works because we see it from other cities around the area.

One more question from Council Member Moore. Actually, Algie's next. I'm sorry.

Thank you, Courtney and Juan, for the presentation and Adam. Obviously, great job. Great event at Red Point earlier today. First, we do have a restaurant week, correct? Or did?

We did once. We tried it out. One of the greatest things about being a smaller organization is we can move pretty quickly and be pretty nimble. It is something that we are...

aware of um restaurant week is a separate kind of entity on its own and so we've instead of trying to do it ourselves looked at what is okay so also you know i agree with councilman martinez about we don't want to overburden certain you know entities and also councilmember byrd as well um i am intrigued though i mentioned to you earlier courtney about well what in this list i would like and i've actually narrowed down some more I really like the employer council and policy councils thing. What would that entail? And then of course, cost, that's the other thing.

Yeah. So that's one of those areas that, you know, for us, it would be a relatively low cost thing that we could organize and put together. We already kind of have some of those councils. And so I think, you know, at some point there may have been a childcare, a formal childcare discussion as there's some work going on with Adams County and different jurisdictions. And so, you know, we've brought together childcare providers in the community and kind of taking their feedback. It'd be a similar just based on just different industries. And that is really just a time limitation of that kind of a time resource of staff. But yeah, Again, getting together employers of different industries, of different sizes, of different overall goals and impacts they want to have and getting a collective voice.

And some things we're already kind of doing, like the economic development collaboration, obviously, you know, the chamber in the city. So and then, you know, and then Drew mentioned the corridor activation, obviously. So we're doing a lot of good things already, but it's just what can we do better? And of course, you know, being, you know, respectful of what cost it would be. And that's all I have. Thank you.

Um, Councillor Morris. So looking at these questions, trying to stay focused here, top priorities, feedback for you. And I guess to also just say, like, I think it's actually really exciting that we're even having this conversation. So we have like our Our high-impact economic development team is out there hooking a jab and doing things. We have a young and growing chamber that wants to get involved and wants to get in the fight, so to speak. And ultimately, the residents and businesses are the ones that are going to benefit from this. and hopefully from this conversation. So from the three-year MOU perspective, I mean, basically really touching on is I'd love to see that incorporated somehow. And I understand, like, as a small, agile organization right now, like, you're not, hey, like, dump it all on me right now because we know that wouldn't work. But how to phase that over three years is actually really smart, as often the city's even, you know, that's how you're kind of structuring it, which is the strategy seems sound. But Yeah, to kind of reinforce, again, some of what's been said here. Business engagement and networking, I think is a really important thing that you guys are doing well, but that'd be a great priority to see shift even more so in terms of leadership role for the chamber. The business tension aspect, super important. And of course, community activation across the city would be amazing as an element of MOU. And then to reinforce again what I've said before, the policy recommendations, not just from the state, but what are we doing internally, right? Like, let's really dig into that. I know these discussions have been happening now for months and years, and we're trying to make progress towards that, but what can we do internally and how can, love to see you guys dig into that with us more, helping create some better policies so that we truly can become like the most business friendly, most business attractive city in the state. And that's what I would recommend.

Sounds good. And I think those are all doable things that we can work towards and with, the partnership we have with the economic development staff and other departments. I do think it's important to note that we partner with more than economic development. We've been really grateful to have support from multiple departments across the city, including like Parks and Rec and our police department. And so we're always looking at how to expand to support the city as a whole, not just with the amazing economic development team. And I think these areas of focus allow us to kind of do that as support goals in a broad sense.

I've got a whole list of notes. I don't know. It looks like it was doodled. It does kind of look like a doodle from a distance. This was really good feedback. I think it's, maybe to echo your point, Council Member Morris, you know, we are excited to, as the chamber continues to evolve, or continues to evolve, see how we can evolve together and continue to complement each other. on the services that we're providing and then making sure, number one, that we are doing what's best for our business community as we continue to grow. And so we are focused on continuing to work with it. That's what's so exciting about kind of this forward-thinking approach of this three-year MOU is we're not looking at We're not looking at just next year one-offs. We're looking at where do we want to go with some of these things. And so this is a good feedback. We'll incorporate this. And as we have our discussions, I don't want to cut anybody off if there's other thoughts.

Are there any other questions? All right. Well, thank you for the presentation. Thank you, guys. Thank you so much. Okay. Next, we have housing strategy and program assessment. scope of work review.

Jessica Prosser, Assistant City Manager, is coming forward. I know we've got some members of our Community Connections, Community Programs teams in the audience as well. Just a reminder, as a part of your budget consideration last year, the Council initiated through discussion a change to the recommended budget, and we included funding to assess our programs, our funding, our relationships and kind of connection regionally and the way that we approach housing and human services. And also, you know, where we fit in terms of the, you know, how we prioritize programming. and our staff. So really thinking about, you know, what are we funding? What's the work that we're engaging? And then how did that work fit within our community and intergovernmental systems? And so there was funding allocated last year. Jessica Prosser, now that she's got her feet under, has worked with staff to put together a proposed scope in terms of what that would look like. So before we went out for a solicitation, we just wanted to touch base with the council to make sure that there was alignment so we're not asking for formal approval tonight there's more work to get this uh finalized on this on the street but we do want to just check in at this moment to make sure that um it appears that the scope of work we've put together is aligned with the policy objectives that have been identified from the council so that'll get the floor to jessica thanks tansy um good evening mark van for town and council um

Just kind of, as Sandy mentioned, the purpose of tonight is really to just review a draft scope of work before we put out an RFP to look for hopefully a consultant or a team of folks to come in and help us do a strategy. So I want to review that scope of work, some of the outcomes we're looking to get out of this, tie some pieces together of things you've been hearing about, and then the timeline as well for moving forward. So again, this is coming out of the strategic plan in multiple areas, really tying together some of those parts and pieces around housing. I've had the opportunity to kind of come in with fresh eyes, talk with multiple departments. look at several policy documents, see where there's some gaps and see the opportunities for tying some of this together. So really around housing choices is something that comes out of the strategic plan, some development review process improvement pieces, looking at some of our priority areas and engagement, looking at how we have attainable and affordable housing, and really looking at homelessness specifically and how we plan for that and support that. Those are all components of the strategic plan, things we hope to touch on throughout this process. So again, this is looking at a housing and homelessness strategy, which ties some of those policy documents together. This will be some of the main point of contact for the housing choice initiative that's come to council several times in the past couple of months, more of the programmatic components of that. Some of the code changes have already come forth and more will be coming and really providing a policy framework, much like you have a comprehensive plan and then you have a parks and open space master plan or a transportation master plan that flows from that comprehensive plan or strategic plan, more of that policy document. As I mentioned, there's several policy documents that speak to housing and homelessness. I've listed some of those in the first bullet point there. Some of those are HUD documents that are required. Some of them are required components by the state now with housing needs assessment and things like that. I think really we need to define our role as what is Thornton's role in housing and homelessness in some of these community programs. We want to tie together again some of the things the spot groups are working on in the strategic plan. Looking at things like how do we define housing? How do we define naturally occurring affordable housing? Sometimes mobile homes are included in that or market rate housing, but it is older, maybe class C sort of apartment pieces. An evaluation of the current programs that Community Connections offers We also offer programs in some of our, you know, city development utilities. Those are things offered to lower income individuals. I think really looking at what's the current, what are the current programs that we offer? What are some of the outcomes we're seeing? Where are some of those gaps? What is some of the community feedback that we're hearing? You all have brought up some of those things like we don't have eviction prevention programs specifically as brought up or Why are we focusing over here versus over here? So some community stakeholder and engagement impact on folks that utilize those programs, some of our key partner nonprofits that also utilize those programs is important. We've heard feedback as well on streamlining funding applications and application requirements for those, not just from the individual, but also from nonprofits, from developers that utilize our programs. Looking at what's effective resources that we have dedicated towards homelessness. Again, looking at that regional approach of Are we duplicating efforts that key nonprofits are offering, that the county is offering from a human services space to a housing space? Identifying, again, where can Thornton be most helpful in closing the gaps and meeting the needs of our community? So we are participating in a regional conversation that Adams County is leading around homelessness. I'll be participating in that from kind of a policy and leadership level. So that is important, as well as talking with our other you know, partner jurisdictions up in this part of the metro area, and again, nonprofits. So we want to identify also the current funding that we have going towards housing and homelessness. I listed some of those there that we already have. We have private activity bonds. We have some HUD funds. We have things like the TAF funds. Really pulling those together and going, what's the highest and best use for some of these fundings so we're not duplicating things in multiple programs and multiple efforts. Research options for additional funding. Some of that might be funding that we already have. Things like opioid funds. And then further looking at things like revolving loan funds, impact fees, dedicated sales tax, you know, those are kind of a large spectrum of things of how do we get new money to implement initiatives around housing and homelessness. And then again, continue with the implementation of the Housing Choice Project, which I mentioned earlier. So the outcomes really reflect things coming out of the scope, right? I'm not going to go through all of these, but really we want to come back with things like a toolkit for how do we incentivize affordable housing in the community? Can a developer fill out one application that would go for private activity bonds and, and CHFA at the state level as well as CDBG. So they're not having to fill out multiple applications for the same thing. We've had, you know, developers coming to us and saying, Hey, We want to have reduction in our impact fees. That's come forth with the housing choice. How do we have sort of a palette of options there? What are the programs that we should be offering? As I said, And really, I think the most important piece that I've seen is sort of establishing these uniform metrics and targets to track implementation and success. And so right now we have a lot of disparate programs with a lot of different outcomes, different levels of reporting and hard to say really, are we being successful in this space with meeting the needs of the community, closing the gap, adding additional housing options in the community. So that's what we would see some of those outcomes being So the next steps, again, as Tansy mentioned, the, uh, funding for this is within the, uh, CIP plan for this year. Um, looking to release an RFP in July, hopefully have some proposals back in selection by early fall with a consultant to get started in anticipation of this work done in early 2027. I do want to note there is some, um, possibilities for leveraging some of this funding. We have talked previously about some grants through Prop 123 that we have. We may be able to offset some of this $150,000 with that and then be able to have some additional money for some implementation of some of these things. So hopefully hoping to not spend all of the $150,000 just on consulting, but using some of this for actual implementation. So with that, happy to take any questions. Just really wanted to have a touch point with many of you, as I know this has been an important topic before we put out the RFP, but just looking for any feedback on kind of the scope at this point, high level, and looking for your recommendation to move forward with releasing an RFP in the next few weeks.

Council Member Morris.

Thanks, Jessica. Very great to see this. I love hearing about, like, we're looking at duplication of effort internally. organizationally, and then with nonprofits in the community, they're doing similar work. So looking at the outcomes, one thing I don't see in here is, is there an outcome that we're, are we looking to reduce costs by removing duplicate efforts? Is that an acceptable outcome based on like kind of where we're headed with this?

It could be. I'm hoping more in the not asking for as much new money to support some of these initiatives, but more effectively using the funding that we have and structuring it to actually meet the needs, which may mean reducing the number of programs or not offering as much in one area with another opportunity. So maybe more bang for our buck with something like the TAF program where we are offering money to nonprofits by being able to see the outcomes more effectively.

Thank you. And so my ask, and maybe this can be a consensus or not, but could we add something, language around that in the outcome so that we know that that is an important thing that we want to look at? Say like, can we explore that? Are there opportunities to reduce costs or create efficiencies? I don't know where that would fit in that category, but I think the budget element should be a priority. So curious what anybody else thinks.

Well, yeah, I do think it's something we want clear direction on. I think it would take the scope of the study in a very specific way. I think if we if that was more broadly spoken about, you know, opportunities to optimize revenues. I think we, we see this as a more flexible set of recommendations that regardless of whether the council wanted to make new investments. or to reduce investments, it would help guide either of those decisions.

And so. That totally makes sense. And I guess what I'm asking for is that we don't really talk about that in the outcome.

Right.

So maybe even just some language around that. So we just remember like, oh, yeah, we're still looking at that. Yeah.

That's my answer. One of the things I think would be a really good HAB-Jacques Juilland, outcome or or assessment that we can try to come from this is. HAB-Jacques Juilland, I would love to know numbers around what we currently have zoned or what we currently have in the city regarding housing choices that are there. HAB-Jacques Juilland, If you try to do any kind of searching there's there's no. finite number to say there's this many high density properties in Thornton or there's this many, you know, mid density or single family. It makes it very difficult to understand the numbers and the metrics when we're like, well, we need more housing, right? But do we need more high density housing? Do we need more single family housing? Like we don't know the actual numbers. So to have that kind of versatility in that. And then also for long-term strategic planning to be able to know, You know, one of the things that I hear the most from residents is, you know, and I know everybody else here hears it too. We need more sit down restaurants. We need these things. Well, those things are all dependent on what commercial zone they're sitting on. Because, you know, Olive Garden is not going to build themselves in front of King Soopers because you're not going to King Soopers parking lot to go to a restaurant. You're going to buy groceries. Or if you come out of an Olive Garden, you're not going to be like, I just spent $200 in here. I could have went in there and bought a whole month's worth of groceries. So restaurants tend to avoid those type of commercial properties. So to understand what availability and kind of mapping we have around that kind of helps us look at it from a long-term strategic plan and go, hey, you know, we don't have any Class B commercial properties, and that's why we don't have any restaurants. That's why we don't have the kind of things that are there. So we need an idea around what we have and what we are strategically looking at would give us a better plan to understand our initiatives going forward with that.

Okay.

Thank you.

Council Member Martinez? Yeah, I think that's a good point from Council Member Byrd, and I would encourage everybody to revisit the housing needs assessment that we do every few years. The latest one, I believe, was 2024. Is that correct? And that does really lay out with quite a bit of granularity the spectrum of different shortages on housing. So when it comes to housing, high density, medium density, low density, single family, it does break it down also through rental versus ownership. So I'm glad that that was mentioned as one of the factors that you're using. I think you mentioned that earlier on the slide. But the commercial side is the missing piece. I don't think that's included in the housing needs assessment. But it is an important tool and it does help drive you know, my understanding at least of where we are in terms of housing shortage and what kind of product we need and how to, you know, stabilize that imbalance in the market and the affordable or attainable housing, whatever you'd like to call it. I do want to say thank you for the presentation. I think it is a nice holistic plan that you've put together. And I think that... You know, I guess my one point comment I wanted to make, another thing was about the senior side of things with the Dr. Koch boomer bond reports. And just for those who aren't aware, boomer bonds actually is not what it sounds like. We hear it, you feel like it's like a financial instrument for boomers. That's what I thought it was. And it has always been. But it's not that at all. That's actually... A little a little summary is it's a it's like an assessment tool to determine you know where we are specific kind of like a housing needs but started it for. Older adults, and I think that that element does need some specific attention, especially you know what we kind of. kind of goes well with what we heard, but we had a small presentation. We have an aging population, and if we're going to be forward-looking on these kinds of things, we want to kind of zoom in on that particular challenge that we're going to have, because it is new territory. As Thornton grows and evolves, we're going to have, you know, one in four people across the whole metro area is going to be 60 or older. That's going to be true in Thornton also, and so that's going to present a whole new set of, I think, special circumstances because it comes to things like, you know, service like Meals on Wheels or services like transportation that we've heard about, or even, you know, what's the balance of assisted living, nursing home, like those kinds of facilities as well. So that would be my feedback. I do think that we should uh go with the recommendation and any added things would be really to kind of zoom in on that um older adults so we can be strategic about what we know is coming our way council member algae yes thank you man report uh great presentation jessica and and great work and uh you know obviously i i share council member martinez's sentiment on that on

Active adults, I am the one boomer up here. But, yeah, that's very important to ensure that we have the attainable housing for our senior population as well. We have a great active adults center. Obviously, we don't have that in place, but still we need the housing to go with that. So I definitely support this tonight. Also, I like also the evolving the current homelessness programs offered in Adams County. Of course, I know they cut some at the beginning of the year. And of course with your work in Aurora as well. So that's definitely another priority that we need to make sure of is to continue to address the homeless situation. Myra's doing great work with the HOT Team obviously as well. That's it. Thank you.

Is everybody okay with the recommendation? Thank you for the presentation. Great. item we have tonight for our briefings is the next step with the Thornton Assistance Fund recommendations.

And this is me, and you're actually going to get a break from PowerPoint. We almost always have a PowerPoint. You do have a memo in your presentation, purposely no PowerPoint. And ultimately not intending for this to be a substantive conversation. just wanted to get some clarity on next steps and sort of concurrence on direction. So you did have on your council meeting agenda on Tuesday night, the recommendations from the Authority Assistance Funds Committee regarding the TAF allocations that got pulled for additional direction from the council. And so in the memo, there were identified several different next steps or pathways that could take And frankly, we just wanted to support the council and whatever that might look like. So some of the options that were outlined in is just an informational session for the council to get any additional discussion or clarity on the recommendations. At this point, I think staff has provided all of the documentation that is available from the sort and assistance funds committee process. We certainly could invite the TAF members back to discuss that in greater detail. But again, I think at this point you have the documentation that staff has access to from that process. Ultimately, we could work with the council on a process the council wanted to revisit And I know there was some discussion about reallocating funds across organizations. We could support the council in some kind of process. If the council wanted to do that, again, we'd need a little bit more direction from you on what support you need or expected from staff in that. the council could direct those recommendations back to the Thornton Assistance Funds Committee with some additional criteria or direction. I do know that in our work with the Thornton Assistance Funds, I think they feel confident in their process and their recommendations. So I do think if HAB-Juliette Boone, You're going to refer those recommendations back to TAF, it would be helpful, I think, for them to have some specific expectation direction from the Council and that the next option was again. HAB-Juliette Boone, Asking the staff to do some kind of analysis. or make some kind of recommendation again, I think we would want direction from the council about what your expectation was on that. And the last option was, again, to adopt the recommendations as made to TAF. Again, I think in prior presentations, I think we have spoken about potential opportunities to refine the priorities and the criteria, the funding process in future years. I think you've heard in greater detail, you know, the broader scope of what that would look like. So as it says in the memo, I don't think these options are mutually exclusive, but particularly if, you know, you wanted the TAF to be involved in some way, we would need to coordinate with those members around scheduling and get that scheduled. So ultimately just want to make sure that we are meeting your expectations in terms of whatever the next step might be.

Before we get into some questions and ideas, when do we typically like talk about the reset for the next year's TAF? When does that usually come into the conversation?

Yeah, it's usually been the appointment. Generally, you've done the appointments in the setting of priorities in the same time frame. Last year that happened in January is when you adopted the priorities, also appointed the members. And so we haven't set up a timeline for next year's process, but I suspect that that's been generally kind of a similar timeframe in the past.

All right, Chris, you had questions first.

My question is, well, I wasn't here. I apologize. I wasn't in person. So I didn't get to have some conversation with the other council members. But I guess what might be helpful for me is understanding the motivation to bring it back. And if there was something specific, and I know, I think it was Council Member Bird that Made the request, so if you could. Give us some insight as to what it is particularly about the process or the recommendation. That we should be talking about so that we don't spend a lot of time going in circles about the whole process, or maybe others that aren't even really relevant, but help us understand what we could. discuss or do better to bring this back, because it is stalling some funding that I know is critical to these nonprofits. But if you want to have the discussion, I think it helps us to know more specific about what part of it is what you're looking to discuss.

So a couple of things. One, it's disappointing the fact that we voted specifically because I said that there are several questions that need to be brought up and answered regarding the TAF process and kind of what was going through that. And that this isn't really what was being asked. We were being asked to actually ask questions about the questions that were being brought forward. So to answer your question, the committee handed over a process document that said that they follow the scoring system, and then they gave us some smaller criteria that was up under there. I have, 38 questions regarding those. So we can fire away at those now if we want. But there's several different issues that come up with the scoring system and the process that was in place. So one, the committee scored and ranked every applicant. What was the expectation around funding the recommendations? And was it based on those rankings? Because if so, That didn't happen. If the scores were not primarily a deciding factor, then what was part of the primary factor that was in there? Because one of the terms that was used in the criteria was uniqueness. Uniqueness of services. I'm curious around that if If the applicants knew that they were going to be denied because they weren't unique, if that was part of the application process, then that's how they're being scored. And how is uniqueness measured? That's a very objective situational ask. When it comes back to the scoring, there are several organizations that paid significantly higher than others that got funding, whereas these organizations did not get funding. One of which, for instance, was the Neighbor Outreach of Colorado. They scored 137, which tied for one of the highest scores in the program. They got zero funding. The maker one, the Low Income Family Empowerment, another 137. Zero funding. There were others. The Legacy Christian Fellowship, 134. They ranked fifth in the food category as far as scoring, and they got nothing. Reaching Hope scored 121, and they're based here in Thornton. and they were overseen by somebody who scored 103. So the scoring factors are a very big concern. And again, like I said, I have 38 questions. I can go through a lot of these. The scoring wasn't the only problem. There's also very clear evidence that, specifically in one case, where an individual intentionally scored everything as ones on a specific entity. And that's fine. But it doesn't correspond with other ones, which goes to look at it and say, this is a bias issue. Because nobody else scored anywhere near that. They were scored by fives and fours and threes by other individuals. So it was a very blatant, I don't want this organization to get funded. What's the process that we put in place to restrict that kind of things from happening? Because you can do that in both ways. If you have a charity and I give it all fives, now all of a sudden it jumps somebody that may or may not get that funding.

I was still answering your question.

I haven't even asked that many questions. Oh, I thought you did ask. I was writing your questions down. There's lots of different situations that brought forth the reasoning. And it's the reason why the ask was specifically to go, there were concerns about the way that the funding was allocated. And I have significant questions And those questions need to be answered before we write a $315,000 check to charities. And I don't think that that's an unfair situation. We have organizations that got a 275% increase. Why? We have organizations that got a 662% increase. Why? And I don't expect to ask all these questions to Tansy because Tansy doesn't know. That was a tough decision. But I think that's the situation of there's lots of... scoring problems that are being laid out that we're just supposed to accept and just sign off on it. But based on the data, none of it makes any sense.

It's a great question, so I would... Council Member Morris?

Yeah, and again, our intent again tonight was not a substantive discussion or a decision, but feedback on next steps. So to the point, we could certainly facilitate with TAF members to attend a future meeting to answer questions. We could facilitate a process to send questions to TAF members You know, to try to answer those. But again, staff aren't going to be able to speculate what drove individual members to make, you know, individual scoring things or the collective to make recommendations.

I don't expect the staff, I think that this is, staff is going based off of what they were told that the recommendations were. And that's great. And To the point of, yes, there are organizations that are in need of the funds and everything's going through that. I don't doubt that at all. What I also have concern with is there's lots of organizations that are also needing that money that scored higher. So why didn't they get it?

I think those are great questions. I would say since you do have a longer list, would it be appropriate for that list to be shared with council and you the staff and then they start answering some of those and then whatever's left over taft does come back and i mean the bias where one you know individuals that is a really good question but i think there's only one person that can answer that so maybe getting those questions out to staff and their blind sighted if we don't know what it is specifically we should be looking at. So I think it's great research on your end. I think there was good points.

I think that's an unfair situation because you're not blind. You get the same data I did.

Blind in terms of it wasn't brought up prior before the recommendation when TAP was in front of us. So that research was done afterwards. Yeah, because I wasn't here. Okay, well.

Also, the information wasn't given to us until after. That was good.

It wasn't given until I asked for it. Yeah, I do remember the separate email for that. So I guess blind would be a bad word choice, but after the fact would be a more accurate word choice. So you're bringing good concerns, and I agree with you. But until we get a more, a deeper look at that, before we have to come back with that, with that. Like, yeah, I'm curious, because like I said, the one where you said the bias and the ones like that does seem a little lot, but I don't know the why. And I think there's only one person really that can answer that. But they're not here either. So it would be really helpful to have that.

And then if we raise those concerns, I think it brings up concerns going forward to Roberta's question earlier is that there clearly needs to be a change in the process and how things are being evaluated and looked at. Because For example, we have an organization that last year we gave like $8,000 to. I don't have the exact number in front of me. This year they asked for $103,000. And you're like, okay, well, how do you get a $100,000 difference than what was there last year? And if you're not looking at the numbers in front of you at the exact time, somebody goes, well, they asked for $100,000, let's give them $30,000. But that was still a 400% increase over last year's.

I think the answer to that is I know some of the previous council members, they had talked to some of the nonprofits and they told them, you know, you can't ask for more. And they were being modest in their asks. So that might be a bad answer. I might actually know. And I don't know which one you're talking about. It was there. If I know of other council members for you were serving. That said, you know, ask for more and you get what you get. But if you ask for 10, you know, you might only get eight, ask for 25 and you get 20. And so that breakdown I know is probably part of the process stuff that needs to be looked at. So and that's just maybe the the applicants didn't know.

Yeah. So also, I mean, like, as part of the process, outlying what is an appropriate ask because you could just ask for crazy numbers and be denied that and then we start having these weird feelings throughout. these communities of people thinking, well, I asked for this and I didn't get it. It just, it seems like a really weird practice just to be like, ask for. Yeah.

An implication of access amount would be like 25. Yeah. Everybody. And then we can actually spread that 300, maybe more across other nonprofits.

So I live technically about the fact that you don't bring just problems to the table. You also bring a solution with it. So I have ideas around that too. When we get to that point of change the process idea around it, but yeah, I think based on just like I said all of these different questions there's significant amounts of data that just doesn't make sense, based on the fact that the sheets that were given to us that said, this is how things are being evaluated and then we look at the data you're like no it's not.

I was I was speaking with tansy earlier in preparation for this meeting, and one of the things that. came to mind to me was like challenges we had on tashko and it wasn't really like. necessarily that it just came down to having like a good skeleton to put the meat onto and I think that's kind of the challenge we have with TAF right now is like there aren't very the parameters might need to be more honed and crafted by staff and maybe managed a little bit better so we don't have these outlying biases and data discrepancies that are just making things look really kind of like willy-nilly picked. Like that's kind of what, and I think like, you know, Council Member Byrd has the mind for that kind of stuff. And then having served on a board, like if we work together, we can probably come up with some, you know, some better processes for the future. But I think when we're looking at this specific situation now, kind of what you said, Chris, is like, let's get the questions out to council. And then I guess we can look at bringing TAF back to answer some of these questions because ultimately when we vote on this and when it's approved, we're going to have to answer to discrepancies because these have already been out in the community. The can of worms is open. People know they're going to start looking if they want to look at that stuff. And the fact of the matter is, is that there's pretty interesting discrepancies in how these things were judged. So, oh, sorry, Boris.

Great conversation. Great. I mean, the great, great back and forth. I guess to answer your question and just get feedback on my thoughts on why I wasn't supportive of bringing this tap discussion back to a planning session is one, I mean, You know, we can't forget that our responsibility as council is to, you know, approve funds. These are taxpayer funds. And so it's okay if we have questions. It's okay for us to ask these things. I think the public expects that. And I think the last thing we want to do is just blindly accept things as they are. If we see an issue and our gut says that or our past experience on other boards and serving those capacities, causes us to want to ask questions, we should do it. So that's one thing is that we know the encouragement to the council to continue to do this. And I would say it's not unusual for a council to go against the recommendations of press boards, Tashko being one of them. So we're not setting a new precedent here. And to say that we are to act like we are is ridiculous. So let's not let that be a part of the conversation. What I will say, though, why I wanted this discussion or I'm in agreement with the discussion continue to happen is, you know, we set a priority as a council to how the money should be doled out to nonprofits. And we talk a lot about homelessness. We talk a lot about needing housing. And we had a great opportunity to set a priority for TAP funding towards homelessness and housing. And when I saw those results come back at not being the number one funded category, but seeing it as number three category, I said, OK, something's wrong here. First of all, what's the point of us giving a priority? Because we're reflecting the words and what we're hearing from the community. So TAP didn't reflect our priorities, first of all. Housing and homelessness, again, a topic that we all care about. And there's all kinds of challenges around it. We had the opportunity to fund the most, the highest category there, and we did. And so a nonprofit that helped, what, 42 Thornton residents last year.

And it was over 18,000.

And they only asked for 18,000 last year. They received zero funding this year. And so to me, that makes zero sense. We're hamstringing ourselves as a community to serve more Thornton residents than when we're telling a nonprofit who served us last year who wants to serve us again in a greater capacity, we tell them no. It doesn't make sense. So when I look at this, my recommendation would be, sure, we need this change in the process. And they're saying that this is impossible, but I would say let's shift the numbers so that priority number one gets funded like priority number one. And that's what I would like to see.

Well, I have that process, too. I can bring it up whenever we're here.

Perfect. So that would mean for those that qualified, Um, yeah, in, in the housing and homelessness, like give them what they asked for. Um, and then we, we kind of divvy out the remainder based on the priorities. So the lowest priority category, based on council direction, should have the least amount of funding. And I know that in some worlds, there might be a close match because the amount of funding requested just doesn't match. It's not the highest amount. I get that. But in this case, we did have that. And so we do have the ability to make that decision. And I think we should. So I'll leave it at that. I think priority number one should be housing. homelessness category and that category should be the highest funded category of all. Here we go.

So let me just mirror back what I think I heard is, and I know Council Member Byrd has some specific questions. I guess if there are others that have specific questions, the goal is to share those with the council can understand. the scope of the issues at question, and then at some point bringing TAF in to speak with the council to be able to address some of those questions. Do you all want to connect again to discuss those questions and sort of make a plan of what that engagement with the TAF is? Or again, we can begin scheduling members of the Thornton Assistance Funds to be here at a future meeting again, you know, to reiterate, I mean, I agree that this is.

I don't need to count. If they answer my questions via the stuff that I send over, great. I don't need to have a whole other meeting set up for that process. Because to the point, we do want to get this money out to the charities as soon as we can. But I want to do it in a fair and equitable way. Like the transparency around the way it was done is inadequate at best. So if they want to answer the questions in that sense, then we can come back and go, hey, great. That's awesome. If council wants to move forward, I have a different proposal we can do on that is we go based off of scoring. And council can make it, we can just do the recommendations that way if you guys want to do that way and skip the whole process on it. But I don't think that blindly accepting the recommendations is the right path.

The only pushback I would have on just going by the scoring would be, kind of housing is a priority, then we would see more go there and maybe they didn't score the highest. So then that, I don't know how we would address that. Those two conflict, but I get what you're saying.

They don't conflict because I actually have a solution for that too. We have four categories around what we want to done, which is the four categories that are there. You can level each priority category based on percentage of the total amount of budgeted money. So we have $314,000. We say that housing and homelessness is the number one priority. You give that 35% because it's going to be the largest amount. That comes out to $110,000 roughly. Then you take that and you divide that based on the scoring system that's there for that housing category. So you can break those down. There are other caveats within that that I put into my idea around everything, which is if you score below 100, you don't get paid because in that case, that was a really bad score. Now, in the case of what Drew was pointing out for the specific charity and the one that originally made me look into everything as well, they would be excluded from this, which I don't like in the system in this way, but that's something we would have to address because of the way that this person scored everything. The Each category would essentially get its own specific amount of number of that payment amount. There's other criteria around how much that person can get. If we gave you $20,000 last year, you can't request 200 this year hoping that you're going to get $80,000 because the top three get $80,000 because they get fully funded. There should be limitations and increased adjustments that would be in place for that so that all the money can still be allocated out appropriately. So somebody doesn't come in and ask for $110,000, we give them $110,000, now seven other organizations don't get paid. So there's a whole different methodology around kind of doing that way that helps equally distribute all the money out in a manner that nobody could come back and be like, there's bias here outside of saying a specific score was bias because otherwise everything else is just, it's all percentages and data.

So I have a follow-up then. So given that we're in this process right now and it sounds like we're discussing a lot of changes Are we considering or talking about applying our new scoring to the current applicants? Or would that be something rolled off the next year and this year we would just have to have discussion and decide? Because I think, I don't know if time would allow us to go back and then create this new system for scoring, rescore everything and then try to get the funds out.

That's a good question. Can we get Council Member Martinez's question answered and then we can come back to that?

Yeah, so I do appreciate this discussion. Lots of good questions here. I think that I would first, my preference would be to have TAF come in here and answer some of these questions or have participated in this conversation to see if the context from their process that they did can add to the data that they sent us to help answer these questions and maybe alleviate these concerns. I think that at the very least, we should provide them that opportunity and provide the rest of the city to listen in have that opportunity to hear how TAF not only went through their process, but the whole context behind it. Because I do think the questions are very good. And I'm very curious to know what TAF says. I think we should do that before we start down the path of any restructuring or redevelopment of the whole process. My question to staff is really about the history of how TAF process of scoring, got to where it is today, how it evolved over time, because the way I understand it, it wasn't something that just was decided upon and was static and set in stone. It has changed over the years, understanding how and why it has changed would also help guide us if we did want to change these These parameters and that if we do feel like we're not satisfied with the answers that the TAF board gives us that we could start, you know, coming up with a methodical way that we could work together as a digital staff and the taft board to um to make the changes that would be necessary based on our concerns um i think that would be more inclusive it would provide additional perspectives beyond the council and um it would also give staff more time to prepare and to put together all the different pieces, historical contexts, and also the TAF's angle of the whole thing. I think that would give us a much more defensible and methodical approach to redoing the TAF procedure. I do have the concern of, you know, holding up the funding awards in this cycle. And so I think before we make that decision, though, I think we I think the right thing to do would be to get Taff in here to attempt to answer some of the questions. And of course, I like the idea of sharing the questions around the council and maybe share them with Taff as well so they can all get on the same page. And yeah, I would just love to hear what they have to say.

If we're going to ask TAF to come in, I'm not going to share the questions with TAF.

Share with the council.

Well, that doesn't mean they're not going to get it. I think that that's not a fair assumption. You don't get some of the tests before you ask them the questions. I think that if they're going to come in, then I want to hear their actual raw responses, not something that they're preparing. We're not studying for a test. I want the raw, honest response when it happens.

Well, that's fair enough. come in have the opportunity to answer the questions um to the best that they can and that would really help inform me on you know what uh what to do next because some of their their contextual you know issues that they've had to make this to make these decisions councilor salazar i think that at this point we should go ahead and offer the money because there's a lot of people that are hurting

You know, one of the things was the $5,000 for the daycare. I mean, that is a wraparound that's going to create people to be homeless because they're not paying their daycare bills so they can't have a job. I don't think that we should continually hold this up. I think it's a detriment to our people. I know that the people in South Florida, they're hurting. They don't have salaries like you do. You know, we hear about this every day about how they're hurting. We need to do something for them.

I agree.

Okay, so why are we holding?

Because somebody demanding money doesn't mean we just jump at the opportunity.

The question is, how many hours were put into this decision? How many hours did TAP work on?

Yeah, we can try to get both some additional information about the process and the evolution of the process over time. To answer the question, it is a lengthy, it's a very big time commitment of the TAF process. And again, I don't want to represent their work on behalf. My best understanding, and I think it is an accurate statement that there was scoring by individual They broke into groups. It's a lot of applications to review. And so there were different teams that reviewed and scored different elements. I do believe that they recognized within their own conversations as they started to review variances across different allocations because each member was using their own judgments to rank those. And I do think through sort of their anecdotal conversation. They tried to even the understanding of the comparative scores. And I think that's why their recommendation did deviate some from the raw scores. That's my best understanding as, you know, through the conversation. They use the scoring as a guide, but then use collective discussion to try to do that. Again, I don't want to represent for the TAF that piece, but the TAF members do read the applications. They also hold interviews with the individual agencies to learn. more about their operations and to address concerns. We can certainly try to characterize what the process has been over time to the degree that it's documented. I have a short window of my own experience of what that has looked like purposely, the council appointments so that there are experienced members of the TAF that continue each year. So there are returning members and new members in each evolution cycle. I do think that there has been large latitude to the TAF committees to design their evaluation process based on the preferences of the committee. I do think it because they have members that have come from the prior evaluation cycle. I do think that my understanding is they typically, I've attended a TAF meeting where they talked about how they were going to approach it. And I think that was last year. And I do think they sort of iterated on some of the practices in the year before. I do think I just want to reiterate some of what I've heard in the conversation. Again, I think there's two pathways here. the consideration of the recommendations that have already been made, and then the development of the process for next year. One of the things that I think I'm hearing from the, as potentially sort of consensus direction to the staff, I do think it's been a relatively hands-off staff technical process. I think the TAF committee has largely designed the process and done the evaluation. I don't think there's been a lot of, I think that the staff has helped convene the meetings and to make sure that the process can be documented, but I don't think there's been a lot of technical assistance in designing rubrics or helping with technical evaluation. What I'm hearing from the council is that there'd be an openness and interest in looking at what that might look like to give some additional technical support to the TAF, potentially some more documented rubrics and criteria going forward. So I appreciate that clarity. I think that will help in the assessment that we're doing to make sure that we can anticipate years that do that. We have a question.

We'll have the follow-up. Okay. Also, that night Fran Ways was here. How did she get here? And did we offer, if she took an Uber, did we offer to take her back in an Uber and pay for it because of the cancellation of the meeting? Or the cancellation of the TAF fund and that's why she was here?

The TAF fund is not funded until the council votes on it. And we voted 6-3 not to fund it at this time. but it didn't get funded. So the fact that you're trying to push that we have to pay for somebody's Uber doesn't make any sense.

Okay, Akunto has a question.

It was less of a question. Just that, I mean, I agree with Council Member Morris and Council Member Byrd. I also don't think we should just give some, an organization money if we're not 100% clear or confident on the scoring criteria. It hurts more people to, throw away money than it does to take the time to look at something thoroughly. So I'm in agreement with bringing this forward, at least asking the questions and hearing the responses to the questions that need to be asked.

I wanted to just interject and say Excuse me, I spent some time looking at the chart that was with the packet and I believe you all have received additional data since then. But it does appear that seven organizations didn't get any funding when someone scoring less than them did. So that's across the board. I will just say that with regards to housing, the top four all got funding and then the one that initially caused council members to want to look into it because they had received funding last year and didn't this year. They were the lowest scoring in housing and for health and medical, the top three received funding, but the fourth didn't. So I would encourage you to put whatever questions you feel comfortable giving to staff and to TAFSE to prepare in advance. um so like for example a question could be seven organizations got funding when they were outscored by someone else why was that and then they would have a chance to look into their notes see why that was um i would just caution against making it feel like taff is being here invited here for like a cross-examination as to the recommendations and that's it for me it sounds like what we have to move forward is that we invite taff back

to answer some of these questions, maybe more, and maybe more the way Erica explained. I'm not exactly sure we do that. But I have to have come back to answer questions. And then the second step was, you mentioned it, Justin, what was the second?

The second one was really just about, you know, making sure that I honestly don't know what the next step is because I need to hear what the TAF, what their responses are. I do agree with Erica, though, about how do we manage this without, you know, making it like they're being interrogated. They are volunteers. They have put a lot of time into it. I don't want to make them feel like, you know, they're criminals or whatever. That's probably the worst way to phrase it, but I think it's a delicate situation. That's all. And I do think we should ask the questions. Well, I don't really know how we can do that. Just something to be mindful of, I guess.

I think what we can do as counsel is kind of help staff, work with staff to create the parameters so that we don't have this happen in the future. Like, that's the big thing, right? Like, we want to all feel really confident when we vote on this that things are going in the direction they need to go. So... like working with our staff to make sure that like next year when TAF has this before them, they're not just working in little groups and creating, you know, things. And I understand what it's like being a board member myself for many years. Like you say, Oh, council, look at this beautiful thing. And they're like, you know, and you get upset. So I, you know, I understand what that's like. It is frustrating, but also it's, I also know that like we're elected officials here and we have people that need funding, but we also have people that want us to be responsible with that money. And I had somebody text me today and say, like, thank you for relooking at it because, you know, the city, the council members should be looking at this policy to make sure that it's done correctly. So. you know, there's two sides to the coin there. So I think let's just start with re-looking at it with TAF, and then we can have a discussion from there to see where we want to move over from there.

Yeah.

Go ahead, Doug. All right.

Thank you, Tansy. I'm sorry, Drew. Okay, sorry, Drew. Chaos is awesome.

Now I'm trying to remember what I was going to say. So to echo what you were saying, I think if we're kind of building this consensus here, I don't think that we improve the process at the next meeting or any meeting this year that has to do with current funding. So I would agree with that. I would say that at the TAF meeting, I totally echo what you're saying. This is not an inquisition or a cross-examination. It is a way to dig deeper and understand some things. I think at the end of that meeting, one of the objectives or one of the things that we could or we should look at doing is if we do want to reallocate funds, we should be able to do that in that discussion after we talk with TAF at the planning session. I assume it'll be at the planning session, right?

Yeah, I imagine just practically it would be difficult within that timeframe.

Okay, sure. So we do, we talk with them, we have the questions and conversation. And then we can determine, like, okay, do we as a council want to reallocate funds based on what we learned, or do we want to keep it the same? And then at that next meeting, we can get it approved so that there's no more, like, lingering after that.

Okay. We should just approve it.

Okay. Yes, as I did say, I partially makes comments, too, you know. And, yeah, I mean, Devin, I do agree with quite a few of your points. But, you know, I also agree with Council Member Martinez. You know, we should bring TAF in here. and be open-minded, but also not, you know, rake them over the coals either, you know. But with that being said, you know, in the future, I think we do need to look at the criteria for TAF and what goes about it. We're kind of in a conundrum, though, too. If we do criteria, then how can we do a scoring system? They kind of maybe don't mesh to me to a degree. okay, let's have the scoring, but then the criteria, what we want like this year, like homelessness, that's number one topic. Right. But then, you know, so, so I think it's important to bring Taff in here, you know, ask, you know, hard, but fair questions to them and, but yet not grill them. Cause I said, they, they do a great job, but still, nonetheless, we need to refine what either the scoring system or what the criteria is. And so that way in 27 on, we're not going to have this same discussion that we're, butting heads with each other about, you know, and Cherish does make a great point. Hey, you know, some of these nonprofits do need money now. The majority of them are fine, but these smaller ones, not so much. So we need to keep, need to bear that in mind. And with that, I will.

I do appreciate the compassion for the work that the Thornton Assistance Fund Committee does. It is very difficult work. And I do think to some degree, The more clarity they have and they work on behalf of the council and more clarity they have about the expectations from the council and the more clarity staff have about the expectations, we can set them up for success going forward. So I do think it would be unfortunate that sort of expectations that were not articulated ahead of time to the committee then they feel sort of caught unaware that there's sort of a specific standard or expectation about the way that they were going to do the work that was not articulated before they did that work. And I understand that.

I would argue that it's not that it's not in standard and it's there because the sheets that were provided to us that were provided to them specifically state there's a scoring methodology. They didn't follow the score. So we're not blindsiding them with like, hey, you didn't do something that we wanted you to do without telling you. We're literally saying this was the scoring chart. Why didn't you follow it?

Yes, and I think they'll be better able to speak to that. And my understanding that, again, is that there was critical discussion of the scoring and whether or not it reflected the concurrence of the group. And so I... but I can't speak on behalf of the staff.

Yeah. I just want to say just to finish up here, I think we have good next steps moving forward. Having worked for a nonprofit organization in the past, like the funding, it will get there. I think it's better that we do this with everybody being on the, on a good, in a good place rather than rushing it. And nonprofits are able to operate. They have, you know, HAB-Masyn Moyer- Funding in there that they can operate so it's it's it's better that I do think it's better that we take our time to make sure this is done properly and that. HAB-Masyn Moyer- we're properly, you know, looking at the scoring and and how it's done so that way in the future, we can all feel good about what we're doing here so all right um let's see here, we have other discussion items here board and committee updates Dr car Dr COG board work session.

Okay, I'll keep it short. There was a presentation on Front Range Passing the Rail. There's essentially two phases. The first phase, they say it's going to happen in 2029. Phase two is the one that requires a boat. And the technical details about how fast the trains are going to be and stuff like that. So then we could talk about some transportation improvement plans federal transportation dollars. That's not something that happens quickly. We just get periodic updates on where that's going. I mean, that's like the other extreme of grant awarding of how detailed you can possibly be. And then, yeah, that's pretty much most of the substance there. And then we don't have a Dr. Cogney this month due to CMO.

AND BUDGET COMMITTEE WAS THAT THE?

JUST A HANDFUL OF SMALLER CONTRACTS THAT WERE APPROVED. WE GAVE THE SECOND RECORD DIRECTOR AUTHORIZATIONS TO EXECUTE THOSE CONTRACTS. IF YOU'D LIKE THE DETAILS, I CAN PROVIDE THEM. BUT THEY WERE ALL IN THE $200,000 RANGE. PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST FEW MONTHS WE'VE BEEN DOING $50 MILLION APPROVALS FOR THE POWER Okay. Why don't we, let me pull up those notes and come back to me on that. Okay.

E470.

So E470 is in the process of, we just approved to have a total renovation done on the E470 building. and they're gonna be moving the employees down to Aurora and a makeshift campus for the next 18 months. But outside of that, there's other things that are coming, but I can't disclose now.

Okay, Dr. Cogg, Southwest Welk County Regional Staff Transformation Forum.

Yeah, that's all we ever do now is .

Dr. Cogg.

Okay.

Yeah, there's ADCOG and there's Dr. COG Southwest. Oh, I didn't. I didn't go there. But the ADCOG one was just the, the meat of it was the Adams County Commissioners doing their inline advocacy. Have we all heard that yet? We've heard some of it. I've heard it like three times. Basically, they're pitching a way to capture some of the FISA account from Fast Tracks Investments that is funding for the large part phase one of Front Range Passenger Rail. There's a statute that lets us grab some of that if we're organized and we have a plan. Adams County is putting together an advocacy plan that involves a regional transportation organization. And then they ask for our letter of support. So we are familiar with that. So we'll just do more of that.

All right. Any other council discussion items? All right. Well, we'll adjourn the meeting.