City Council - workshop

All right, it is 545, so we will go ahead and get started. I have not heard from Councilmember Acunto, so I don't know if someone wants to text him and make sure he's all right, make sure to see what's going on there, but we will start without him. Any questions on the agenda? All right, Tansy, anything from you?

I do have just one very brief update I wanted to give. Police Enviro will be collaborating on a joint update to the council, hopefully by the end of next week, just in terms of citation and fire activity over the weekend. But they were able to pull together some quick statistics. So did just want to share a little bit, know that both the council and the community, there was higher concern given drought and fire risk. So did just want to give a brief update So in terms of year over year, I won't go through all of these statistics again. You'll get a more full report. But when we compare last year or this year from a fire perspective, we did have 20 fire incidents between the third and the fifth. Ultimately, most of those were outdoor fires. So eight outdoor fires on the fourth and seven on the fifth. We had three structure fires on the third and one on the fourth. And then there was one vehicle fire. So again, that was the 20 fires over the three day period. They will get some historical information to the council too. So you can put that into perspective. in terms of what we've experienced in the past. But thankfully, again, few structure fires over the period. In terms of citations, and this is where I think the council was a helpful collaborator with the staff in terms of putting some new ordinance tools in place. We did have a pretty significant increase in citations from prior years. Again, still a difficult thing in terms of having manpower available for these calls for service. But in terms of calls for services, call for service was up from 2025. In 2025, we had about 220 calls for service. That was on the evening of July 4th. So from July 4th at midnight through July 5th at 4 a.m. So 220 calls for service in 2025. That increased to 292 this year. That was about a 30% increase. In 2025, we issued two citations. And in 2026, we issued 16. So that was a 700% increase in the number of citations that we were able to issue in terms of calls for service for that kind of longer period leading up when we do enhance patrols and communication. So that's June 27th through July 6th. We had 408 calls for service in 2025 that grew to 430. That was about a 6% increase. And again, in 2025, We gave nine citations in 2026 and 23 citations. So just over about 150% increase. They believe that at least eight of the tickets were specifically possible because of the changes that were made through the ordinance. So again, they'll continue to look at the data and get an additional report out to the council. But I did just want to recognize that in the moment. I thank the first responders for their work and clearly their support of the Fourth of July effort and all of our parks staff. So that's it in terms of updates. Pardon? I just wanted to say, was that sent to us? Hasn't been yet. So they're going to work on a more comprehensive report that they'll send to you. We just wanted to give you a little taste. Awesome. Thank you.

Tammy, anything from you?

Yeah, I just want a note from council. I'll be sending you an email early next week to update you on our lawsuit against the state for the denial of our grant application relevant to our land use powers. We've had some movement there and legal strategizing on Friday. So I'll send you a confidential update early next week. And if you have questions on it, you need to direct those to me. Okay.

Thank you. All right, let's jump right in. Riverdale Animal Shelter.

So Stephanie Wilde, the Riverdale Animal Shelter Director, will be coming forward. I know Alicia Reese is also in the audience. I don't know if she'll be joining her at the table, but feel free to go ahead and come forward. As they're coming forward, I do want to give some background and context. So we've been communicating with the animal shelter in Adams County for, frankly, about the last, I'd say, 19 months about the city's IGA and fees. I do want to acknowledge in the presentation that you're going to see tonight, there are some fairly significant financial impacts and the request that the animal shelter is given. What you can't necessarily see from the presentation that I wanted to make sure I gave context for is actually the county came to us ahead of last year's budget about increases in some of what they were seeing in their operations needs and sort of what cost sharing might be. There was a lot of concern expressed not only by Thornton but other cities about the level of increases and the methodologies that were proposed last year. that the Riverdale and county staff took that feedback back and took it very seriously. And so have come back with a pretty significantly modified proposal this year that has reduced the impact on Thornton and our budget. The last thing that I will say is we have done some cost comparison in terms of other shelter operations in the region and the increases that are being proposed are generally comparable to what other shelter operating expenses would be. But I appreciate county staff and the animal shelter wanted you to hear directly from them, but we're some of the cost drivers in the circumstances that are leading them to ask for additional contributions to partners like Thornton. So with that, I will give the floor. I think Alicia, are you kicking us off? Yes.

Thanks so much. Mayor and council are really glad to be here to talk about the services we provide on behalf of the county and then also Thornton residents here at the shelter. And the team will walk through the methodology, the why now, and frankly, to talk through some of the cost escalations that we've seen in our business and Just like anything you all have seen in your own as well. And we feel that this could be a nice conversation back and forth. I don't know how you all do it all the time, but if you have questions along the way, we're used to answering those things right in the moment. So please feel free. And so hopefully we can have a better understanding going forward. And so I'll pass it over to Stephanie Wild, who is our director, and Marla, who is kind of the constructor of all things financial at the shelter and is quite helpful in that respect. So I'm so glad to be here and thanks for having us.

Yes, thank you so much for having us and good evening, Mayor and Council. So we're just going to start out. I think it's really important to say that we value and want to continue our partnerships really with the eight municipal partners that you see on the screen. Also with unincorporated Adams County Animal Management and the shelter, we really form a safety net within the community. Animals and people don't always think about jurisdictional boundaries when they're lost or they've bitten someone or that goes on. And I never take, do not miss an opportunity to say how much I appreciate the Thornton Animal Control Team. Tansy has heard me say this before, it is not to butter you up, it is really to be genuine that I think if Janice retires, I'm right behind her because she is such a help and her team are really, they're very skilled and very trained and we work well in partnership. So we just think that that's important to establish. We're going to just give you a brief overview of our services. And one of the things I want to say is we moved to the new shelter and the new facility in 2020. And we have enhanced services, but we really haven't added anything. Because one of the questions may be if costs are going up, have you add anything? So the first group is for public services. And I would say shelters up and down the front range and any shelter that's municipal, county, or a nonprofit shelter that does animal control contracts is going to have what we call the main or the big four. That would be adoptions, lost and found, which is the highest. That's the status. Most animals that come into the shelter are lost and found. That's our biggest status of animals. followed by pet surrenders when people can no longer care for their pets. And you have to have adoptions because some of those pets are never claimed and for the ones who are given up. or seized because they've been abused and neglected. And then we do a small amount of end-of-life care. Residents may come in with a pet whose age and whose time has come or been hit by a car. And we do that at a lower cost for the community. And while it's not a larger service, if any of you have a pet, my only complaint about pets is they don't live as long as humans. And so that is a part of animal care. Any shelter up and down the front range would have these core four services. Next is municipal impound services. And again, for our eight municipal IGA partners in the county animal control itself, these aren't so much services that you'll see on the screen, but the status of intake. So whatever officers bring in on those different status, like a police cold could be an animal that is, maybe there's a dog in the backseat when someone gets arrested or, there's a porthole because there's been abuse or neglect, bike quarantine because a dog is bitten. So those are all the different statuses that we support. And of course, cremation services, we have a state-of-the-art crematory and it can help with those pets that that are already deceased. And then we have a very small repertoire of community-focused services. We do low-cost pet vaccination and microchip clinics twice a month at the shelter. That is really volunteer-driven, and a lot of our donations support those vaccinations, really helps with with public health and safety. And in that first slide, one of your officers was helping us with a clinic a while back where we partnered with the Adams County Health Department. And then we do some events, but not fundraising events. We do events, mainly resource fairs. Sometimes we'll be in a parade, really helping the community understand what services are available. And then like most shelters that are county or municipal, we are the designated pet evacuation site for Adams County. if, God forbid, there's a tornado or environmental disaster. Right now, the Colorado Springs Animal Shelter is taking hundreds of animals from fires down south. And so we're in a position to be able to help with that. We also do some very temporary pet sheltering for residents in crisis. For example, we have a senior resident from a different jurisdiction right now that went through a surgery and has no next of kin and where he's very attached to his pet and we're caring for his dog for a few weeks. So he doesn't have to lose his pet during that, but we do that only as far as the space allows and it's primarily foster and donation funded. And again, stop me at any time, but I'm just going to keep rolling, but that's the general overview. Why are we asking for a fee increase? I will say that we haven't done an increase since 2018 where it was approved by our county commissioners and it went into effect in 2019. We moved in our facility in 2020. Animal intake went down because of the pandemic. And then about 22, we saw it start to skyrocket. And that has increased our cost and we've had to add staff to manage that. Sometimes you'll hear on the news that a lot of people adopted pets during the pandemic and then they went back to work and gave them up and really the research is not bearing that out. What we see primarily is financial situations, housing, financial stress as being one of the primary drivers. I wanna also say we do have a beautiful state of the art facility. Our old shelter was out of compliance. It was really outdated. And unless you were looking for a chemical or a backhoe, you would have a hard time finding us. The county really invested in a better facility, but it was fully funded by the county and we're not trying to recoup funds for the building itself. But I think that would be a reasonable question, but that is not the case. This is really just to get to operational cost. And to create a more balance in that way. What are some of the drivers? We've also talked about those post-pandemic intake levels. Also, we see a lot of unaltered pets. That means they're not spay and neutered, which often means is why they're roaming, as the officers will know. And the state requires pets to be spay and neutered before they're adopted. And so that is something we must do. We did over 4,000 adoptions last year and the majority of those animals were needing spay and neuter surgeries. Also shelters for about the past decade to 15 years. We just see a lot more senior pets. more behaviorally challenged and medically needy pets that just take more time to move through the system. I've already talked about our increased need for staff. The facility is costly to run. We have a high HVAC system. I mentioned the crematory, our utilities, We've had to add security because we live in a world now where we have to have security. Those costs run us over $500,000 a year. And when we did the original ask, as Tansy mentioned, we were attempting to pass some of those costs along to our partners. And we have pulled those out, but it's still costs that we have to absorb. There's new regulatory requirements, some as recently as 2023 around enrichment plans. And just everything has gone up. Human medicine is, shelter medicine mirrors human medicine with cost of things like medications. So I wanted to just show you some data. And while we can see this dip going back to 2018, going forward. You can see the dip with the pandemic, but if you look at the three line, you can see that our intake continues to go up. Last year was our highest level of intake of live animals on record. And we did some numbers before this presentation, we're running 200 animals over right now where we were last year. So we're just not seeing a dip yet. So we're about up about close to 30% since 2018 overall. And that is just, We're seeing this not just in Adams County, but pretty much statewide and in a lot of national terms. It takes a lot to run an animal shelter. I would not do any other work, but there are a lot of things that you might not think about that we need to have. We're required. to be licensed through the Pet Animal Care Facilities Act. That's PACFA for short, through the state. There's daily cleaning, feeding, and now enrichment requirements, which is mental stimulation for pets. They do decline when they sit long in kennels. We have to provide essential medical care and the appropriate vaccines when animals come in so they don't catch everything in that herd health situation. Appropriate housing may seem simple, but if the longer a pet is there, the state requires that kennel to get bigger. So we've installed some really big kennel spaces, but we have to manage that and manage that. We do, as you see in the picture here, one of our great veterinarians, we have a DEA license. We were regulated with a door. We have controlled substances on site, which takes a lot of records management. Also, the state requires a stray hold weight. Again, strays are our biggest intake type. We have to hold those pets and we have to post pets. And our website most of the time updates about every 20 minutes and does link to your city animal control page. But that is really important. About 94% of people consider their pets family. And while I don't think that pets are more important than people, pets are really important to people. And we have to be really mindful that when we have a stray pet, that is someone's property by law, but it's also their family member by their definition. I've already talked about the spay and neuter, and then behavior assessments. We get lots of animals in. We want to make sure we're putting safe animals into homes, and the state requires behavior disclosures, which you can't provide unless you've done a behavior assessment, and we do thousands of shows per year. So it takes some specialized staff and just a lot to make sure we're meeting those regulatory requirements. I want to talk to you about that we don't charge the cities, our municipal IJA partners, we don't charge for animals that come in through an owner. It's basically unowned pets, so not for public services. But we thought it would be helpful since the second largest intake type is owner surrenders, just to show you this pre- and post-pandemic change. So around 1,700 was the average annual leave in that 2018-19 pandemic. And last two years, we're looking at Is that an increase? More like 1,200. More like 1,200, yeah. 1,200, I was looking at it wrong. My contacts are a little blurry. So we've seen a significant increase, almost 47% in owner surrenders. I put this up here. Thornton's at the top of the list. It's not to make you feel it really goes by the size of your jurisdiction. You can see all the way down to some of our smallest ones like Bennett and Hudson. And last year, I think it was over 500. And so there is a lot of community need in this area and it's also driving up our intake. And then to just show you sheltered days, the best way to describe this, if you had a hotel and you had guests coming, one metric you'd look at is how many guests came and then you would look at how many days each of them stayed. And so we do the same thing with pets. You can see back in 2022, that was the first time I think we went over 100,000 sheltered days for animals. And last year, we ended up at over 141,000 days of shelter. So the volume is just so heavy. The reason I'm showing you this is also because the current fee assessment model we have is based on shelter days. And it's pretty simple. We basically, we look at our budget annually. We see how many days of shelter we've provided for animal control related income. And then we get a number for cost per animal. And then we build that. And that's a pretty great formula. That's what we chose to do back in 2018. But what's happening in the current model is since the shelter days number is going up so high, it's diluting the model. And where we were getting about 13% of our budget when we started with this shelter days model, we're down to about eight percent and so it's just really not keeping up with cost and so that's why over the past few years we've been looking at different ways to do the assessment. So the assessment has some positives. The one thing it's a bit complicated to explain But the one thing I would say about it is we feel it's really fair. It's really a cost sharing model. It shares back revenue where it's appropriate. It helps to balance. This takes two years worth of your intake data or three instead of two. So we have a little bit more of time to get an average to smooth out your highs and lows. Those are some of the positives. The challenge is that we fully recognize And I just want to be so genuine about it that we know in times of tight budget, this creates a burden for our municipal partners, and there's no way of getting around that. So how does it work? There's a lot of text here. I'm just going to cover the highlights. But I'm going to start by just having you look at the charts, where we can see if we look at all the animals that come into the shelter, that 8,300 of live intakes average over 23 to 25. 60% of the animals that come in are animal control impounds. They're coming in from officers, our own in Adams County, Thornton, all the other cities and towns we provide for. And then there are also those strays, unowned pets coming in over the counter that are found in the jurisdictions that we serve and our own unincorporated Adams County. 40% is then all the other public services that we deliver. This model is about assessment of the animal control portion. the county provides the public services and absorbs the cost of those as well as administrative overhead. So the way this works is basically we're taking that three-year average, in this case for City of Thornton, delineating between animal control impounds and the public. And then we're going to calculate your billing share. And I'll show you on the next slide what your percentage of that 60% is of animal control intakes. And that is gonna be based on that three-year average. And then we're gonna apply credits and fees. And so this will share back credits and Marla can jump in if needed, share back credits for any restitution that would come through from a Thornton case, would share back donations related to your intake, your billing percentage, correct? It will share back, adoption revenue, reclaim if the pets that your officers bring in are reclaimed by the public, that then is shared back. And then we're gonna add some simple fees for things that not all cities use evenly. So those cremation services for the deceased animals that come in and community cat returns. And then when that's all done, it'll come up with a final number. When we did this, We, in listening to the feedback we received last summer and speaking to your leadership and other cities and towns, if we look to lower the target, not only by pulling some of those costs out, but that we have put the target at 20% of our budget. So if all those eight cities and towns combined that I showed you in the first slide, if what they're paying in collectively was over 20% of our budget, then the final step is then we do a credit back based on your intake or billing percentage so that collectively all eight of our partners are not sharing more than 20 percent of the budget. This is a lot of information, like Lisa said, you can stop me anytime.

I wanted to also point out that last summer that target was at 30 percent and also included those overhead numbers of operations, so both the operations were removed. based on that feedback and the target number was reduced 10% between last summer and this year. Do you give me a sense?

Yes, so we really worked on that and also working on increasing our revenue, which I'll talk about a little later because that also lowers the target. So you might be saying, well, what is our percentage? Well, unincorporated Adams County, we're the biggest user group of the shelter at 32.6%, again, of animal control related intakes. And then Thornton being a larger municipality is at 25.1% on this three-year average. And you can kind of see where all the other municipalities fall. And then that small print at the bottom again is just what we bill the city's back for. So like protective custody, if that's, you know, if someone dies in their home and they have a cat still in their home and we're holding that for next to Kim, we don't bill the city's back for those. So those statuses are the only ones that we bill back for. So here are the numbers. And so I'm just, you can stay with me. I'm just going to, I'm going to go right to the top, the green line. is really looking at, again, Thornton's 23 to 25 live intake percentage is that 25.1%. That's not the percentage of the amount we're billing back, but that is your billing percentage where we start with. The last two years, because we were on a two-year flat, you were at 147 and 242. And then what we're asking that to change for 2027 is 349.8668. Sorry, my contacts are really blurry with this dry weather. I apologize. That is an increase of 202,426 and over 137% increase. We do recognize that this first change of going to the new model is a big step up for the reasons that I've mentioned. After that, we are looking at continuing to use this model if you stay with us. And so it would not be as big as a leap going forward. But we do know that that is significant. To look at the breakdown, our budget for 2025, because we're using with the three-year intake average, our most recent closed budget, over 4,600,000 in some. And the way that it breaks down, if you see the pie chart, is that we're, our share, the 2.6 million includes our own animal control cost, our cost of delivering public services, administrative costs, and then anything above the 20% that we didn't assess to the cities. And then our revenue was over a million last year, the way we get to the initial cost recovery target is minus the revenue from our budget. And then we're asking the cities and towns collectively to be at that 931,000. And so again, in 2025, we were getting about 8% of our budget from our municipal partners. This would move us to 20% for an increase of 12%. And then really with the revenue, being pulled out of the target. It's really an 80-20 split, which we feel is fair. We feel like this is what we can do and absorb at this point. But I have some other things to share with you about what we're doing to mitigate costs, but it's a lot of numbers and information. And I don't know if Alicia would want to add anything, Marla, but if you have any questions at this point.

Well, and to make sure that we give some breathing room to this slide in case there's questions on there. Is the methodology making sense? Are there questions along those lines?

We can go back, too, if you'll feel that there's questions. You see the lights light up and they have questions, I'll make sure I call on them.

Thank you for that. We don't want to take up too much of your time, but we cannot go too fast.

I'm sure there'll be questions at the end.

So you might be asking, well, what are you doing, Riverdale Animal Shelter in Adams County to help mitigate some costs? And there's some things we just wanna briefly mention. All shelters really cannot survive without a volunteer base. We have nearly 300, volunteers that gave over 35,000 hours last year. If you just look at labor, that's close to 17 FTEs. It's not legal to just put volunteers into staff roles. You can't do that, but what they do is enhance and support our workload, and that helps us to balance out cost. We also had over 800 animals that went into foster care last year. When those animals are in foster care, They are not taking up space in the shelter. They're not taking up daily care and staffing costs, and that helps us reduce costs. It also helps us improve our library to be for save rate of those more vulnerable animals that originally go into foster. We did raise some fees along to the public in 2025 that resulted in a 19% increase. Service fees, grants, and donations, and then the IGAs are really the repertoire of revenue that we have. we have some challenges being a fundraising entity because statutorily we're a county and we're not even a city and a county have some strict we can do, but we did take in almost 300,000 in grants and donations last year. Some of the grants helped us reduce links of stay for dogs every day and animals in the shelter costs. We helped some pets get home to owners who might not otherwise been able to claim them. And the rest of our donations, really the core of them go to those medical costs, vaccines, and supplies. We also use our partnerships with other shelters to really help us. Last year, we took in 10 masks in pounds, seven really large ones between July and December of 2025. It was really a... anomaly and a very intense year for both officers and the shelter. But we were able to transfer out almost 600 animals to make room for those court hold animals during that time. So those partnerships also really help us. A couple other things that I think are notable to mention, we did add an online donation platform, Join the Modern World in 2023, and that resulted in a 30% increase in donations. We doubled our grants, even though we don't have very many. Some of our sticking points is some of the grants, we don't apply for federal grants. It's not really federal grants for animal shelters, but sometimes we get blocked out of those because we're a government entity. And then I'll let Alicia mention a little bit about this Adams County Foundation petition bill.

You all will hear much more about this going into the future, but the county is working on relaunching a community foundation concept that is really more active than anything we've had before. It's a space where we can receive in and work with a third party entity that we would contract with that can solicit donations on our behalf. They would have the capability to have nonprofit taxation status, et cetera. The county is not permitted to actively, um, solicit donations or sponsorships of our services. So we do a lot of passive things like, if you so happen to have some treats you'd like to drop off, we will take them. So that sort of thing. But there are a number of folks who would like to leave bequests and support the operations and things of that nature. So we're excited to be able to do that later on this year. So you'll hear more about that probably in the fall, maybe with the ADCOG regional meeting in about October, we'll have more then.

So we're hoping that'll give us more possibilities because as we're able to bring in more revenue ourselves, again, that lowers the cost recovery that we're trying to make up for. um restitution is something that's always helpful Thornton does a great job with that and then we're not really looking actively at we don't have a county-wide pet licensing program here and I think this could be future conversations um but it does take staffing and it does take money to ramp up and right now in this time of tight budgets probably not immediately on the table it takes time to build we're seeing in some counties where licensing revenue is going down. And we're seeing in some counties it's staying stable. So it's something we can always partner with and talk about in the future. Lastly, what are we getting for the cost? And I will be the first to say we are not infallible. We do make mistakes. We're always looking to improve. We try to own those. But we also believe we're delivering some really quality services for the community that has such high animal welfare needs. And so, you know, when an animal has hurt someone, we have a safe place to contain that pet. What's going through a court case if somebody's hurt that animal, which is always hard to see, we have a really great team to care for them. And where shelters exist in a municipal or county sense to be the place where when animals don't have a place to go. to have a place for animals to go. So we serve as that place. We really put a lot of effort in making the building welcoming to residents. And when the big things happen, like 10 Mass in Pounds, some of them were Adams County, some were Thornton, some were other municipalities. We are there with a team on hand to deal with that. And we also really have put a lot of things in place and Some are just existing things that we have that support your officers. So I'm not going to read this whole list, but just give you a few highlights. We have a state-of-the-art veterinary clinic with x-ray. Janice and her team will remember at the old shelter, if a dog was hit by a car and it had a potential fracture, we'd have to call around and try to get a vet office to see that pet and move it around. We have all that on site now. We have places for officers to meet. privately with your residents. We have a drive through Sally Port, which came from meeting with the officers before we built the facility to, so they don't have to back up and it's safer. We also is built in. We have 24 hour manager on duty. We have to, because we're a 24 seven facility. You know, we have staff there on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day and 4th of July. So officers can call us anytime. We have a back line for them. We do host quarterly meetings and meet with your officers and your lieutenants and sometimes police chiefs to work through things and get better and debrief and brainstorm. And just a lot of things that we feel support your officers and to work in unison with them. I will also just say that, again, while we're not infallible, we're a pretty high-performing group. doing a lot. We provided almost 20,000 vaccinations for over 8,000 pets, both sheltered and in the community, helping with that public health and safety. 4,000 animals adopted. Over 3,587 surgeries last year. Over 3,000 of those were those spay and neuters, and the rest are surgeries for injured pets. We reunited almost 1,900 animals with their owners. We handled 70,000 phone calls. That doesn't include the emails that we get from the public. Average is 200 contacts per day. And then cared for 500 abused and neglected animals with care last year, most of whom survived. And that is in partnership with the animal officers and law enforcement that do their work. And so again, We always are in continuous improvement. We always have room to improve and grow. We also know there is a lot of need around pets in Adams County and in municipalities within. So we're going to stop now. Thank you for being so attentive and answer your questions.

Justin.

Thank you for the presentation. Very informative. I really like how you included some of the things that you're doing to mitigate the cost. It was very informative. My questions are actually for our staff. So when... It's the current IGA that we have. Is it expiring? Yes. So it has termed out and we have to renew it. These are the terms of the new agreement. Okay. So my next question is for the county is, Have any other municipalities already agreed to the new IGA?

We have had one of our communities already adapt, and that was Bennett, you know, one of our smaller communities. So they are in their budget season a little bit earlier than our larger communities.

So you're doing the roadshow?

Absolutely.

For the second? Second place you visited so far?

Actually, you all are the first that we visited. We've been working at length with the staffs of all eight of our parks.

Okay. I know recently we had a big surrender from one of our pet stores. When you have those mass surrenders, when you have to take a bunch of moving animals, how does your team will scale up? And what do you do if the shelter is at capacity and you have these kinds of events that would impact your operations?

Yeah, there's some white knuckling when that happens because it seems like it happens in the summer, which is for all animal shelters, the busiest time. And so our first mass in town last July was over 120 and with babies being born, it ended up being 130 animals. And so it's all hands on deck for one. I can tell you, it's not that I'm above it, but our entire administrative team Director, Deputy Director, everyone was cleaning. We rallied more volunteers for it. We utilized those other shelter partnerships. We had, I think, I don't have the exact number, I have it in another slide, but we were able to transfer to seven animals out, so adoptable animals that we had to go to other shelters to be adopted to make room for those animals. And so those partnerships are, it's a great question. Those partnerships are key. And we work with about 40 rescues too. And so I think we have 20 or so rescues also. So we're constantly transferring and asking partners up and down the Front Range. We even had Cheyenne Animal Shelter in Wyoming help us. So we look at other options for those healthy adoptable pets to go to make room. and we roll up our sleeves. We also received in that particular, a lot of community support. We had a lot of donations come in. I will say in part, it's why our revenue went up and I wanna take credit for all of it. Some of it was like, there was a lot of media coverage and people are very interested. And so we communicate with our, senior leadership in the county. We actually had some of our facility team staff come over and help us literally spray down kennels and do things. So, you know, we really, we try to pull it on stops and look at our partnerships and resources. And it's not easy, but we usually can do that. The shelter is also built to be flexible. So like a room that is normally an adoption room or a run can change over to be a holding room. And so we have these great magnet signs so we can say this room was adoption, but it's now for sick cats that are on court hold. And so we built the shelter to have flexible space so we can kind of move with that. We hope we don't have another year like

that that was quite an anomaly yeah but does that answer your question or it does i do have uh two more questions one is uh on the slide about mitigating costs you said the uh you increased some public service fees in 2025 are those like adoption fees or what kind of fees are those for paying those yeah that would be we pass those on um to the public um one of the big components we did is um increase our fees for um

cremation services for animals by the pound instead of just one bee because someone could bring in, I'm seriously a guinea pig, you know, that passed away and time has come and somebody could bring us like 130 pound dog and that's energy and most shelters do. So just even, and we also pass those categories of weights onto the cities. So that did help. And I want to say... Around 19,000 increase in fees.

I mean, Do you just do small animals or do large livestock?

Oh, good question. We do have a little barn that we just opened. Again, it was part of the original shelter plan, but we had to do it in phases. So it just opened. So we're we're zoned for small farm animals. So we can do goats, pigs, a lot of production birds like chickens, turkeys, peacocks, but horses and like cattle and things would not come to our shelter, so.

Would you be willing to host a tour for someone?

I am so glad you asked that because I think, you know, sometimes something hits you right in the face, like you don't see it right in front of you. And I know one of your staff came out who'd never been here and took a tour of the shelter. And I think that we haven't, we moved during COVID. It was like five years of planning and it was like crickets because everybody was all hunkered down and there was, you know, no bells and whistles that just, we just quietly moved into this big... We really missed opportunities to have a lot of you come out. And I think seeing our operation is really powerful. Seeing where your officers bring in the animals, seeing the health care. 90% of what goes on in shelter happens not in the adoption area. It's all in the back. So we'd love to have any of you at any time out for the tour.

Yeah, I'd love that. I'm sorry we haven't been more forthcoming in offering that. Yeah.

Kind of a miss there. Evan?

Thank you for the presentation. So I have a couple of questions. One of which right now looks like we're paying $147,242. The new ask is $349,668. That's a massive 137% increase for the city as a whole. To your comment earlier as well, you know, I think right now with all of the cities and municipalities as a whole, everyone is kind of tightening budgets rather than giving out more funds. With that in mind, what other actions, I saw your slide 15, your revenue intake ideas. What should the... The consensus be from a city to commit to 137% increase when the revenue generating potential hasn't been played out and kind of looked at beforehand.

Well, that is a good question. I think we have steadily been working on revenue increases over time. The primary area that we have some opportunities is in that philanthropic space. And it's taking us some time to set up that capability because as a county, like I said, we're not able to do that. But we should have that in place coming this fall. And that will take some time to get going. But that should help offset things. I think this is a shock given the amount of increase, really the percentage. It's side by side to the percentage of increase that we've seen in activity, in service levels that we've been delivering to our communities, as well as our own service level at the county and cost increases side by side to that. In the past, what we would have told you is the county will simply absorb it, as we have continued to do for all of the years that we've had partnerships, which has been largely since we've been open. We just aren't able to continue to do that as a county. We have come to the place where we can sustain some give and take. And we'll continue to work with our communities to do the best we can to provide those services for what we can all sustain financially. But we can't any longer recapture 8% of operating costs when those service levels, just the demands and the costs keep rising as they are.

What is the preventative measures being put in place to make sure that this doesn't come up again in the next five years when another IGU needs to be signed?

One of the things that we've applied is we adjusted the model to take into account actual use over that rolling three-year period, but we've also applied the regional CPI or cost of living percentage that applies along with the contract over time so instead of seeing such a large increase because we haven't asked for any increases in eight years It should carry along at cost of living increases, so to speak, probably quite similar to how you apply that for water and sewer rates so that we don't get into a place where we're having to ask for such a high increase at once.

So you made a comment that The county really can't absorb any more going forward with that sense. But if only one city has agreed thus far, what's to say that the other cities don't agree, then what's the shelter going to do?

We have gotten a sense from most that they're looking at continuing to work with us. If there truly is a financial condition that one or more of our partners simply cannot do it, then we'll work with you all and figure out what is best. We're just at a space where we all have to work together to do what we can to absorb and work through these cost escalations.

Roberta? I just want to say thank you for the presentation. I think that we've been prepared since whenever that thing was at the county building. So I'll be in support of it. So thank you. Any other questions?

Yes, I just had a comment. I actually did get so we took a few months ago. However, you guys are so so busy. We arrived 45 minutes early before opening think that that was enough time. people have been there for about an hour and a half, probably about 40 or 50 people standing outside the door. I'm sure you've seen that many times, especially when you get cute puppies or whatever. And there seems to be an uptick and we were part of that. But the feedback I have is just with so many people gathered up front and having to get there over an hour or longer in advance just to try to achieve what you're trying to adopt. there was only a very small sitting area on that wall. So my feedback is, and I know this is the worst time to say it, but perhaps some dentures or extras because you, seating right there by the front door.

Outside to me.

Because everybody's stuck standing there and it was like lightly raining that day, but there wasn't anywhere to, you didn't want to sit on the ground either because it was wet. So.

I really appreciate that feedback. I would be willing to bet on, council member that there were some high demand animals there that day. We don't always have a line, but when we do have, we can get that. One of the things that we don't have in place right now, because just very frankly, we didn't know if we had the staff to manage it well, is a pet hold policy so that someone can put a pet on hold for a small fee while shelters do this. And then they get the first dibs at that adoption visit and it does help reduce the lines. It would also bring some revenue, but that's not really why we're doing it, really doing it to serve residents better. So I really appreciate that feedback. It's great feedback. And we do have, we have a lot of like different seating and for different sizes and body types, kids and everything, but outside it's just kind of that cement bench. So that is really, really helpful feedback. We do have a new, like a gazebo, some bench seating out there too now that's covered from the sun because we're west facing there. So I will take that feedback to Arden. And I'm sorry you had to wait, but I'm really glad you came in.

No, no, no apologies needed. It was just something that we noticed. And obviously we talked on the budget. So here I am adding something. Early feedback when you get to it, when you get to it. But that was something that I noticed.

And just for clarification, I know you pressed your button, John. This is for the 2027 budget. So this would be in that budget request. So this isn't necessarily coming forward in tonight to be brought forward to a future meeting, except through the budget process, right? Okay.

I'll be brief. Thank you for the presentation. Lisa, great to see you again as always. You know, Riverdale Animal Shelter is absolutely amazing. I just luckily just donated items to y'all, but still, you know, I know y'all do amazing work and there is a cost involved with that. And, you know, we kind of like early first part of the year, we had our meeting, we kind of with the current climate, it is what it is. But still, I'm very supportive of your work. I am satisfied with what you all are doing to mitigate costs on your end. So I will be in support of this when it comes time. Thank you.

All right. I look forward to seeing how it proceeds in the budget for 27. Very much appreciate it. And I look forward to a tour as well.

Thanks so much. We always have really wonderful pets for adoption. So you could take one with you at the tour. Thank you.

All right, we go to the next one. More animals.

Yeah, we're going to stick on the animal chat. So I want to recognize Lieutenant Peterson.

I think he's going to be taking the lead.

But Janet almost needs no introduction at this point because she got lots of love and will allow us to do some teaching as well. I do want to recognize we are recommending a refresh of Chapter 6 in the code around animals. This code hadn't been looked at for quite a period of time and so you're going to see a mix of recommendations that came through the leadership and research by the animal control team and then a lot of collaboration with the municipal court and the prosecution team as well. So this reflects a lot of work by a lot of individuals. A lot of what you're going to see is actually just adding more clarity to the code and reflecting some of our current practices that aren't codified that will just create clear expectations for the community. and hopefully make prosecution when that's necessary a little bit cleaner. There are some things in here related to the last presentation that we do believe can help better manage our costs by potentially creating more efficient processes going forward. So with that introduction, Chief Hawkins, are you?

I'm just here for moral support.

Okay. So Lieutenant Peterson is going to kick us off.

All right, yeah, it's a good segue. Good evening, everybody. The presentation that went right before us, this goes right along with it. It should help with some of the issues that Riverdale Shelter currently has. The purpose tonight is just going to be provide information for all the requested changes for Chapter 6 and then answer any questions that anybody may have. And City Manager already kind of went over it. It really is a Joint effort, animal control, legal, and... The courts have really done a majority of the work on this. I can't take credit for any of this. Everything you see in here really is stuff that animal control currently already does or an issue they've identified in prosecution or in their day-to-day operations, just things that need to be updated or cleaned up to make prosecutions, litigation, and the front end paperwork run more smoothly and more effectively through the courts all the way through legal. First part here is not very exciting. All of the words below there are just things that needed to be defined in the ordinance that aren't currently. So it makes it difficult when you charge somebody with something or something goes in front of legal and we're referring to something in the code that actually doesn't physically have a definition. And then obviously there's There could be more arguments about that things like breeder, kennel, livestock, owner, pet store, things that a lot of things that we would think that would be pretty common sense, but they need definitions so that there's not going to be any ambiguity or anything like that during the actual court process. Vaccinations required. This is simply an ordinance requiring animal owners to show us rabies vaccines. We demand them all the time and there's nothing physically in the ordinance that allows us to enforce that they give it to us. So we have a dog bite or something like that and we're investigating it. This is just an ordinance saying that now we have a little teeth in it. If we say you have to give us your rabies vaccine, now we have an ordinance that says that you have to. Commercial license required. This is just going to mimic the anticipated pet store stuff that's gonna come down from the state. Cats and dogs at retail stores will no longer be a thing. So we're just gonna mirror what's gonna happen in CRS with that. And moving forward, Thorne Animal Control, clerk's office and legal, we were also going to look into how to set up steps to do licensing for private breeders in the city. There's no system set up for that right now for us to actually do that for somebody to get a license to breed animals in the city, there's no system. So we're going to move forward and try to set up a system so that that's possible in the future. This is a big one for the Riserdale Animal Shelter that we just had the nice presentation for. Animals at large, animal control folks, when animals are at large, believe it or not, they see the same animals a lot. So if your animal is at large, it can now be ordered or mandated that that animal will be microchipped. Hopefully once that happens, animal control finds it, then we're not bogging down the shelter. We'll be able to return them to their owners without having them being housed and waiting for someone to locate the animal. So if your animal is at large, get a microchip after that first ticket and now it shouldn't be an issue next time we find that animal. Our animal control folks have the equipment with them where they can scan the animals and do it right there when they find it and then just contact the owners and take it straight home so it's not housed for an extended period of time. Other cities have already done this and it's been in successful form. They've been able to reduce their numbers of intakes at animals at large so that it doesn't become an issue. Back finding changes. This has just kind of been an oddball thing that doesn't really fall in line with a lot of other municipalities or other places. As of right now, if we want to seize an animal and not give it back to its owner, the burden of proof on whether that animal should be given back to their owner falls on the owner, which is the exact opposite of every other legal proceeding that we have. So this would be to change that so that animal control or whoever sees the animal, the city would have the burden of proof to say why the animal should not go back to the owner as opposed to the owner showing up and telling us why they should get it back. because we seized it for a reason and we're the ones that are saying they shouldn't have it. So we should have the burden of proof, say where they're not gonna give it back. It should also speed some things up and also help with the Riverdale Animal Shelter and some of the other thing with elongated housing, because when the burden is on the owner, if that owner doesn't show up to court and we have to extend court dates and everything else like that, we don't have any recourse at this point. Our animal control folks will show up to court, I promise you, and it'll get handled. And it can be handled without that owner so that we can get them processed and moving along instead of keeping them in the shelter.

Before you move on, Cherish?

So how many repeat offenders do we see on animals that large?

Janice?

Quite a few.

I would say 20 to 25% of the animals that we encounter stray out there, we've encountered the

So when these animals are microchipped, I know that it requires, I mean, if I had it done as a personal owner, then I have to register. Do they register it at the shelter or how does that work?

If the animal is microchipped at the shelter upon reclaim, then the shelter does the registration for them.

Okay. And also I have a crazy question. Are chickens included in the at-large?

Yes.

Okay. They, yes.

We've added some things into the, as far as neglect of animals go, these are things that the animal control officers have had to deal with in the past, but there's just nothing on the books to specifically address them. First one is tethering. So tying your dog up or tethering them. And then it's broken down to, it's not saying you can't tether your animal. It's saying that you have to do it reasonably. It can't put a 50-pound chain on a 10-pound chihuahua, so it can't move. You can't have it tethered in an instance where it doesn't have enough room and it's going to be strangled or become entangled. It can't be for elongated hours, only 10 hours, no more than 10 hours a day in a 24-hour period. It has to have adequate shelter, food, water. So some pretty common sense things that if you're going to tether your animal, make sure that it's okay. The second one is going to be unlawful transporting of an animal in an unsafe manner, which is just mimicking a state statue. It's the dog in the back of a pickup bed that could jump out or having an animal being transported in inhumane conditions outside as far as like temperature or something like that. They have to be transported safely. Impound of a neglected animal. So same thing. We impound animals all the time. There's just nothing essentially on the books that we have any teeth where we can charge somebody with. This is saying that if we are going to impound your animal, you have to give it to us. There's nothing on the books that says you have to. We can demand it, but there's just no teeth behind it. The next one is probably animal control's favorite call that they get on a daily basis. That's going to be nuisance or noise. This ordinance is really simply doing what the courts have kind of already mandated as far as burden of proof for us to be able to charge somebody for a nuisance animal. It just basically breaks it down to you have to have two complaints separately. Believe it or not, some neighbors don't get along and the barking dog complaints are literally just people going at each other and trying to get each other in trouble and harassing each other. So you have to have two separate households that are willing to sign a complaint and testify. If you don't have that, then you need to have video proof of it. It has to be more than 15 minutes of continuous barking, yelping, mowing, squawking, whatever the case may be, or an animal control officer has to physically be there to witness it. So it's just laying out those three things need to be done before we're actually going to cite somebody for it. And these things are actually already happening. This is kind of the rules of courts have laid out saying this is what we need if we're going to proceed with this. It's just putting it down on paper. Some new prohibited animals in the city. I don't know if anybody here has any venomous or poisonous spiders, but the proposal to not let people have those. And going along with that, if you can't have them, there's a section saying that if you do have them, we can impound them. limitations of animals. There are thresholds on how many animals you can have in the city. This section is going to make it so that if you're violating that, then we can write a warrant or actually impound those animals based off you being over those limitations. Right now, it's on the books that you can't do it. But once again, it's another thing. They don't physically have anything. The ordinance can't do it, but there's no recourse. This is just giving a recourse for it. Believe it or not, we don't currently have anything for the removal of animal excrement, public or private. So that's probably needed. There's some households in the city that private property can become a nuisance if you live next door and no one's picking up anything forever. And then obviously in public spaces, that probably shouldn't be the way we're doing business. So that's also being proposed to be put on the books.

Real quick, Roberta.

For the excrement removal, is there, like, some sort of, what is the, what are the actions taken for people not doing that in public? And then, like, if it's a private property, what does that look like, code enforcement or something?

Animal control will be able to enforce it.

So currently we do have it for private residences. Our typical process if we get a complaint is we'll go out, observe the violation, give them a warning notice, and usually give them a time frame to get it cleaned up. The one we don't have is if someone's walking, goes to the bathroom and they keep walking and leave that pile of feces. That's the one that we're adding into that. That was inadvertently removed, the last code religion. And so we're putting it back in. So it was removed and you're putting it back in? I'm sorry, what?

That it was removed and you're putting it back in.

Yes, we want to be able to have teeth behind enforcing people picking up after their pets when they're walking.

Okay, so just out of curiosity, like with that, what does enforcement look like? Because I think sometimes with like leash laws and things like this, like I see it all the time at Woodland Park where people are like, hunting the dogs in the park without a leash and playing frisbee ball. They're pooping, leaving it there. People complained about it, but how do you enforce it after the dog's gone? They've already ran around and then people just go home upset or get in a fight or that kind of thing. What are some actions we're taking to enforce some of those things? Because there's a lot of folks that complain.

about those actions to me. Sure. There are several different ways we can approach that. Generally, we have officers that work certain areas. And so they're pretty familiar with their parks, their citizens, and their areas. So generally, if we come across them out playing ball with their dog, we'll give them a warning initially. Say, this is not where you can do this. Here's where you can go. After that, we do cite them and issue summonses to court for those violations. If we don't see it, but someone else does, generally we ask them, snap a picture, and then we can also go through that same process. But somebody has to see it.

Okay. Or you all have to see it if you're patrolling or something. And then for the venomous spiders, does that include snakes too or just spiders or any venomous animals?

Venomous snakes were already in the ordinance but not spiders. Not spiders. So people have... That was actually recommended by one of our partner jurisdictions. as they encountered that. So a lot of these changes are based upon use in the field issues and that was one of theirs and they suggested we add spiders.

All right, thank you.

Uh-oh. We are on to prairie dogs. So I want to be clear on this. The addition to this is not the argument of whether people should be able to exterminate or not exterminate prairie dogs. That's not what this is about. People can. That's already a thing. This is just adding guidelines. so that it's done safely at the end of the day and that the public is aware of what's happening so the additions are simply um the signage they have to be eight and a half by eleven they have to be out seven days prior to any actual extermination there's information that needs to be on the signs as far as who's doing it their contact numbers uh what type of materials or or that they're using and it has to be posted for a certain amount of time, two days after the final treatment. This is just the layout of them notifying and how they're gonna do that so that everybody's aware that it's happening. So that's the only addition to that piece. And that fell into the prohibited area with the spiders and some of the other stuff. We broke it out just because this was a bigger issue last year and we're not revisiting any of that. We're just putting in guidelines to make it safer. more noticeable when they're actually doing it.

I just want to say thank you for that because that was something that came up with word for issue last year with the Catholic Church and I'm glad to see that we'll have that because it just freaks people out when they're all there and then they're all gone and they're like what happened it's kind of like a horror movie so thank you.

Absolutely. Public sale of animals. This is just matching other statute. It's just you can't sell animals in public places. This is to address the folks that are breeding animals and they have the pickup truck in the Walmart parking lot or other places. So we're just going to mimic the other things and put that into community ordinance. Protective impoundment. This is something that we already do, and they actually brought up in the last presentation. This is when we have to impound an animal due to a crash or an arrest or an Amazon issue, and the owner isn't capable of taking the pet at that time, and we have to take custody of it. It's just something we already do that isn't actually laid out in the ordinance. So we're going to put that in there. Feeding of wild animals. This prevents anybody from feeding any wild animals other than perching or songbirds in the city. So if you want to have your bird feeders to do that, you can. And this really is a common sense thing the animal control folks deal with where neighbors start feeding wild animals other than that. Name anything you want and you start feeding them, they don't go away and it becomes a nuisance for everybody who lives around you because you have, you know, wild pack of raccoons running the neighborhood or whatever, whatever they're feeding.

A question on that.

Yep. With turkeys. So, yes, turkeys would fall into no longer being able to see.

Can we get some communications once this is.

past about that stuff because there's tons of people that feed animals in the city they probably think it's a good idea like peanut from it just makes the animals insanely crazy and um like the it's just not good for wildlife so um maybe just getting some communications out that it's now not

Yeah, I mean, should it go through? Absolutely, because we constantly see that controversy between the people who love to feed the wildlife and the issues that it might create for the neighbors around them.

Yeah, I see it all the time on next door, like they're feeding the raccoon or the squirrels and the squirrels are tearing up this and I found peanuts growing in my grass, which I don't mind, but weird you know you have a peanut allergy then it's a that's a good point i don't but you know i was a little surprised to see peanuts growing in a planter so

We are onto cost of housing. So this is essentially, Riverdale has issues obviously with people paying sometimes and especially when we're going through the courts and there's the fact findings and they're giving the disposition of what's gonna happen to that animal. In five days of the fact finding, folks are gonna be required to pay the impound fees instead of letting that drag out and animals being there forever and then never getting paid, and then them having to dispo the animal after an extended period of time. It's putting a timeframe on that where they have to pay on the front end and go get their animals, or then if they don't, then the animal shelter can dispo that animal appropriately, whether that's adoption or whatever they need to do with that animal. them. Contempt, just like any other contempt of court in the animal cases, we didn't have contempt of court for any of those charges. So they could order you to do something in under the animal code. And if you didn't do it, then I guess you just didn't do it. So now you have the ability to be held in contempt when you're ordered to do something by the courts. Harassment of wildlife is something we're going to add. We're talking dens and nests and eggs. It's putting an ordinance in place to make it illegal to go mess with wildlife in that fashion. And finally, we have livestock, which we don't have a ton of, but we don't have anything on the books that protects any type of livestock, like other animals, as far as the conditions they live in. So we've taken the recommendations from the Bureau of Animal Protection and put some things in there to keep track. Livestock safe as well. We're talking about dry bedding in place for them to be appropriate food and water and things like that. Just some very basic life sustaining things for livestock for conditions.

Question about that. Looking at the updated ordinance text and it doesn't specify, you know, like what zone districts or where livestock is allowed in the city. Where is that in our code? Like, do we prohibit livestock in certain areas of the city? Or is it under this proposal, any area of the city is allowed to have livestock?

So it is the only areas that I am aware of that are allowed to have livestock currently are agricultural or residential estates. And so each of them agricultural zoning doesn't really have any restrictions. Residential estates does have some restrictions and requirements in order to have livestock on them.

So that's defined in another section of our municipal code.

Just to add or build on that, would, you know, we can have goats and chickens. So would that fall under that category of livestock?

So they would be separate. There is actually a clause in there that says it does not include miniature goats. So that... We're kind of following along, giving more of those guidelines of what the expectations are for the different types of ads.

That brings us to the recommendations. We obviously recommend that staff recommends all the ordinance changes. Alternatives are going to be to not approve them or to revise some of these things with council's direction.

Yeah, I had one question. Regarding section 6, the license to sell cats or dogs, do we have any businesses that are currently going to be impacted by this once it goes into effect within the city that are already currently selling dogs or cats?

The only one that we had was Pet Ranch. That's closed, I think, still currently. So they wouldn't be affected because they're closed. There's nobody else currently in the city operating.

Okay. Transportation in an open bed. I understand why that's illegal, but in a cage, it's okay? Like in a kennel for a dog?

Yeah. Okay. If it's done in a safe manner, then it is acceptable. That is just following basically state statute. So if it's in a kennel and the kennel is secured in the back, sure, that's absolutely fine. We're trying to prevent animals that are either left loose in the back of a truck or tied up in a manner to where they're exposed to extremes and temperatures and whatnot.

Are there any objections to bringing this forward? Will it be on next week's agenda?

We didn't currently have it calendared. It'd be a little bit quick to turn it around for the agenda for Thursday, but we'll get it on an agenda as quickly as we can. Yeah, you actually have a lot of action items at your next.

So yeah, I was going through the look ahead and I didn't see it. I was wondering.

Yeah, I think because this was the first year hearing, we wanted to make sure that we had support.

Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you. All right. Next is Thornton Assistance Fund.

Jessica Prosser can help to introduce any guests that we have here. We do, in the materials, we do have the presentation materials that were previously provided by the Thornton Assistance Fund Committee on May 19th. there was some other information that was presented at that time or that was requested as a follow-up that's also in your packets. We had not intended to redisplay those materials tonight, but they are accessible if the council wants those to be shared. At your last meeting, you did ask for us to reach out to members of the Support and Assistance Fund committee to be available to answer questions and to dialogue with the council about their recommendations. So I know with summer, there was pretty limited availability. Jessica was checking in with people to be able to introduce who we have here this evening.

Before you do that, Justin had a quick thing he wanted to add.

Yeah, I just want to let everybody here at the council know that since I serve on the Almost Home Board, I'm going to recuse myself from this conversation and from weighing in on the course of action. So I'm going to sit here and listen.

Yeah. Thank you.

Okay. So thanks to the mayor members council. We have one member. I think, I don't think we have anybody that joined online. So Francesca Mays is here. There was two other members that have been participating back and forth with staff meeting and helping to answer questions that were unable to make it tonight, both me and Heather. We've been very responsive and questions back and forth with staff, but nobody else was able to make it tonight. So they were notified. I did meet with the committee members on the 26th. And part of that was part of the responses back to council and some of the initial questions that we had heard. um so that's what i have for now is a one member here um and um again the committee's sort of sentiment on the 26th when i'm when i met with them was um providing the responses that we've provided to council sort of on how they got from scoring to decision making with some overlay and additional conversations yeah but i'm going to punt it to you because you had a professional

Yeah, so since there's only one member here, I won't bombard you with a billion questions. I sent over a proposal to staff, and my recommendation at this time is that we take the 36 applicants that did score an amount or a score at all, and we split our funding evenly between those. And then we That's one proposal. My second part of that is that we go forward looking at a new process and procedure on how we actually fund the charities going forward.

So the proposal is to equally fund the charities that were in the list.

All 36 of the ones who actually did score. So I think there was two that actually did not go well, which comes out to a little over $8,600. For the vast majority, it's a... amounts that is pretty close to what they asked was. The majority of the charities asked for 10,000. So it would be pretty close to what their asking price was. Give us a clear, clean field to move forward with the new process going forward.

I know one of the concerns that I've heard from the charities in general is the delay in the funding that is needed. So if this is a way to move us forward to be able to get that funding out, I can support that. Other members of council?

support that as well i'm support of that others parents you're shaking your head you have a different proposal so that i think that we should you know there's a separation church and state i don't know what that means there's a state statute that says that

Right. So how does that apply to the recommendation?

Organizations that are religious money.

We're doing that already anyway with the recommendation that was in place.

So I'm going to stop the back and forth. Your point has been made. Chris, did you want to add?

Yeah, can I clarify one thing on that? I think it's important to know that if you offer grant funding, you have to provide that openly to any organization that provides those services, whether they be religious or non-religious. And there is a Supreme Court case, a United States Supreme Court case on this issue. So I'll just put it on the record. The Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia versus Comer. And in that case, the court held that Missouri had to allow religious organizations apply for grants for rubber playgrounds and resurfacing, just like it would non-religious. And so the establishment clause is really the government doesn't favor religion, but also that it doesn't discriminate against a religion in general grant application processes. So in other words, religious organizations and non-religious can apply for any general grant program if they're providing those services. And you cannot deny them the grant solely on the basis of the religion. It has to be on other criteria.

If I can add, I do believe that the Thornton Assistance Funds Committee has been given that advice previously. And it is my understanding through consultation with the committee and reviewing notes of meetings that the religious status of organizations did not influence the recommendations that the Thornton Assistance Fund Committee made.

And I will send this case out to counsel, too. So I think we have... Go ahead.

I'm in support of the recommendation. I think it opened up my eyes to the fact that when we look at our process for the future, I think we've already kind of weighed in on this a lot of ideas, but the weighting of categories would be really helpful because I think there are true priorities over others when it comes to the categories. And so we need to make sure that our funding in the future matches that or is in line with that priority study by us. So, but get the money out there fast, spread the love, make more impact. So I'm in support.

Yeah. The reason I'm mainly in support of this is there were, there was, there were significant organizations within Thornton that served people within Thornton that were not funded or funded at $0 within the proposal. So in my core, I feel like that's the end. I've had actual residents come to me and say, you know, how are these funds supporting Thornton residents? And so when an organization exists in our city is getting zero funding from TAF, that is problematic. So this would quickly dispersed funds to all the organizations that asked and had the significant or had enough scoring. And it would include organizations that weren't funded under previous.

To clarify, it's $8,729. So that's all I wanted to say about that. Thank you.

Two things, and we already have the numbers, so I'm not going to elongate this. I just have, I guess, the request then. I think you did great research on that, and my mind is still wondering, like, what are those 37 questions? And I think if that's something that we as a body can review, that might help us as we revamp this process. So It sounds like it's going to go one way already right now, but afterwards, my request is that you do share that so that maybe there's learning opportunity or some things that maybe you picked up on that we can sharpen our pencil as we revamp the process. I know why you were holding off the first time around, but now we are in a different spot. So I think that would be helpful. Second, OK, I understand doing all 36, but Roberta just made me go to a different place. Do we have numbers that say that some of these nonprofits or charities were falling short of supporting our Thornton residents? I do remember like, it might've been a year or two ago, the bullying one, we were like, they didn't really help Thornton people. So if we have that data instead of 36, maybe it's 32 because for those organizations really aren't doing the work within our city and perhaps it's $9,000 that the 32 get because they are doing work in our city. So if that information is available, I don't know if that changes any opinions, but maybe we do more of an emphasis on those that are actually taking care of our residents. and it's pretty much in line with what you're saying.

I'm excluding one or two, but maybe- Part of my questions goes into that because part of my questions is around the scoring methodology that was there. Again, there's one member of TAF here and I don't want to ask her all 37 questions because she's going to really hate me by the end of the night. There's questions around that because some of the organizations were scored significantly higher, but not given funding. Some of the organizations that were scored significantly lower were given funding, but yet there's no rhyme or reason behind it. So to say, yes, this organization did a great job for us last year, and see that data would be great, but I don't know that the scoring really reflects the data so much as in my personal opinion about it, I think that there's a, I don't really like this foundation kind of situation from some of the scoring that went on.

Well, I guess that's my point is I'm taking out the scoring because you kind of just let's do a blanket equal distribution to those. But I'm not saying let's get into the weeds of scoring. If you didn't support any of our residents, then again, maybe it's only one or two out of there, but instead of all 36, maybe there's 34 and we can give a few extra dollars to those that are actually taking care of third residents, the taxpayers' dollars from our city that should go and support our residents. residents.

I don't know the answer to that, but if that is, I would concur with that, but I think it was going to draw everything out longer because one of the things that I spoke to some people is like they already have the data.

It would be just looking in the old row, but the data is not that cut and dry. I don't believe.

We know that we had that answer with the bullying just two years ago. We got that answer during the presentation, so I'm curious if that exists.

I'll defer to the top member and to Jessica. I do believe that the application does ask the applicants to report how many Thornton residents they serve. So we do have that data in the applications. I think it was considered in the scoring. I don't know that we've got that in an easy way to withdraw and provide to the council. And I think it's unlikely the applicants didn't serve any Thornton.

That was going to be my question is if they had a zero, that's different than if they serve somebody, right? So I'm sure all of them at some point serve somebody.

It was part of the review criteria and went into the scoring. And so if we were going based on that, that was part of multiple things that were being scored to get to a score, the problem is the scoring here. And so, you know, they could have served five or 50, I don't know, but if they check yes in the application, they're checking yes to that and they're providing an estimated or there was not backup for that to sort of show how or any outcomes.

So out of those 36, it's a quick look through of each application. If any of those 36 said no, let's break up that 8,000 to our own residents who are paying for it.

That's an easy compromise. That's a very easy compromise.

Does that affect the new charities that applied to them?

Well, because they would be serving Thornton residents currently, even if they hadn't been funded. So the question is not how many have you used TAF funding for to serve. It is how many residents do you serve?

I just want to make sure we're not going to leave off the newer system to put in place as well.

I think we'll need to get into that with the revamping. But again, you know, if you're not doing anything for our residents and our residents are paying for it, maybe it's 34 instead of 36. That's my only request and I can get on board and we can.

Let's go with that. Just show hands to support that proposal. of if they checked no for Thornton residents, then they are off the list. And the rest, any of them that checked yes, that met the intent, that didn't get a zero, will get the split evenly. Okay. Is that clear enough? My goal is to get this out as quickly as possible since we've already delayed a couple of months.

Yeah, I don't mean to throw us back in the weeds, but that's a real quick one. I think that would mean something to our residents since they are the ones paying for it.

Agreed.

We'll bring this to your agenda for adoption next week. There is a next step in terms of working through the contract documents with each of the organizations. There will be a little bit. Well, there will be more workload for the staff in terms of getting all that those contracts and payment consideration get paid on Wednesday. That's right. So we'll work as efficiently through that. But this is a higher number of organizations to contract with than we have done in the past. So I do want to acknowledge that to summary, we'll work as quickly and efficiently as we can once this gets approved. But there is some more administrative work to happen once we get that council direction.

Tansy, I'll just say we will communicate with all of the applicants so they have a status update as well, and we committed that to them when we updated them in June as well.

Thank you.

Thank you for coming in this evening. I know it's very brief and you've been sitting here for over an hour, but I appreciate you coming back in.

This is my 10th year I came back. And I don't want to minimize the work Taft did. You know, having done this years and years, how hard that job is and how you do what you can do. And you also know that we get new council members every two years and have a similar conversation, right? So thank you for your patience for helping us work through this. And we look forward to the next round of data that we can look at. Thank you. All right. We need to take a five-minute break. Yeah, let's do that. Let's talk about the Justice Center.

Thank you, counsel. This is a topic we spent a little bit of time at your retreat in, in terms of talking about policy interests, in terms of thinking about municipal justice system, which is really that intersection between the court, prosecutors, police, code enforcement, In some cases, stormwater or other life safety kinds of issues. Do you want to acknowledge Judge Soros is in the back and she is available for questions or comments. Do you want to thank both her and Tammy? I think this has been a real team effort in terms of from early days that Tammy and I thinking about where we thought there were opportunities. We appreciate the feedback that the council gave. I think That allowed us to add some elements to this. Since that time, Kevin Forgett has joined our office. He's going to be leading the RFP process and managing the project. We just wanted to get a brief touch point with you. We have prepared a request for proposals and are prepared to begin the solicitation process, but we wanted to do one last check-in just to make sure there was alignment in terms of the project goals. And so with that, I'll give the floor to Kevin.

Thank you, Tansy. Good evening, Mayor. Mayor Pro Tem, members of Council. Is this going to work for me today or not? There we go. All right. I went too far now. So as Tansy mentioned tonight, we will just provide a quick update and provide the next steps for the city's municipal justice master plan study. We'll go through the background. We'll talk just briefly about what will be covered in the study itself. Talk about the governance structure that's in place and then kind of go through the RFP and the next steps. So just as a refresher, just providing a bit of some background. As many of you have heard, as part of the recent organizational evaluation, a recommendation was made to examine the supervisory alignment of the municipal court. and administrative staff. Additionally, we've seen that the court has continued to see growth, which has created both opportunities and challenges. Just last year, there were over 16,000 cases. Given those caseloads, we've seen that the court has had to rely on contracted associate judges. Over 500 hours were worked just last year. And then, of course, you've heard about the conversion to paperless processing, which has created some great efficiencies and made some real improvements, but also has created some new challenges. And then, of course, the court will continue to be impacted by state laws, new policies, and programmatic priorities. So the master plan will look to examine and provide some operational and policy impact. So looking at the short-term decision-making processes around the municipal court administration alignment, as we mentioned, and then from a longer-term perspective, looking at a roadmap to support the decision-making and how can we build a local justice system that best responds to community law violations. So again, looking both at the short-term and long-term success of the justice system. So just really quickly wanted to highlight the governance structure that will help go through this process and work through the master plan. We have both an executive committee and a steering committee. So first, we'll start with the governance of the executive committee members. We have presiding Judge Soros. We have the city manager, Tansy Hayward, and city attorney, Tim Yelicoe. So they'll provide executive oversight of the plan itself. They will help participate in the vendor selection process. They'll provide guidance and feedback throughout the process, obviously recognizing we want to recognize the independence of the vendor that's selected to conduct the study. But again, we'll provide guidance. some additional feedback throughout the process. And then once the study has been completed, they will look at the report, accept the final report, provide feedback, and then we'll bring it forward to City Council for consideration with operational and policy considerations. Next is the steering committee. I've listed all the members of the steering committee on this slide. The members have been selected based on their area of expertise and their subject matter expertise to help inform this process. We'll just take a minute to thank them because they were really instrumental in helping us get to a place that we have a final scope of services. So they were able to refine that, review that, and help us get us to the place we're at today. Throughout the process, the steering committee will also participate in the vendor selection process. If there's data that's needed throughout that the vendor will need, they will help provide that and continue to be subject matter experts throughout the process. And then as the report gets closer to completion, they will evaluate the recommendations, think about the implementation and potentially some of the costs. And so again, we'll be a real pivotal group to help us get to the final report. We also just wanted to highlight some of the major themes that will be seen in the RFP that we're hoping the vendor will implement into the study itself. So first is just evaluating the realignment of administrative duties. So as we mentioned, this will measure the impacts and resources on governance. it'll look at decision-making and we will ask them to research best practices, looking at peers and others for potential implementation. Next up, second is just developing information to inform intergovernmental impacts and strategy. This will include analyzing where we can see municipal versus county functions. There'll be a focus on domestic violence. And then also identifying additional benefits of looking at additional benefits of local regulations versus state law regulations. Third is taking a look at technology in court facilities. Obviously, with growth, there's no opportunity to consider court case management systems, taking a look at cross-departmental information, and then, of course, looking at the physical building itself in the courtroom facilities. And then finally, the last theme is around municipal justice system programs and innovations. So we'll ask the vendor to look at and review potential levels of service and scoping around a series of programs and innovations, as you can see on the bullets there on number four there. So just getting into next steps, as Sandy mentioned, we've been working really hard on finalizing the RFP. We expect to get the RFP to go live, hopefully within even the next week or two, hoping to get the vendor selection process by the end of this quarter, early quarter four, and then getting the master planning, the master plan study up and running by the end of this year. So with that, I'm happy to open it up to any questions.

Any questions? You made that way too easy. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Budget preview.

Budget preview. So I'm not sure we did this presentation quite this way in the last year, but from a philosophical perspective, I do believe that the budget is one of the most important policy documents that all of us work on. each year. And so we have started the administrative part of the process in terms of developing projections, understanding base needs of departments and the requests for that departments have in terms of growth and service pressures. Tonight, I want to be really clear, and you're going to hear this multiple times for the presentation. We are at the starting line, not the finish line of the budget process, but did want to approach this process with transparency to let you know where we are in a starting position so that everybody has some context for the challenges that we're going to be facing, both in developing a recommended budget and that you might see in a final budget recommendation. We're going to be doing a similar presentation by city employees this Thursday so that they can be aware to generally have both the pressures on revenues and the resource needs that we're facing. And so we've got in it and Kim Newhart here. Some of this will potentially the information similar that you've seen in the past in terms of policy framework that we have around the budget, the way that we handle both sort of the short-term and long-term sustainability of our decision making. And then we will give you a sense of some of the data that at this point I would say is still preliminary. We still have a little bit of time to refine both our revenue and expenditure projections. But we're getting to a point where this is going to be pretty close. We don't have a lot more time to assemble new information to inform our decision making. There is the possibility by the time we get to a recommended budget, you'll see some slight changes in projections. But I think we generally feel comfortable that these are some of the trends that we believe are going to persist as we get into the budget process. So with that, I'll give the floor to Erica. Thanks, Tansy.

Good evening, Mayor, Mayor Pro Tem and Council. I'm Erica Sena, Budget Director here with Kim Newhart, our Finance Director. So tonight, the purpose of this, as Tansy mentioned, is really to provide you all with a preview of the 2027 budget process. That includes just general high-level overview of our financial management, Financial management philosophy. What are some of our goals that feed into that philosophy? And then we'll talk high level modeling. So this is really, again, like big picture. And then we're going to be focused on the general government. That's kind of that's our biggest fund. It's where the majority of our services are funded out of. public safety, traffic engineering, et cetera. Then we get into high level, what does the budget development process look like? Where are the different inputs coming from? Where are we in the process? Third up, we will talk financial outlook. So in order to build the 2027 outlook, we really had to look at what's happening in 2026. And so we've talked previously with you all about what we're experiencing early on. I think we talked to Q1 what we were experiencing for 2026. This is an update to that information and it feeds right into what we're anticipating for 2027. Next, we get into takeaways and next steps, sort of the so what of the presentation, followed by discussion and questions. So stepping into financial management first. So really big picture, this first bullet is a key tenant to our philosophy, and that is to balance our available financial resources within these different priority areas. And I think of these four different areas as having sort of a natural tension between them, that they include maintaining levels of service. And that could include anything from the services residents currently expect or businesses currently expect, as well as capital maintenance. So making sure that our roads are maintained or buildings are maintained, et cetera. The next one is enhancing current or creating new levels of service. So oftentimes this is sort of not necessarily for all of the strategic plan items, but certainly for some of them, we are looking to sort of go like, what's on the next frontier? You know, what else could we offer or what could we do better? The third one is remaining competitive in the labor market. You're going to see on a future slide that Personnel costs make up a huge portion of our general government budget. And so this maybe wouldn't make the list necessarily, except it is such a key part of the budget, such a large part of the budget, that we really need to consider it when we're balancing these other areas. And then fourth is financial sustainability. So we're kind of taking these three different resource ads or resource request type sectors. And we are comparing that to the financial sustainability overall of the organization. And so of course, anytime that you're adding resources somewhere, there is that natural tension between that and financial sustainability. The second major bullet is to prepare a balanced budget. We're required to do this. And what that means is that ongoing revenues meet or exceed ongoing expenditures. This is something we watch closely and we actually look and we'll talk about it a little bit later on. We look to make sure that that is true, not just this year, but in future years as well. And then lastly, we are looking to meet or exceed our financial sustainability goals now and in the future and what are those goals so they're really different by fund um so when you think about the general government that includes the general fund and the governmental capital fund the goal that we have shared with you all in prior years for a number of years now is what we call a five-year inflection point and that is where we are modeling to no longer have a balanced budget and then a 10-year zeroing out point. And that is related to no longer having any available fund balance. I'm going to get into more on that in a lot more detail on the next slide. The next one is we have some capital project funds. You can think about this like the TDA funds, so TDA North, TDA South, et cetera. We also have a number of special revenue funds. So these are our Parks and Open Space Fund, Road and Bridge Fund, et cetera. These are funds that typically we sort of build up a fund balance to then spend it down in support of high priority expansion projects. So they tend to be, so these funds work significantly differently than a fund that has a lot of operating ongoing costs like the general fund might have. And so we have different goals around it. We also want to make sure in these funds as it's appropriate by fund that we're maintaining sufficient capacity within those funds to cover ongoing capital maintenance. So for example, there are certain funds that we cannot use to cover capital maintenance. in the special revenues. But then there's others where it's absolutely allowed and encouraged. And so we want to make sure that if we are currently relying on that capacity to maintain assets, that we are continuing to utilize those funds for maintenance in the future. Otherwise, if we didn't, if we started loading up those funds with expansion capital, we might not have the ability to cover maintenance in the only fund that could cover it, which would likely be the general fund. And then lastly are the utility funds. So this is water, sewer, stormwater, and sanitation. And again, these funds have different goals. That is because we set the rates for these. So we're in the general government. We are not quite as in control of the revenues coming in. In these funds, we have a bit more control. But we do have goals around it. We don't want to just raise rates, raise rates, raise rates. We want to make sure that we have stable but conservative rates, rate increases. um that we meet our required debt ratios uh that we meet our fund reserve requirements and that we don't utilize those reserves unless of a true emergency and again that we maintain sufficient capacity to cover um excuse me maintenance and expansion capital as well and so that's sort of hopefully that grounds us all in what our goals are for these different types of funds So as I mentioned on the last slide, and I think this is, again, we spend the most time talking about the general government because it's where the majority of our services are funded. So our financial sustainability goal as it relates to the general fund is a five-year inflection point and a zeroing out at 10 years. That's sort of our minimum goal. I think of that as sort of like the floor. So what this graph illustrates is this is a graph that we showed you as part of the 2026 budget recommendation. And what it showed was that based on the recommendation, the information we had at that time and the recommendation that we were presenting to you all, we were surpassing our financial sustainability goals. So the dark blue columns, that is available fund balance. So that is above and beyond any reserves we have in the general government. You'll notice that there is a little bit of a trend downward, and that is because we are still projecting in our model an inflection point. And that inflection point is shown between the orange line, which are expected ongoing revenues, and the light blue line, which are expected ongoing expenditures. And so you can see that in about 2033, between 2032 and 2033, we were modeling the inflection point at that time. And so at that point in time, you start seeing this drop off of fund balance because we're no longer adding to the bank account. We are now actually utilizing that bank account to pay for ongoing services. I just want to note, and I'll say this again later, this is purely, I mean, this is a model. So it's a tool. We know it's not perfectly accurate. And our goal is never to actually hit the inflection point. It is never to hit the zeroing out point. It is for us to utilize this like a tool and make sure that those that... those factors in the model stay at that distance from us. And by doing that, by keeping the inflection point pushed out five years, by keeping the zeroing out point pushed out 10 years, what we're allowing ourselves to do is we're giving ourselves capacity that if we experience revenue shortfalls, if we go into a recession, that it gives us flexibility where we don't have to react too quickly. We can take a moment to think about our decisions moving forward because we have the capacity. We're not sort of living on the razor's edge. And so that's how this philosophy was developed. So now I'll turn it over to Kim.

So the pictures on the screen illustrate kind of that level of confidence that we have as we move closer into each budget year. So you can see in the out years, it's cloudy. We can't really see what's ahead. Big, vague assumptions built. As shown in the previous graph, projections further into the future just carry that uncertainty, right? And so as we get closer, the economy changes. We start to understand development trends. We start to better understand our operational needs. And so we can kind of start to dial it in. As we prepare the 2027 budget, we have more current information available. than when the long-term forecast was developed. So basically, this is just going to allow us to refine revenue and expenditure assumptions and make those informed budget decisions. For 2027, those refinements are especially important, just given the sales tax volatility and the slower development activity and the ongoing cost pressures that we're facing. Like Tansy mentioned, the annual budget is one step in this process, right? We're at the first step in a process that's also part of a much bigger process. Think about financial planning. And as to Erica's point, long-term planning really is going to allow us to adjust and adapt as we go forward, keeping the city resilient and on a sustainable path long-term. Devin?

So I have a question regarding the last slide that was up there. And the last slide showed from 2026 to 2027, there's a massive drop in expenditures. What was the root cause of that big drop before everything started going back up?

I don't want to speak out of turn. I don't know off the top of my head, but I'm happy to get back to you on what it is. It is in all likelihood a capital expenditure, a one-time expenditure that dropped off in 2027, but I'm happy to follow up on that.

It looks like it's like a $7 million to $8 million drop, so I was just curious.

You will notice in 2028, revenues drop off as well, and that is related to TDA.

TDA comes in to the general government in 2028. I'm not sure. Sorry. Bringing up more questions.

Happy to follow up with you on that.

Some of what we're going to be sharing with you later in the presentation, we've actually pulled some grant things out because that adds some volatility to some of these numbers as well.

So we use consistent long-term modeling framework across all of our funds. You can see the funds on the left-hand side. just to provide that view of long-term financial sustainability. Each of our models have core components, ongoing and one-time revenues, debt financing and related payment requirements. We have the known expenditures, both ongoing and one-time, projected fund balance levels to ensure reserve requirements are maintained. And these models help us understand that every impact that we make, every decision that we make today impacts the future. So if you add a one-time ongoing expenditure, that's not going to roll forward to the next year. But if you add five FTEs, that continues to roll forward and compound over the next few years. So we're using these models to understand all of those impacts that we make today and how they roll out into the future. So how do we build these? Models are built using data-driven assumptions. They basically provide the framework for this long-term evaluation. So we begin with historical trends, where they provide meaningful insight. And then we also look behind those trends and understand what's actually driving those changes. And then whether those changes are sustainable over a long period of time. The models also incorporate forward-looking economic drivers, including national, state, and local forecast factors such as inflation, interest rates, the broader economic conditions influence both revenues and expenditure projections. We also rely heavily on departments and their expertise to understand what the development picture looks like, what are our operational needs, service demands, and the future cost pressures that we face. We consider policy and external factors, so legislation impacts at the federal, state, and local level. They're evaluated, and this can influence, again, both revenues and expenditures. Rates, fees, and external cost pressures are incorporated into the models. Those changes can either be driven by council decisions, and those are rates coming into us, or they can be outside factors, such as utility and energy costs. What we wouldn't do is apply a flat inflation rate across the board to every expenditure when we know that utilities or insurance go up at different variables. Grants are modeled once they're awarded. We pay particular attention to grants that support ongoing personnel. We want to understand if that grant goes away, what's that long-term impact of the personnel? We also distinguish between what's a one-time recurring revenue and expenditure and what is an ongoing revenue and expenditure. And then finally, on both sides of the model, we take a very conservative approach to our assumptions. And this is just basically protecting our ability to maintain the service levels we have and then respond to the future. So key drivers in our current budget here, once the long-term framework's established, we refine the model by evaluating the key drivers that can change the financial outlook from year to year. So for revenue projections, we're closely monitoring factors like sales tax performance. We look at population growth, development activity, and any other economic indicators that would change that. On the expenditure side, We're looking at inflation trends. We're looking at labor market conditions. We're looking at the trajectory of personnel costs and what they might do. And all of these are going to represent a significant portion of the ongoing city operations. And you'll see that in the next slide. We also monitor more factors, including the broader economic outlook. So inflationary pressures on households, interest earnings that play a part, and the timing and availability of our grant funding. And then finally, we have policy and institutional impacts, legislative changes, rate and fee decisions, and development policies all have a meaningful impact on the city's financial position. So these key drivers allow us to adjust and ensure the model reflects the most current information that we have as we move into each budget cycle. So if you think back to that picture, the closer we get to the year we're budgeting for, the more we're going to know and the more we can dial in those numbers. This slide gives you a visual breakdown of both revenues and expenditures for the general government. So revenues are on your left, expenditures are on your right. Erica walked through on the graph and she showed you the inflection point where expenditures start to outpace revenues. Before we can talk about tools that influence those, it's important to understand what's driving our revenues and what's driving our expenditures. So the pie chart on the left shows by category Each one of our revenue sources and what you'll see is taxes so sales tax use and other taxes and property tax make up 70% of the city's revenues. These are revenue sources that we have the least control and they're the most sensitive to the economic conditions. And then I want to note that many development related revenues that we're going to discuss, which is kind of the hot topic right now, are included in the use tax and license and permit categories on the chart. We don't separate development out all by itself. But these are directly impacted anytime development changes.

the expenditure side i think the big takeaway here is personnel is like the biggest and baddest on the block like it it is far and away our biggest expenditure in the general fund and that is true just generally speaking in operating funds um this is important because it is also one of our least flexible expenditures and it tends to grow at a faster pace than other expenditures um and so And that is just in part because if you think about what is included in personnel, it's things like health insurance, pay raises, FTEs being added. And so when you think about it that way, it's kind of not surprising. Those things tend to, like when we're adding them, they may increase faster than CPI is increasing. There is the potential that if we're not experiencing growth on the revenue side and that's just growing potentially by inflation, you know, if 75 percent of our costs are personnel driven, you know, that is that is really what's driving the model to show that inflection point.

So now that you've seen the makeup of revenue and expenditures, the next question is, what tools does council and management have to influence that long-term trajectory, right? And these are important to just keep in mind as we go through the budget cycle and through the year. Under our current assumptions, expenditures naturally increase over time. with inflation and all of our operational needs. Revenue is more dependent on economic conditions, growth, and policy decisions. So without changing the assumptions or intentionally creating an action, the difference will always create a structural balance. So we will always zero out and out for being conservative on the expenditure side, but on the revenue side, we're assuming that it's just a very slow economic process. increases, we're not making any policy changes. So as a reminder, this slide highlights the revenue and expenditure tools available to influence that trajectory. So on the revenue side, these tools range from anywhere from policy decisions, such as a ballot measure, adjustment to your fees and charges and targeted land use or economic development strategies to more technical decisions, such as adjusting long-term growth assumptions based on updated information. Um, each of these tools comes with trade-offs. So for example, increasing taxes can provide additional resources to support our levels of service. Um, but it's also going to impact affordability for residents. So, um, another thing is, you know, encouraging commercial development can expand the tax base, but it also might influence the character and the future growth of the city to build out. Um, we do have, um, established several spot teams around the city. And some of these are focusing on the long-term challenges that we have. One specifically is focusing on city revenues and their goal of exploring the new revenue sources. They're going to review existing revenues. They're evaluating cost recovery practices. And then they're going to work at the end with council to develop a broader philosophy around fees and charges. So if you look at our model right now, we're not baking in that you're gonna do a golf course increase or an active adult center meal increase or any ambulance fee increases into the model. So if you're not baking those in, but your costs associated are going up, that's where you cross paths.

So similarly, we do have tools to impact expenditures and expenditure growth. And if we can control expenditures, then that helps us in terms of long-term sustainability. And so the first is change growth to wages or benefit plans. Then we have change FTE growth. This previously had said change assumptions of FTE growth, change assumptions to growth to wages and benefit plans. But I wanted to get rid of the word assumptions because to me that feels like passive. It feels like this is just like a theoretical exercise we're doing as opposed to something that we might be doing like, in real time in next year's budget, let's say. And so I just wanted to note the distinction. Maybe that's just a nuance in my own head, but I do think of those. We do have change assumptions related to levels of service or programs and projects. So right now, if you think about what's going on in the model, we assume levels of service continue, like sort of continue as is, with a certain amount of growth built in, but not very much. So we're not assuming that new programs are starting and old programs that aren't utilized are ending. It's really sort of like status quo is what's going on. And then lastly, we could change how the city maintains city infrastructure and equipment. Similar to what Kim mentioned, there are trade-offs here. So if we change growth to wages or benefit plans, we may... we may sacrifice some market competitiveness, our ability to hire the employees that we want to hire for cost effectiveness or financial sustainability. If we change FTE growth, if we limit FTE growth, we are potentially being more adaptable and making sure that we're adapting our programs to what is most important to the city at any given time and to our residents at any given time versus predictability and the ability to prioritize new FTEs. Also similar to Kim, there are a number of strategic plan operational teams that are focused on these different areas. So three spots that I'd like to recognize, two of them are really working in parallel. It's actually the same group members on on the two spots. So the first one is an inventory of services. And this also includes an inventory of sort of what is providing X service cost. And so the idea here is to be able to give you all really detailed information on what are all of the services provided at the city and what are the costs and revenues associated with those services. And then the second spot that's closely associated is a spot that's setting up a performance management program. And so the idea there is once we have an inventory of those services and we best understand what the current goal level of service is, we can then track performance measurements around those levels of service to see, are we hitting our goals? Are we overshooting them? And maybe we're A plus students, maybe we can back off a little bit, et cetera. The other spot I wanted to recognize was related to how the city maintains city infrastructure. So we do have a spot related to deferred maintenance. This is mostly related to fleet facilities. It could include other city infrastructure. It's really not related to the utilities, but it's again, more to do with fleet and facilities. How do we currently maintain them? How do we model that maintenance in the future? And then they're also going to be working on recommendations for changes. So that is a really high level overview of our financial management. Now we'll get into what does the budget development process look like this year? So first I wanted to talk about what the different touch points were with council and the community. These are sort of the different ways That input from council and the community comes into staff that helps us develop a recommendation to present to you all. So first is the council retreat that happened at the very end of January this year. And this is where we can get a sort of a read from you all on where your priorities live. We did a big focus this year on the strategic plan. And so we are definitely focusing on tying our budget to that strategic plan. Next up, again, the strategic planning effort itself. There's an update coming on July 21st to talk about where are we in this plan and are we on track? We're going to be asking for feedback from you all. Then community feedback on the city survey. This is really sort of big picture. What we're looking for when we check out the city survey is what's going well, what's not going well, and then what are some of the priorities of our community? And just, it's a bit of a gut check to make sure that we are aligning with what those priorities are. We did have a... a survey that went out to the community on feedback we requested for funding priorities for the 2027 budget. It was a quick survey. It was about three questions long. It closed the 4th of July. It was open for a month. And we are planning on showing those results to you all during the budget presentation in September. We also are coming back to council August 18th to talk utility funds rate and fee discussion. That influences the budget because based on what rates we're setting, that is going to impact what we can fund in the utility funds. Then we have our preliminary budget recommendation, September 1st. This is really, it's not the nuts and bolts of the budget. This is high level. What are the key investments included in this budget? And does that... Is that what you were all looking for? Are we missing anything? That's what that meeting is about. And then finally, September 15th and 29th, we have the budget, the full budget review meetings, which are much more detailed.

Before we move on, Justin.

Oh yeah, so what's the process of ingesting this feedback and getting it into the actual proposals that you'll present to the council?

and does it you know is it change on for each different item that you have or how do you get all that information and translate it into what you what you propose to us well i think part of it is that it you know honestly it relates a lot to like active listening and then and then some analysis so when i think about the council retreat community feedback on city survey Community feedback that that survey that just went out. I think that is about listening to what you all are saying. I mean, in part, that is why staff attends these events. And certainly I feel like part of why I'm attending. I'm in attendance at these events is to understand better what items council is saying, like, this is a priority for me. And I think that if we're hearing that from council, this is a priority, then that is certainly influencing what is showing up in the budget recommendation. Similarly, I think of the strategic plan, I think council stated, you know, this is priority. This was adopted by council. You all want to see these 60 plus action items happen. And so to me, like that is a known priority of council. And so what we're trying to do as part of this budget is make sure that those priority items are being considered and potentially funded based on financial feasibility. But I don't think there's, there's no like a direct flow chart where I could say, first we, you know, we do this, then we go to this step, you know, it's, there's a little bit of process of osmosis going on.

Okay. Are the items that we see here consistent ear to ear?

yes the only one that i would say so there are some new items here i think the strategic planning effort is new it was adopted in 2025 we did our best to include items in the 2026 budget but it was really those those connections were relatively tenuous um and so i do think that this year those connections are going to be significantly more concrete um and that's something that i see happening moving forward The community feedback on the 2027 funding priorities, that was a new initiative from the budget office just to understand a little bit better what the community was thinking in terms of what would they like to see funded. Again, it was a quite simple survey, just three questions, but we wanted to take the temperature of the community. The other items are all pretty similar. similar to what we've done in past years.

The community feedback is closed now after the 4th. Yes. Do you know how many people participated?

The last time I checked, and I checked before it closed, there were over 100 individuals who participated online. We also had a booth at Thornton Fest, and we had several folks participate there as well. Thanks. So that's sort of, you know, that last slide was focused on council and the community. And then what are the major touch points that occur with city staff? So I think big picture development of the budget is a team sport. It is not occurring like, you know, we're not hunkering down in a silo doing this. It's really all of the departments are involved in one way or another. So This year, we have a newly formed capital governance committee. Basically, there are stakeholders from every single department that sits on this committee that reviews all of the capital requests through all of the funds and prioritizes them through a number of key factors. We also have a fleet committee. This is Again, number of departments that work on this IT steering committee. So, you know, don't need to go through all of them. But I think it's just important to note that everyone is involved in this process and in creating the budget. And as mentioned previously, we are integrating the strategic plan into this effort. So individual teams, we call them spots, are putting forward resource requests that are then being reviewed through the budget process. They are going through the same review process as all other requests, but we are recognizing them as, you know, this was a request directly from a spot, and that means something.

We're going to switch gears a little bit and talk about 2026. As we start building the 27 budget, we want to understand where we expect to finish 2026. Those projections provide basically a foundation or a new starting point in some of our revenue estimates. And so if you think about it in terms of like sales tax, if we have a sales tax year, we're going to use that as our kind of our new base. And then we're going to move from there. We're going to say, okay, it might go up for population or commercial growth or inflation. And so everything, some of them, we might, it might be a unique year. And so we won't change it moving forward. But it's really important for us to dial in 26 before we can work on 27. So, Looking at the numbers, we want to look at the broader economy, right? Not just Thornton. See what's happening around us. Right now, we're really focused in on two economic indicators. One is consumer spending. The other one is development activity. These are the two biggest drivers of our city's revenue and the general government fund. Development activity, if you remember the graph I've shown in the past, is low. It's like on year two of a 10-year high that we were having amazing development and now we've slowed down. And we expect that to kind of continue through the end of this year and possibly into next. That's gonna impact all of our growth related revenue streams. We've got building use tax, development fees, permit fees. And then consumer spending is also an important indicator that we're watching really closely. If you listen and hear on the news, everybody's concerned about where people are spending money and how they're spending their money and there's no consumer confidence. We We definitely are hearing that. And we're seeing that in a way that we're seeing a shift. We're not seeing a drop yet in our sales tax, but we are seeing a shift in where that tax is spent. So, you know, maybe it shifted from vehicle to grocery. Right. And so usually what that'll tell us is there's like it's kind of a precursor of things to come. And so we're we haven't. We haven't seen the decrease yet, but we are paying attention. On the expenditure side, we know that construction costs continue to be impacted by higher material prices. This creates pressure on our capital projects and our operating budgets. And so for the rest of 2026, we're really planning for an economy that's kind of unstable, right? There's still a lot of uncertainty out there. We might be seeing kind of a stable revenue path, but we're not going to assume that that's going to maintain all year long. So we are being conservative of where we think we're going to end 2026. And then that will help again, that helps build that foundation for 2027. So this slide, it summarizes just the general government where we're going to end. So that first column is our major revenue sources.

So one of the things that we repetitively hear all the time is there's a shortage in housing and things need to be built up. So we're seeing a slowdown in construction activity. An idea that I think would be a good consideration for us to look into as a city would be to see about reducing permit costs if the developer can complete construction of projects within a certain timeframe in order to expedite one, the housing situation that we have that's going on with everything, but then also two, to offset some of the tariff costs or the prolonged construction costs that may come with that. And since permitting is only like what, 4% of our budget, it's not taking a huge hit in that sense, but it is kind of helping with some of our strategic and master plan initiatives down the road as well. So from a budgetary standpoint, I'd like to see like if that would be feasible for one and two, if it would be something where, um, It could be achieved not necessarily taking the full cost of a permanent off, but maybe we reduce it if we say if you finish the project within six months, then you know what types of permanent costs in half, which will help you with some of the costs that you're absorbing for construction.

Where's the rest of Council think of that idea.

I mean, I love the idea of faster timelines and incentives tied to that, but I think we've had this conversation before, or it's a continuing conversation around limited staff capacity to fast-track things. It's not necessarily that the builder can't build it in six months. It's that the process time.

John Gerstle, No i'm saying that would process after the the permanent process has been set, because if it's if it's slow on our part that's slow on our part that's not the builders fall. John Gerstle, But once we're saying hey everything's completed done now the builder can start, if you can get it done within a certain time. Okay, we give you a rebate on that or whatever, just didn't come back to that.

So if I take that and move it up to the policy perspective, because our job is not to direct staff to do specific activity, right? Is to look at a bigger policy question. It wouldn't be, can we cut the price of the permits? The question would be, what can we do to expedite housing? Correct. And so that, I think that's the direction that we can give staff as we are interested in expediting housing, whether that's permitting or finding other creative ways to do that, that would be up to staff to figure out. So- Does that make more sense on a policy perspective? Justin, you want to add?

Yeah, along the lines of what you said, Jan, is, you know, I like the idea, I think, making it a broader investigation. I wasn't thinking as broad as you were, Jan, but the idea is finding ways to incentivize builders to move quicker and um to lower their costs because their costs are going to be transferred over to the the people who buy the properties so um yeah i like that idea i just think that we should you know not not limit it in scope as much as uh the initial suggestion was but we'll look at other look at ways with to fulfill that objective yeah so it's chris you can see yeah there's a lot of ways to work around that like if we were to talk just tap fees

know improve any tabbies based on lot sizes there's a quick way to earn just as much income but reduce the individual tax fees for those properties so yeah like the larger actually wouldn't be to do tap is it'd be to look at the holistic approach including yeah i'm agreeing with you i'm just giving you another example conversations with the builders about and with the Builder Association, HBA, and they already have those suggestions and ideas. It's whether or not we can implement and, you know, in a cost-effective way that isn't in detriment to the city. So I support that investigation and data that we would get back because I know it's already done.

HAB-Juliette Boone, Yes, so I appreciate the feedback. A couple of things of affirmation. So we do have a housing choice study ongoing, which will look at our processes and ways that we can accelerate our permitting and potentially provide Uh, incentives and other kinds of things. Uh, we can provide a just a quick update just to remind people soon. Uh, the Council and the public, the scope and timeline of that project. Uh, the Council did previously give feedback for us to re, uh, consider. our tap fees in light of new development patterns. I know that work is ongoing. That's a holistic rate model that has to be equitable across all the rate payers. And so I think that process has begun to work through that. There's a lot of data analysis that has to look into consumption and other kinds of things. So I don't believe that we'll have any TAP fee recommendations ready for this year's budget. But I think the goal, Kim, is that that could be ready for action for 2028. Is that correct? That's correct. So to affirm, I think the Council has been clear in the past of interest in both of those things. I think we do have some ongoing... HAB-Juliette Boone, meetings with HBA and home builders and can certainly ask HAB-Juliette Boone, I will say, honestly, I think the feedback that we're getting from the home building. community at this point. I don't know that it's local factors that are as much influencing their decision about new building starts at this point as it is more macro interest rate kinds of considerations and broader economic pieces. But we can ask our city development team that meets with the HBA again if there are things that they think in the near term that would accelerate or incentivize particularly residential home development.

I think that also lines with the conversation we had about, you know, prop, well, the affordable housing, sorry, brain not working this late, but that we wanted to do expedited housing for everybody, not just for affordable housing, because it's important for every scope. So that seems to be in line with what we've asked, so.

I will add this isn't unique to Thornton. This is definitely a national trend, a Colorado trend, and a Thornton rep. So we're seeing this across the board. We're not unique in the sense that we're seeing slower development.

Another organization that might be beneficial or have additional information would be AC Rep. They ran a panel and put together a lot of information around that I was part of, and it was for us to weigh in on.

Thanks. Was that it, Devin? For now?

For now. So this is our 2026 general governmental revenues. The first column is each of our major revenue sources. The second column is the original 2026 budget. The third column is our current year-end projections based on the actual results through May 31st. The next two columns show the projected dollar and percentage variance from budget. And then finally, the last column illustrates how sensitive these projections are by showing an impact of just 1% change in each revenue estimate. I don't expect you to remember these numbers, but really the takeaway here is the bottom of the table. Based on what we know today, everything that we know today, we're projecting general government revenues to finish 1.4 million or 0.6 below where we originally projected them when we did the projections back in 2025. The other important takeaway here is that far right column. We're only halfway through the year. Most of our revenue streams, our biggest revenue streams are a month behind, which is taxes. And so we really only have four months of taxes that we're able to use and analyze to make this data. And so, I think all these numbers are subject to change, right? And a relatively small change in our assumptions can move roughly, you know, you see a million dollars above what we originally projected to $3.8 million below. And that's why we're always looking at these revenue streams and we're always continuing to analyze them. Yeah. I do want to stress again, though, that we have to have a point in time, right? And so we have to say, okay, we have to decide what bucket of money are we going to use for 2027? And so these 2026 projections become that starting point for 2027. And so where we finish this year, that's how we're going to then develop what we think is going to happen in 2027. And so that's why this process is is important to do now and so that we can walk through the budget process. Go ahead. What's driving the projections that you just saw on that screen are our overall revenues are really close to budget, what we originally budgeted for. And there's a few variances. That largest one is building use tax. And that was lower than we originally expected when you look at single-family and multifamily development. And this is what we've been talking about. And that does change things for us. We're also projecting lower fines and forfeitures. And this is primarily due to a decline in traffic-related fines. This isn't a decline in number of stops. It's the decline in the associated fines that comes with those stops. Intergovernmental revenues are below budget for two reasons. First, the 2026 budget included a revenue sharing payment that ended in 2025. Then second, we are projecting lower police overtime reimbursements. One thing to note about police overtime is that there's a related expenditure, so really there really isn't a net impact there. So the good news here is that our major revenue source, which is sales tax is tracking right up right along with budget. But again, we saw the variance that can shift pretty quickly and change.

So on the expenditure side, so we don't wanna show you a problem on the revenue side and not show you a solution on the expenditure side or maybe a future solution. So currently in the general government, what I have here are two tables. The first table is the general fund. Those are our operating expenditures. And very similar to Kim, this shows what is the total budget, what is our projection point in time with data through May 31st, what is our projected over or under budget, the percentage, and then similar to Kim, what is a variance if you think about this in terms of 1 percent in either direction? So, we had a budget of $220 million in the general fund in 2026. We are currently projecting $3.4 million of savings. That's about 1.5 percent in savings. To give you all some perspective, we normally see between 1% and 1.5% in savings every year. We saw significantly more during COVID. That was a very different year for many reasons. But this is normal. The reasons behind that, those savings change year to year. So we don't see savings and go like, oh, we'll let it ride into the future. We are always updating future budgets to to make sure we're not over-appropriating known savings. So we do believe that we're going to have savings in the general fund. And then governmental capital, we think about a little bit differently. This fund includes current year appropriation of $53.8 million. And then it also includes prior year appropriation. So these are projects that tend to be multi-year projects and they roll from year to year. So you can see prior year, we had about 43 million that rolled over from prior years into 2026. Those projects, they're always sort of completing just throughout the year. So we're always looking for savings in those. We have identified about $2 million of savings in the governmental capital from prior year appropriation. This is not related to any projects being canceled. This is simply just projects being completed, closed out, and we had identified savings. And it comes from a number of projects. I'm happy to provide you all with a list. I don't have the detail on hand at the moment. And as Kim mentioned, there is some of the savings that Kim mentioned, officer off-duty pay, and then the... Westminster Revenue Sharing Agreement, but we also saw some expenditure savings. Part of that expenditure savings is showing up in GovCap related to Westminster Revenue Sharing, and then the officer off-duty pay is showing up in those projections in the general fund. So they are offsetting in nature. So what are the things driving these? So personnel savings are a big driver. right now in the general fund savings. And that's due to vacancies as well as health insurance. Health insurance, y'all may remember that last year we had a preliminary number when we finalized the budget. Once after the budget was finalized, health insurance was finalized and those rates came down. And so we knew that we would have savings in these accounts and they are realized in 2026. We also have some vacancies. They were held vacancies that we knew about. And so as the year progresses and those vacancies are filled through the reorg process, that savings will actually diminish slightly. We also have some additional savings in parks irrigation water since we're trying to reduce our consumption as part of our drought management. We have savings in multiple accounts and contracted services and then in snow and ice supplies as well. And then I mentioned previously the savings that we're experiencing in prior year capital projects. One thing, though, that I do want to know is that none of these savings are due to us cutting projects, cutting programming, holding staffing that are related to programs that residents, you know, are currently expecting services out of. Like, that is not happening. That would come to council. So... And the other thing I want to mention, I think I may have already noted it, but it's just that when we find savings that we believe will roll forward into future years, like we've experienced it this year, we think we're going to experience it in future years, we build that into the next year's budget.

All right, moving on to water. The other fund we want to talk about is water, simply because we've been talking a lot about drought and the water fund is not, HAB-Juliette Boone, To me it's it's projected revenue, the key takeaway again at the bottom is based on what we know today we're expecting the water fund to finish 7.1 million or 5.9% below budget. So I want to recognize that far right column again because we're only halfway through the year. So these projections are still subject to change. A relatively small change in our assumptions can move us roughly from 6 million under to 8.2 million. So we're watching consumption really closely in the water model. Unlike the general government, these projections are not the starting point for 2027. And I'll explain this a little bit more on the next slide. So driving the water projections, the largest revenue assumption is water consumption. For 2027, we're assuming usage returns to pre-drought levels, meaning there's no drought restrictions in place. But for 2026, we're assuming that people are reducing what we've asked them to. Development activity is also impacted. And when development's impacted, connection fee revenue is impacted. And so if you have less multifamily or less single family than you planned for, it can change that. We're seeing favorable variances and miscellaneous revenues. So that's primarily driven by PFAS settlement money that we got. We had some oil and gas revenues that were higher than we expected and some grant revenues. Many of these are one time and they're also less predictable revenue sources. So we don't plan for them. until they're certain. And then I, you know, just to kind of, I think it's important to understand that the waterfront is a little bit different, like Erica explained earlier than, than the general fund. And so we're always looking at a few years window, right? We're always gonna look at the five-year, 10-year plan. And we wanna make sure that even if development has slowed down a little bit, we're not gonna go raise rates because we didn't develop 50 homes that we thought we were, right? We're gonna take that into consideration over the long-term plan. A lot of the cost in the water fund is due to infrastructure related to new growth. So if you don't get those connection fees to pay for new growth, that growth then gets pushed out.

So on the expenditure side, similar to how I showed general fund and GovCap, this is broken into water fund operating and water fund capital. So we are currently anticipating savings of about $4 million in the water fund on the operating side. And I'll get into the big drivers there. Again, that is our point in time projection. We think that some variants will occur throughout the year. This is just data through May. But it will be interesting to see in terms of utilization, how much water do we actually have to treat, et cetera. But as best we know, we're looking at about $4 million of savings on the operating side On the capital side, we have realized about $4 million of savings, again, of projects that have been completed and are closing out for the year. So right now, we have nearly matched the revenue shortfall in water with savings in 2026. You think about 2027, and that's kind of what we'll be talking about next. It's its own challenge. But we feel relatively comfortable that we are meeting the challenge in 26. So what is driving the water fund expenditures? Personnel savings. We also have some positions that are frozen in the water fund. There are savings in contracted services being recognized right now. And then as mentioned on the previous slide, we are seeing savings in water treatment supplies and utilities related to water treatment. We're not treating as much water. So this was to be expected. So what are some key considerations when we sort of close out our conversation on 2026? As Kim has mentioned multiple times, these projections play a really key role in the development of the 2027 budget. So we utilize the information we have now about 2027 and play it forward into 2027 as that makes sense. We do have some key challenges. We have slowing development. That is impacting not just the general government, but as you can see, it's impacting any funds that have development-related revenues associated. And then sales tax, though it's meeting projections right now, we do view that as a key risk, just given our portfolio of revenues. And then our response here is to identify for 2026, to identify short-term savings, which we've shown you previously. It's looking for those existing operational and capital savings to cover those 26 revenue shortfalls. And now we'll move into 2027.

So we're going to take what we learned from 2026 projections and use them as a starting point for the 2027 budget. This gives us a better understanding of where we're trending, allows us to build 2027 budgets from a more realistic baseline, rather than just simply carrying forward the original budget assumptions from 2026. So overall, we are expecting a more constrained revenue environment in 2027 compared to 26. The biggest factors, again, just a slower development activity, which impacts those growth-related revenues, and then more moderate consumer spending. Again, that's all the uncertainty around sales tax. At the same time, we continue to feed resource requests that exceed our projected revenue growth. So we're balancing the need to maintain those existing service levels while also addressing new operational needs. We continue to see pressure from the higher construction costs. We believe that'll carry into 2027, just like it did in 2026. And that impacts our capital on operating budgets. And then as we build the 2027, we're gonna continue to monitor those risks that we've been talking about. We don't think they're gonna disappear. So we're gonna monitor consumer spending and our sales tax activity development, and then any uncertainty still on state or federal funding. Um, to start out, um, there, there's a number of change on the slide that you have in front of you versus the slide that you see on your screen at the water fund change. Um, it was a typo. So this slide basically compares our original 2026 budget to our now projected 2027 revenue budget. HAB-Masyn Moyer- Across all of our funds, the purpose of this is just to show that the overall revenue picture. HAB-Masyn Moyer- For the entire city and then how we're seeing that. HAB-Masyn Moyer- Based on on 2026 so. One thing I want to note on this is this is a really consolidated view of all the funds. And so the changes shown here are adjustments across every single revenue stream we have. And so some of these numbers have nuances behind them that unless you dug into them, without having that context behind that number, it's really hard to understand the results. When we come back and talk through the final budget, we'll actually talk through what's driving those ups and downs. You can see we're $9.2 million down overall as a city when you take all of our funds into consideration. But again, this is the starting point for what the budget team then needs to use to put resources and support our expenditure asks and all of our services. and then to consider our future years. So, main drivers of our 2027 projections for our governmental funds, it's sales tax again, our largest revenue source. Like I said, we're modeling a very modest growth. We're considering it pretty stable to 2026 with slight inflation levels, but this is very different than what we've experienced historically. Historically, the city's had way above average sales tax growth for year over year for 10 years. We've had tax code changes. We've had significant retailers come in. And so it's important to know that we don't plan for this stuff until it happens, right? Until we know a new... Maybe a tax code is going to change or until a new development is going to come in. We're not going to put that in the model. And so we do have some years looking ahead that seem pretty low compared to what we're used to, right? We're used to pretty high growth. property tax is also remaining pretty constrained. As you all know, your property tax values increase every year, but we've had all kinds of state legislation to help limit that for our residents. And so the result back to the city is that we're not seeing any growth in that line. Our TDAs in 2027 are going to take a bigger hit. They're all commercial. And The change in the commercial valuation will impact those. You'll see those when we get into more detail. Development-related revenues, again, that's your building use tax and your permit fees. That's just kind of flat for that development. We are assuming that there's going to be a gradual recovery as interest rates come down and development will go back up, but there's a lot of uncertainty still of what that looks like. Charges for services and fines and fees. I mentioned earlier, we don't make any assumptions in the model that council is going to raise those fees until forward to council and council buys off on them. Then we'll plug those into the model and move forward. Right now, you're seeing that's flat. There's no fee adjustments. Overall, 2027 governmental revenues, it just reflects a slower growing revenue than you've probably seen in past years. A lot of this is really influenced by things that are out of our control and economic conditions. And so all of this, you saw the numbers, all of this then impacts what we can spend. Utility funds are a bit different, the revenue drivers. They're modeled with, like Erica said, a longer-term perspective, both revenues and expenditures. But they are tied closely to development patterns. They're tied to customer growth and infrastructure needs. So specific really to the water fund, the primary driver of any revenue growth is going to be the rate increase. We have a proposed rate increase of 3.6% coming to you, and that was scheduled for August 18th, and that would be the only thing driving that revenue up. We're also assuming that we go back to more of a normal consumption year, that we don't have a drought again. So Again, we're barely into the irrigation season. We're going to see how that plays out, and then we'll continue to watch that. We'll continue to watch through winter and then adjust if we need to for next year. Connection fee revenue is projected to increase. That also includes a proposed 3% fee adjustment that will come forward on August 18th. But again, growth is constrained by that development. And then also commercial size of a tap. So if it's a three inch versus a one inch can make a huge difference from year to year. So depending on what commercial is coming in. So commercial in 2027 is actually makes development fees go down when you compare year to year. So key takeaways for utilities is the projected revenue growth is primarily driven by rate increases rather than an increase in consumption or economic growth.

So on the expenditure side, As mentioned much earlier in the presentation, we have a lot of assumptions built into the model. So some of our assumptions include how many FTEs we're going to grow by, what are we anticipating health insurance to look like, What are other accounts going to grow by? And so what I've listed here includes what were we modeling and then what are we experiencing as part of resource requests in the 27 budget? So we had modeled the addition of eight new positions. as part of the 27 budget, we received 30 FTE requests from the departments. We had anticipated, you know, a moderate increase in pay and benefits. When we're looking at the benefits market right now, we are seeing inflationary pressures affect that market beyond what we had modeled for. And so that is certainly, we are seeing I'm not sure if I'd call it a resource request. We are seeing resource requests in that area much higher than what we had anticipated or what we had modeled. And then, again, generally all of our general expenses were expected to rise by inflation, which at the time when we were modeling was 2.8%. Inflation has since gone up. The estimate for the remainder of 2026 has gone up. to over 4%. But we are seeing several cost centers that are increasing well beyond even the 4%. Some of them we're seeing in the double digit increases. Some of these areas, overtime requests, utility requests, and software requests. And so none of these are necessarily for new things. They are really what we've been calling them base building. So it's sort of about continuing current levels of service and what would that cost us. So based on, before I jump to this slide, the other thing I would note is that when we were modeling these things, we were modeling in a different revenue environment. So we were modeling eight FTEs, but the revenue environment was healthier. And so now we've kind of got two things going on. We have a revenue environment that's stagnating, and then we have resource requests just base building requests well beyond what we had modeled. In our financial model right now, we're a little bit between a rock and a hard place. What this graph shows you is three different available fund balance scenarios. The dark blue line is modeled growth considering the new revenue environment. So you might remember, if you think back to the beginning of the presentation, what our available fund balance graph looked like at the beginning. We were zeroing out well beyond 2035. It was outside of the 10-year horizon. And it has decreased by, millions of dollars if you look out to 2035. And the reason for that is because if you think about our revenues, they were modeled to increase somewhat conservatively. What we're actually experiencing is, or what we are anticipating to experience is actually a decrease in revenues from 2026 to 2027. And so that is not just impacting 26 or 27, that is rolling into future years. And so that has an impact just with our modeled expenditures. We are now basically sitting at the floor of our financial sustainability goal of the 10-year goal. The light blue line is what I'm calling base building growth. So these are increases that include those items I mentioned earlier, health insurance, overtime, software, utilities, above and beyond what was being modeled, significantly higher than what was being modeled. And so you can see that just adding in those base building increases, We are not meeting our financial sustainability goal anymore. In fact, from this, it looks like we've got about four years from 2027 to right the ship. And so, you know, I won't hammer on about the model or the availability of this curve anymore. I think the important thing to note here, and I put it up earlier, On the side of the graph, two things. This is not, and Tansy mentioned at the beginning, this is not the end of our budget journey. So I am not here to share terrible news that we're going to hit the blue line. Sorry, guys, bad news. It's really just the beginning of it. And we use the financial model as a tool. It's not our fate. It's a tool. And so what we can do with this information is we can go, okay, revenue is stagnant. We need to respond in a variety of ways. One is sort of a long-term play. We need to explore revenue, you know, revenue options. But the other one, and maybe a more short-term thing that we can do is we can figure out how to slow our growth or find savings. And so, you know, that's really what we're looking at because we want to make sure that when we bring this budget recommendation to you all, that we're hitting that financial sustainability goal, that it is a balanced budget. And so that is our plan to bring you all that. I wanted to just share again our philosophy. This slide is identical to a slide I showed earlier in the presentation, and it's just talking about the interplay and the tensions that exist between all of these different items that are resource requests in the budget. Maintaining current levels of service, expanding levels of service, paying employees or increasing employee wages. financial sustainability. And so I want to stop here and just, you know, maybe give the floor to you all to see, do you have any questions or thoughts as it relates to these priorities or anything else we've shared?

So the main driving factor for our city is obviously sales tax. Do we know what the main contributor within that sales tax is as far as like more of an itemized thing without having outliers? So like example, I know that the distribution center and Target's probably gonna be an outlier.

That doesn't necessarily mean that Target's always our biggest seller, but more so from a- We can't share specifics about specific people, specific locations.

exactly and that's more what my ask is it's not specific company itself it's more generalizations and to see how we as a city can try to expand that category more from a regular development side of it to try to help boost that so our biggest category is general merchandise um so it's your you think about um and groceries so your

Your Walmarts and your Costcos and your big box stores, that's a whole variety of things. So we think of that as like necessity-based. Those are your main drivers. We also get a lot of revenue from things that aren't in the city, right? So several years ago, we changed our tax code. So now we make sure that we get our sales tax from, you don't have to have a physical presence in the city of Thornton. So you're in Texas and you're selling something to a Thornton resident, Thornton gets the tax for that. And so that boost our revenue. And so when you think about tax in Thornton, now we get to think beyond our local businesses, right? It's everything, every Thornton residents that's doing business, they're either at a physical location and we get the tax or they're getting stuff shipped to their house and we get the tax. So we do have a list of like top 100. We can share our top 10. So we can always share our top 10 list. We can't share it in one order, but like alphabetically, you know, we're allowed to share things like that with you.

And we did previously provide some of the key categories and what the revenue production, I think we included like restaurants, fast food, big box, local retail. I think we previously shared HAB-Juliette Boone, Produce that for you. We can look update that and provide that again. You do have a quarterly economic development update at next week's meeting and I know that HAB-Juliette Boone, We were working on that presentation earlier today. So I think the goal is to pull in some of the sales tax. and tax implications of different kind of strategies into that presentation. So hopefully we can answer that question multiple ways to support you.

Great. I mean, if we're seeing a direct correlation between the revenue flow coming in, decreasing, then that's an area that we need to be more highly focused on because it's clearly not sustainable.

Our main decreases in... development revenues that are tied to new building growth, not our base sales tax. Our base sales tax continues to go up. It's not going up as fast as it has in the past, what we're used to, right? We've seen these huge increases. And 2027 is a very modest increase. What's driving revenues down is that development.

Yeah, but if we can offset that by something that's extremely high in sales tax, then that helps them.

Any other questions? And really, I'll just reiterate kind of the goal on this table. We are going to come back with you with a recommended balanced budget. That is what is going to come back to us or come back to you. I guess this is an opportunity for us to hear your feedback. let's say, you know, you really want us to prioritize addressing growth pressures on the city, what we would say to you is we need to acknowledge that that might have an implication either on longer-term financial performance and sustainability, or it might tether back what we can do in terms of, again, the support of our labor force And so if there are key considerations that the council wants us to prioritize as we go into that, those difficult trade-offs, this is a good opportunity for us to hear from you.

Well, I'll say one thing that I, I mean, maybe this is too specific. Sorry, did I cut in front of you? No, we were just simultaneously. I got Chris next. Yeah, I'm not clicking.

No, just...

From a philosophy, I mean, are these priorities like from top to bottom? Is this, it's not ranked, it's just kind of like your board where you kind of collectively think. I mean, I think from a resident perspective, maintaining levels of service, of course, is going to be highest priority. And, you know, the money, the dollars that go from, you know, people's pockets, you know, into a store and then that sales task of the city and the people ultimately want to see their dollar in the real world. So the more that dollar is shown in the real world with kind of our fundamental governmental tasks and roles, I think the better. Of course, like road maintenance comes to mind. That's one of those things.

Not sexy, right?

But awesome and needed. You know, everybody cares about it. So in that kind of basic function of government world, that's the priority.

Chris? Yeah, highly visible items that people can see the results of those tax dollars. The question I had, I know for quite some time now, we've intentionally not filled positions as the city did the reorg. And my question is, how is our staff doing with those positions unfilled? Are we seeing higher levels of stress, overworking? And if not, maybe that's an area since we've been at this pace for a year plus that we continue or hold off. I don't wanna overwork our staff by no means, but if everybody is in a comfortable work environment and they're able to handle these tasks, then maybe that's an area that we look at and just delaying filling some of those positions.

So we could certainly revisit that. Again, most of those positions have been repurposed for the leadership positions in the reorganization. So absent filling those positions, we don't actually put the structures in place. And so now to the point, I think a lot of when those positions are filled, I think those efforts come back and reinforce some of the work efforts that have been down positions. Certainly as a part of this process, we will be looking at vacant positions to see if there are additional vacant positions that could be held for a period of time or eliminated. So at this point, I don't think we would recommend not moving forward with the positions through the reorganization. HAB-Masyn Moyer- Ultimately, because that would differ the entirety of being able to implement the new structure. HAB-Masyn Moyer- And so, and frankly, some of those HAB-Masyn Moyer- We have some interim positions that that we are we have that we do need to fill. We've got people that are are just standing in halls. So, but, but I do believe that we will for with a recommendation that does hold positions.

I have kind of expressed to you, you know, just my priorities and where to, and that specifically just goes with Colorado Boulevard. Like, I know that, you know, there's a lot of things that need to be considered, but It is a pretty major road in Thornton and has had quite a bit of tragedy as long as far as like fatalities and just overall dangerous driving behavior. And so that's been my biggest priority for work too is Colorado Boulevard. And I think we put like last, if I remember correctly, last time we worked on the budget, we prioritized a lot of those visible things. I know it It just takes a while for them to get done. So I feel like we made some headway on that in the last budget. And I still continue to think we need to do that. But specifically for Ward 2, Colorado Boulevard has just been a major sticking point with a lot of the residents.

So that's all I have. John. Excellent presentation, as always. So, yeah, I agree with what Chris and Roberta mentioned, too, is, you know, and Tansy, I've talked to you about, you know, my concern is to ensure, you know, especially as far as our staff and our employees to make sure that they're protected as much as possible, that if we have, you know, to make cuts, trying to do the attrition and retirement process and not lay people off. because we do have great city employees, you know, leadership on down, and I want to keep them here. So as long as, you know, we take that into consideration, they're well-being into our budget. But I'll see, you know, we're a mesh Colorado Boulevard. We see the thing with the bike lane improvements. That's on the books as well. I live right off Colorado Boulevard myself. So, you know, I experienced that, you know, every day for eight years. So... Yeah. So, but that's all I have.

Thank you. Um, you mentioned, uh, the development, um, activity being lower. And so I'm kind of wondering if that is like, and I think the revenue, um, what do you call it? The, it seems like hopefully we're looking at like the development, um, activity and revenue decreasing as like a normal thing kind of like going forward is that uh is that kind of what we're headed i mean because i feel like we're at some point we're going to hit a point in in the city where you know there's no land and you know there's no uh maybe it's too expensive or whatever the reasonings are economically and so i liked what devin said about you know expanding or figuring out how do we how do we expand or invest more in like economic development type activities? You know, how are we looking at replacing that development revenue that will go away at some point, or at least it'll be a lot lower than maybe what we're used to. And we're kind of seeing that now and replacing it with things that are sales tax generating businesses or whatever, whatever that is. So yeah, I don't know if that is a budgetary like priority thing that can be affected, but it seems like a kind of a bigger kind of long-term issue that we are looking at now, it seems, but maybe it does need to burn in some capacity, but I don't know if that makes sense at all, but you know, that's, uh, if there's a way to do that, then cool. I'm going to, I think that should be a priority.

Yeah, so I think the revenue team both is looking at a diverse pool of revenues. What are all of the operational and policy levers that are available to us? And the point about development is true. The degree to which... Again, it comes to ongoing revenues and ongoing expenditures. And at some point, future development, new development isn't certain. And new development comes with new revenue, but it also generally comes with new service needs as well. So calibrating those things. Now, the flip side of that is it also sometimes comes with additional employment opportunity and additional, you know, And rooftops do sometimes fuel economic development activity so that the picture is a little more nuanced and you know separating all of the pieces, but I do think we acknowledge that we can't. We you know we. We can't bet on the future of financial sustainability in terms of continued growth revenues.

We only have so much property. Right, exactly. Is it like around $16 to $17 million, it seems, each year in development revenue?

At the top of my head, I want to say $12.

So it's a pretty significant amount to try to replace.

And some of that wood, Some of those are ongoing maintenance of existing properties or use tax on equipment in businesses and those things. So there are a diversity of different kinds of circumstances. Not all of that bucket is true new development.

Other concerns, questions? I mean, I can add mine on the philosophy itself. I think the four bullet points you have there are extremely important to how we manage a balanced budget. Maintaining levels of service is something that our residents have expected, that that is the bare minimum of what we do, unless you all bring something to us that says we need to stop this for whatever reason. I think the next important thing is the financial sustainability is figuring out how we maintain what we have. So that when we get to making sure we can be in the labor market, and then the last thing is any current enhancing or creating new. That should only happen when we have available funds to be able to support that, or if we're willing to cancel something that we've already been doing. But I think as we get tighter in the budget, we're going to have to have harder conversations when it comes to that.

Thank you. So just really quickly to wrap up for 2027, since we're really, this is sort of like our jumping off point as we start building the recommendation. The goal of this budget is to advance the city towards the four strategic focus areas while building towards that long-term financial sustainability. We have some challenges. We're seeing the slow revenue growth. We are seeing large increases in resource requests. Response to that is going to be a limited growth environment simply because just in order to maintain financial sustainability, that is likely what we'll be seeing as part of the budget recommendation. So we are going to strive to maintain levels of service. We'll be carefully considering all new positions, programs, and personnel. And then any time we can, we are going to integrate the strategic focus area items and master plan items into that recommendation just to make a clear tie. What are our next steps? So August 18th is the utility funds rate and fee discussion followed by a preliminary high-level budget review on September 1st. The detailed budget review is September 15th and 29th at those planning sessions. It includes those items listed there. So detailed revenue and expenditure information, analysis of departmental budgets, A full capital plan with highlighted items on that plan, financial outlook and analysis for all major funds, and then a debt summary by fund as well. We then have a public hearing and first reading on October 27th, followed by second reading on November 10th. With that, happy to answer any other questions y'all might have.

Any additional questions? Nice work as always. Thank you. All right. Looks like we have a nonprofit request.

Yeah, that was heavy. So we're going to end the line. So Kevin Fargett's going to join us. We have, um, a couple of nonprofit requests that have come in. One is time sensitive. One is less so about while we were in front of you, uh, we were going to address that. I will note, we, we did identify, um, And so the materials in your packet aren't going to match precisely what's on the screen. We corrected one number. And Kevin, I'll point that out to you as we get to it.

Great. Thank you, and thanks for having me back at the table here. I will try to be brief, as I know it's been a long night. But we do have two nonprofit sponsor funding requests before you tonight. Just as a reminder, Council's policy on reimbursement for travel, training, substance, and other business expenses does require that requests for sponsorships and fundraising events do receive Council approval. Just going through the requests, we have a request from the Stout Street Foundation and from the Naloxone Project. So starting with Stout Street, just as a reminder, they're a nonprofit organization that provides long-term recovery services and a structured community environment to support individuals recovering from substance use disorders. They have requested a sponsorship of twenty five hundred dollars. It's going to in support of their 20th annual golf tournament that will take place later this month on July 31st. It's the time sensitive issue. It will be for whole sponsorship and will include four tickets, golf tickets and recognition. The second request is from the Naloxone Project, which is a Colorado-based nonprofit organization established to reduce opioid overdose deaths and expand equitable access to overdose education, naloxone distribution, harm reduction services, and evidence-based substance use disorder care. They are requesting $500. It's a friend of the Naloxone Project sponsorship. It includes a table of eight. and recognition at their gala, which takes place later this year on October 16th. I got ahead of myself here on the slides. So just this side, the slide here is just a summary. This is where we realized there was a calculation error. There was an extra $500 in your packet. So the numbers have been adjusted here. It relates to the total expended year to date. So right now, what has been approved is $24,250. The two requests before you today would add another $3,000. it would be a new total if approved of $27,250, which would leave a balance of $7,750. The next slide here, a little bit challenging to read, maybe a little bit easier in the packet there, is just a summary of all the funding requests that have come through and been approved this year, both from the non-profit requests as well as the youth event funding requests. So we'll certainly answer any questions. And then just looking for a council direction on whether or not we should bring forward a resolution.

Is the golf tournament at Thorpe Creek? The golf tournament?

I don't believe it is at Thorpe Creek. Give me one second. It's at Thorpe Creek? It's at Thorpe Creek. Okay. HAB-Masyn Moyer- It does say it's a. HAB-Masyn Moyer- Location story, but I, we can we can follow up on that.

HAB-Charlotte Pitts- drive, so it looks like that's where it is again.

HAB-Terry Palmos- That might be your way to do a donation. HAB-Terry Palmos- yep yeah it is.

HAB-Charlotte Pitts- Are there any objections to these two requests. All right, I guess we can bring them forward to the next meeting.

Thank you. Thanks.

All right, that was the last briefing item. So any board or committee reports? We haven't had our Mile High Flood District meeting. We had a tour instead of a meeting last time. No update there.

Yeah, North by 25 coalition meeting got moved to August.

And 8478 means Thursday, so. Yeah, so nothing.

And Neda didn't meet last month due to CML.

Right, so not a lot of updates. All right, council discussion items. Roberta?

No, I was wondering, we have our community meeting on flock cameras on the 30th of July. And I was wondering if we have had any movement or consideration of changing our contract was flocked to Axon, since that was something that you talked a little bit about.

Yes, I think the police department has continued to study what that would take. Again, I think the recommendations of the council was that we make that decision in the context of the broader budget. So we're not at the place yet of making specific recommendations for the 2027 budget yet.

Okay. So this will probably then be like revisited in the budget conversation for next year. Okay. Thank you. Is that okay, Barbara? Yeah. Evan?

I would ask If we can have staff look at a traffic analysis of 116th in Quebec during our Ward 3 meeting. I know David and I both had several people come to us and ask us about that area. Apparently the residents who live in that neighborhood have a really hard time getting out of there. They said that there was a traffic analysis done, but it was several years ago and there's been a large number of increase there. So we can look at that.

HAB-Masyn Moyer- Thanks the current concern is ingress any grass and.

HAB-Masyn Moyer- Left or right on the go back there's so many courses just go there and it's so.

HAB-Masyn Moyer- The question is whether it might warn us and no. HAB-Masyn Moyer- Okay yeah we're happy.

HAB-Masyn Moyer- Chris. PB Harmon Zuckerman, My questions regarding the red light traffic camera at 120th and Colorado and perhaps the other location as well. It's ironic that you got that. PB Harmon Zuckerman, Email. I don't know if somebody submitted a car because maybe the call you. Okay, so the calls are coming in and the complaint is that when making a right on read They're still getting ticketed and they're claiming they've stopped. And I've had some photos that were shared with me, I guess. It's hard to see it, but he says his wife is looking left and stop makes the right and the camera's still triggering. The data that we got this week shows nearly 10,000 right turn violations and less than a thousand on all the other violations. So I know Vera takes care of that, but is there any way that we can speak audit or look just to make sure that that camera is not being oversensitive and catching people making a right on right after they did in fact make stop because the numbers are pretty high for just that one infraction. And that's what we're getting calls about too. So I know that we don't monitor that. So I don't know what that oversight looks like. It's just too sensitive or can be recalibrated. But that would be something that I'm being asked to look into or ask from our city. And I don't know, Chief, you're nodding your head, so I don't know if you've heard this.

We can definitely look into it. I will say that it doesn't surprise me at all that that is the majority of the violations either. Rolling stops.

I get it. I see it myself, but it's not so much. Happy to look at it. Yeah, well, I don't know a better name. That's just, you know, David might know one. But...

Illegal.

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I don't have any way of verifying if you guys can look at that footage. I mean, there's very little we can do as a council from this position.

But, you know, we'll prepare a report. I always say I live there and I turn on it all the time. And I've never noticed it go off as long as you stop and turn.

Yeah, I don't sit there on the corner, but you know.

Because I'm nervous about it. I'm like, oh no, is it going to catch me?

Yellows now, like it definitely curbs any behavior. I think it's a good tool.

Yeah.

But this individual said they stood there for like an hour, noticed the cameras going off on people that were stopping. They talked to a couple of our police officers in the McDonald's parking lot on that corner. Another complaint was they asked for the police officer's business card and the police officer wouldn't give it to him. So it was a loaded 45-minute phone call with complaints basically all about that intersection. So I don't know what's true and what's not, but I said I'd look into it.

I got the same phone call from the same resident.

Same conversation. Expect some phone calls. Maybe they're making their rounds. Typically do.

Drew?

An easy one. It looks like it's Parks and Rec month. Can we do a resolution for that next week? I'll watch the show. The Rec Professionals Day is July 17th as well.

Can we dress up like Leslie Knope? No objection. So we can bring that forward. Anything else? Thank you. All right.

So I emailed the council last week. about data centers. I think it's a very hot topic going on right now. There's a lot of special considerations I think that need to be taken into account when a data center applies for development in a city. I don't think that we're prepared if we were to get such an application. I don't think we've done enough of the stakeholder research on that. So I would suggest that we propose a, you know, we follow some of the other cities in our region and putting a 12 month moratorium on such applications to allow us time to really dive into, you know, the stakeholder research and all the different intricacies of what a data center our community and how we might need to change some of our ordinances and our development laws to meet the needs of that kind of special facilities. So it's an action out of precaution. I feel like if we were to get an application tomorrow, we wouldn't be prepared to handle the community response to that. And I don't know if our ordinances that we currently have, our zoning regulations, all the things that go into that kind of development are suited for the level of impact that such development could have. So I'm suggesting this to be cautious and to give our staff time to prepare for something that is such a hot topic nationwide. You know, essentially to give us some cover if that were to come our way.

Roberta? Oh, this was about something else. Oh, sorry. Okay, I'll put you off to the side with John. Devin?

I don't I don't necessarily agree. And one of the reasons is because we already have a data center in Thornton. 121st and Grant, there's a data center already there. So, I mean, showing that it's already in place. I do agree that we should have a discussion around development agreements or requirements for things to come into place. I think that there are good topics that we can kind of address and kind of move forward with on, but I think doing an outright freeze out of caution isn't necessarily needed because, like I said, we already have a data center in Thornton. The The other concern with it too is the fact that if we freeze and we pause all of that to come through, what's the stop the same development to building in Dekono? We're sharing the same energy utilities. The only thing different at that point would be water, and most new data centers run on closed loop systems, so the water is not really a concern there either. So instead, we're just pushing the revenue flows outward, and we're not really preventing anything internally from our side. So I would caution against having a freeze in place and be more open to having a discussion around how do we leverage it from a service fee perspective to help try to build revenue for the city, or we do it from a requirement of, If you want to have a data center here, then we can have X percentage of your power has to be renewable or something of that nature. But I don't necessarily agree with a total freeze on it because it's just going to cause them to go to Broomfield or Dakota or Brighton. And we're still sharing all the same exact utilities. So it's not really helping our city in any way.

Chris? Okay, a few follow ups then. 121st and Grant, that'd be the business park since you're familiar.

Washington Square.

Yeah, since you're familiar with that one, was that an already built existing structure that they just moved their equipment in?

Or did they do a ground up development? I don't know the exact, I just know there is a data center there. I don't know what the actual full development process was for that building.

Okay, because I think then maybe size, and the reason I bring that up, and this was before you were on council, but we did have some interest prior to, you know, without getting into the specific details, it was like right next to a school. So when he says community outreach, I think you know a lot about tech, but I think community only hears the headlines and some of the negative things. There's two schools right there by that one too. You know the one that I'm talking about then? The one on 121st? No.

My wife schools across the street from it.

No, I'm talking about the one that was coming in to build one from the ground up and was a really large one is what we'll just say. And it was right next to that school. So I think there might be some community pushback if they were to see, you know, whatever 500,000 square foot or bigger built next to a school and it's all data center. So I do understand the concern around community engagement, given we've had interest. It might be just right before you got on council. So that's where we've had the process of community pushback. And I think it's less impactful was already, you know, part of the business park, and they just moved equipment into an existing building versus seeing a bigger new structure. And then my understanding too, is the state is going to come up with some of their own rules and legislation around that. But I'm not super familiar. So my question is to the rest of the electeds that maybe know the legislators, do we know anything about that? And horizon and that others or changes the work that we're doing with our staff is the state's going to, you know, shove something in our throat like they always try to. Then, you know, why not save some staff hours and dollars and coming up with our own policy, given there's the state level policy that we can adapt to in the very near future. That's where my mind is going is let the state do what they're going to do first. And then we can respond to that with our own versus we build something out and we get trampled on by the state since it's in the near future and let our staff spend time you know, working on maybe some other things since it's already in the works. That's my understanding, but that is my question to the rest of the council. I know Jan and I briefly at my MCML, we started that conversation, but we haven't had it yet. So I'd love to hear what anybody else knows about upcoming state legislation on it.

Well, I don't know. That's the thing is like, I don't know a lot and I like to really learn and see what all the facets are before I just say, like what I know from like environmental groups is it's bad from people in the community. Like my son showed me a Tik TOK the other day up in ward four of like an area. And they were like, Oh, it's missing is a data center making fun of us. Right. So I'm like, it's, it's a, it's like a buzz thing. Like with Gen Z, like data centers suck. AI sucks. Like, everything's stuck.

Totally.

So like, yeah, like my kids, like my kids, even at school are talking about how it all sucks yet. They like are glued to YouTube 24 seven. So I think the thing is, is like, I'm going to local progress and that's like one of the major things we're talking, are they're talking about there is it's one of the top, like, focus points of the convention. And so I just kind of want to learn a lot more and, and understand like how it kind of all folds in with like our ordinances and like everything and what other cities have done. Yeah. Like I want to, like, I think, I think there are some things like that are not great for sure. I think it's probably a lot not great, right? But, like, it's just, it's like everything's going so fast and so new. But I do agree that, like, we probably need to have policy that's going to keep things reined in so we don't have a data center next to another data center next to a drive-thru.

Next to a car wash. Next to a car wash, yeah.

sound like we're in a position or rushing to create policy around something that we, or at least a few of us would like more information on stalling a year while we work on that information gathering and policy generation. Is that the correct step? And we're talking about 12 months to educate ourselves and what our staff draft stuff and see what the state's going to push out. You know, I just don't want to spend the time we're coming up with stuff in the next three to five months, only eight to nine months later, it's trampled on. That's not a good use of our time. Well, we could use that logic for anything.

Hold on. We got people that have pressed their buttons. Hold on.

Hold on. Thank you, Madam Mayor. Yeah. And, you know, I've had conversations with Justin, with Devin, with Tansy. And I agree with Justin. We should have a moratorium for a year because, for one thing, we do have midterm elections coming up. Speaking of, Chris, what you said about state ledge. Correct. So we pretty much know. it's for conclusion who's going to win. But with that being said, with us being a non-partisan body, we can't necessarily act like that. We have to see how the election plays out. And then once the, you know, once January kicks in, which would be six months, right? When the new administration is sworn in, the statewide electives, the new state ledge, and then we can go to work with updating our ordinances. And because, you know, Tansy mentioned specifically, it's not, You know, we don't know if it's commercial or industrial, right? And Deb and I had this talk as well. So that would give us time with the new administration coming in from governor on AG ledge on down. We can formulate the policy that we need and update the ordinances to ensure that we don't build a data center by a school. And I will say, you know, they do bring in money. Granted, there is a usage issue. Every time they have to replace equipment, that's money that we're going to get from the city. We have to keep that in mind, but also we have to keep mine water. You know, I'm having conversations with neighbors in general that, you know, they're worried about water use because of the drought. Not going to go into specifics, obviously, you know, due to our role here, but that's something we need to keep in mind. And having this moratorium would help us formulate the policy and have conversations with neighbors. So... If we do bring data centers in, then we're doing it the right way, and it's not going to negatively impact community. And, of course, you know, power usage is another thing, and environmental concerns. So that's all I have.

Dustin? Yeah. You know, I think that, you know, if we could get an application for a data center coming in here, it would be the hardest thing I've ever done. that I think we've ever had. Just based off of what's going on around the country, you know, it's very intense conversation. I think it would dwarf the Claude Court conversation, but there is this in the same neighborhood.

One of these biggest marijuana, probably.

Yeah, it's up there, okay?

I'll be there for that, too.

And it's totally worth it. What I'm trying to say is that I don't want our council here to be in a position where we have to make a very tough decision, where we're legally bound to do something because we have antiquated rules and regulations, or we have rules that aren't really fit for this changing, you know, the changing public perception, the changing reality of what these data centers are. They're getting bigger. We might already have one, right? We do have one. It was built before this new opposition trend of data centers has come forward. So I'm just suggesting that we take our time to do this. I'm not advocating to permanently ban them. I'm not advocating that we take any specific position. to give our staff time to do due diligence on what it would actually look like here in 2026 and 2027. Things will be very different when application comes for David Center this year versus when the one that already exists came out. So that's really where the motivation behind this is coming, is to give us opportunity to really have all of our T's crossed and our eyes dotted when it comes to when we inevitably do get a data center application, then we can be confident in the rules and the laws that we have to follow when it comes to voting on a quasi judicial public hearing that will inevitably come up on that kind of thing. So that's that's what that's the motivation behind this.

Andy. I don't want to interject in a policy discussion that's happening between council members. I do want to insert maybe a practical matter from a staff perspective if the council were going to consider a moratorium. If part of the policy rationale is to wait to react to something the legislature might do and then study what corresponding actions the city might want to take. I'm not sure a year would give us enough time to to learn of that outcome through the legislative process. And as you all recall, changes to the development code is a pretty lengthy process in itself. So there may be a need, if you want to allow the timeline, consider opportunities to learn about and reflect the changes that are made in the legislative session. 18 months might be a more, reasonable timeframe to reflect the reality of the timing of both of those things influencing each other.

And from a legal perspective, it has to be a reasonable period of time based upon what we want to do in that time. We want to research, we want to learn, we want to draft, we want to see what the state does. And I know Broomfield did adopt or is considering an 18-month moratorium. But the other local governments that are in it, Denver did 12. Woodland Park did 12. Jefferson County did 10. Larimer County has extended their moratorium three times. And Boulder County did six months. Counties have to do six months by statute. So cities have a little more leeway on the length of time that they can do it. What we need to do if we put a moratorium in place is really determine the timeframe and determine how we want to define data centers for the purposes of the moratorium. A lot of these folks are tying it to, I don't know, megawatts, kilowatts, and others are leaving it open-ended with not... to the degree they don't put a load requirement in the definition for the moratorium. So they're just studying data centers in general without a load requirement in there.

And a water requirement, I think, would also be important because not all data centers are created equal when it comes to either energy or water use.

Right. So we could make it overly broad or we can, not overly broad, but broader, or we can try to narrow down on our knowledge now of loads and usage. Right. And there is a pending legislation doctrine. So, I mean, even if you're considering a moratorium, if an application would come in, you know, I think we could hold off on that if we really decided to put a moratorium in place and we were ready for that, if we were reasonably concerned.

David?

Go ahead. I'm always a little apprehensive about moratoriums. I mean, we just sat through a two hour lovely presentation on the budget. And now we're saying, nah, no, thanks. We don't want, we don't want this revenue in our city. You look at Lakewood and their growth, their growth ordinance that screwed their city up for a long time. And, or, you know, I think it was Longmont that did a grocery tax program. got rid of that, but that screwed up their budget. So I'm very hesitant to say, yeah, we don't want your business. Try a different area. And for all the reasons that Devin brought up, that really doesn't help the energy and the water consumption is a misnomer. There's many, many other industries across the United States to include agriculture and manufacturing that use significantly more water than data centers do. So that reason i would rather not have our city's time with it and if an application comes in we can consider it through our normal process so i have roberta then chris and devon but all three of you have already spoken so i'm going to actually ask cherish and drew first before i you would take you off yeah i was just going to ask tanya what her thoughts were but we those

Yeah, I'm a little hesitant to agree to a moratorium a week after getting an email about it before a holiday weekend. And because I feel like we're not taking the implications of a decision like this as serious as we should be. I'm sure we can follow in the footsteps of other cities that are carrying out this very, I don't know, I guess we can say maybe it's proactive in some ways and performative in others. But I do think we should, you know, to Roberta's point, like there's probably some more exploration around like, what is happening? Uh, what are, what are things that are being discussed locally that are actually effective, um, that are more than just, Hey, let's put a stop to something. Um, and my question was really like, do we have anything in the pipeline right now, uh, that is triggering this or is it truly like a let's go with the crowd thing?

I am not aware of any.

Nothing in the pipeline right now. Okay. And so if an application did come in, I mean, we still have zoning laws in our city, right? And we, and so there would still be something, it would still go through the planning process or the planning department, right? There would still be like our usual things that would come up and we would have to deal with these questions and concerns, just like the drone program, it sounds like. HAB-Jacques Juilland, that's pretty similar in terms of like simultaneously dealing with a business that is introducing something new and scary to our city and our and our staff has said we'll try to reflect the priorities of Council to address the concerns of the Community. HAB-Jacques Juilland, and develop that in real time, while we're also working with the business to make it. HAB-Jacques Juilland, To make it work. Is that, am I looking at that the right way? Is it a similar kind of concept or action that's happening? Like drones, new, scary, we need to enact land use legislation or policy around this. And we give you priority or feedback on what we think is important, then you guys go and do it. And then you're doing it right now based on what I think our last presentation was. So I think that's my understanding. Would that be a similar process if there was no moratorium?

You can certainly direct staff to start studying this now, obviously, and see where we would recommend regulatory changes without a moratorium. And if you were in the process of doing that, you could also put a moratorium in place later if an application came in, you felt we weren't ready. I think we've already talked about a moratorium. So I think we could probably hold off the application at that time if we're working on something and if we've decided to put a moratorium in place. So there were two legislative bills I saw last time that did put some restrictions around this, but they didn't pass. And I could share those, but it makes me think there's more coming up this session.

Senator Malka is already working on it right now.

Yeah, I think some of the points that were brought up with just I think there are things to develop in making this decision because it is a very big and important decision. It's bigger than the political winds that are shaping certain things in our county, our state right now. So I want to be outside of that. And I want to show that we've done greater due diligence as a council and a staff. And we're not just following a PAC mentality. That's ultimately how I feel about it. So if that means it takes a month to develop more questions and answers to what does it mean for us as a city and a moratorium in place, and that's what it is, or if it's a week, or if the staff says, hey, maybe it takes three months to figure this out, that's great. But I just think we need to treat it like that, and we need to be a little bit more serious about it. That's where I stand. So for the purposes of our discussion, I am not in favor of a moratorium now.

I'm definitely in favor of a moratorium, but I think that definitely we should give it an 18 month look at hold off. We should definitely study the environmental impact of what these do.

I do have a burden Devon, but there is consensus for the job to ask staff to draft language for moratorium. I mean, I think. Personal opinion. I don't like moratoriums for many of the reasons that drew said we have an opportunity to do the work without doing a moratorium, but the will of the council is to do a moratorium. I would like if we could, as the staff brings that forward. outline what a data center is, because again, all data centers are not created equal. It's whether it's megawatts, whether it's water use, whether it's square footage, whether it's purpose, because not all of them are AI, some of them are other things, like figuring out that language that makes the most sense to address the concerns that have been heard by the company.

Well, and I think if I might, for purposes of the moratorium, it might be better to follow the folks that left it, the definition of a data center a little bit broader. Because we're studying it, you know, and we don't know what the watts are, the water usage is really about.

I don't think. Who all said yes to the moratoriums? I didn't hear.

Justin, Chris, Roberta, John, and Cherish.

I wasn't really, yes.

Okay. That's why I hadn't worked clear. Sorry. That's why I wanted to tell you. You were a maybe.

Okay. What I want is that we study it, that we study what a data center is more because I'm like, I don't really know. And I guess that's kind of to your point. Like everything that you said, Tammy, I was like, yeah. Like, what is it? Like, what exactly are we putting in that definition? Because I, if we make a moratorium, we don't, so what I'd like to see is if staff could come back with all of this research and then we can decide from there where we go. Because I don't feel comfortable saying, let's just do a moratorium overnight and we don't even know what we're really doing that about. Like I agree with Devin on also the aspects of like, I feel like just like I was saying earlier with my son's TikTok is like people are just throwing that word out there and I don't know exactly what it is. And furthermore, as I mentioned, like I'm going to a convention like tomorrow about this. So I want to know more before I just say that. So could we have staff prepare information about this so we can decide whether memoratorium or policy changes? Like I was really... concerned when I thought about it last night about how much time and as Tammy brought up is like how much time it took for us to construct our our ordinances on zoning and how many years I as a resident complained about gas stations next to gas stations that was always my thing right and then when I got on council and I understood it more I was like oh no wonder they're doing it because of all these things and laws and stuff And that's kind of where I'm concerned right now is like, where does it fit into that question? I'm not saying that we don't do it, but can we have staff bring us the information so we can understand it? Because I feel that like right now, it's just people are angry at AI. They're angry at data centers and we're not really understanding what that all means if we already have one. How many do we have in Thornton? Can we have staff look at that?

There's 49 in the North Denver metro area, but there's one in Thornton.

And it might be interesting to know from our surrounding community, too, what size they are, what their purpose is, how much water they need.

One of Thornton's 291,000 square feet.

Square feet doesn't mean anything, though.

I don't know the kilowatts.

Yeah, so what do the kilowatts and the megawatts mean, and what does that mean to the environment? Is it, you know, how much, what is that in comparison to a household or to a Walmart? You know, those are kind of things I'm thinking. Like also, there was just something else that came to my head. It's just, there's so many different things to it. And I agree with Drew along the lines of like, It can look politically sexy just to say we're doing this. And what does it really mean when we don't even really understand? We're just data centers. No, you know, I hear that all day. AI sucks. Like, I just want to know exactly what we're talking about here. And I'm not saying no to a moratorium. I'm just saying, can we have our staff do more research, more information, because then that becomes public record and our residents can look at it and see exactly what we did. That's what I feel like.

So I have Chris and Drew, but to Tammy's point, it still gives us the leeway to do a moratorium if we have an application that comes in because we're starting the conversation if that's the direction that we end up going.

So that's what I felt like. I was like, okay, that sounds great. Like, we're looking at all these things. I think we need to have the conversation for sure. And I want to. I just want for us to make good policy, not quick, fast, politically sexy policy that everybody's like, oh, cool. You jumped on the bandwagon of no data centers. But what does that really mean? Like,

like all over the place with it right now we do need to be clear that a moratorium is still on the table though we could come back in a while and give you an overview yeah about that but during the i mean in order to use the pending legislation doctrine if something would come in and we're not ready we have to be clear that the moratorium is something that we're still discussing is still a possibility so yeah so well hang on i got chris then drew and then i'll come back to you devon

Excuse my ignorance. The question that came to mind through this previous conversation is with the moratorium in place, we have the ability to live that even though we set 12 or 18 months, we can live that at will, correct?

I think that's right.

Yeah.

So it's done by ordinance and it has to be because it affects property rights. And under the charter, that's a requirement. Yeah, you can do that. Out of operation sooner, definitely, if you're ready.

So then I go back to what Tandy was saying of the 18 months. Where's the harm in putting it in for 12 or 18 months while we do the research and put all of our ducks in a line? And when we're ready, that's seven months from now, we can lift it right then. Well, we don't have to worry about the legal aspects. Just you can put it in and that's kind of based off what you guys are saying. And I'm not trying to jump the gun, but this is a compromise is what I'm trying to get to. Since there's nothing that's holding us to that timeline, this allows us then to do the research and get the data and and lead into that legislation that would allow us to defer it, because we are in a moratorium. And as soon as we know what we want, and maybe an application comes in at that time, we can lift it. And we're not stalling the developer at all. We're just giving ourselves a window to actually do this late work, answer the questions, and we'll lift it early if we get to that in three months. I don't, I mean, Either way, we've all said we want, for the most part, some more research or data. We want to just give us that protected space for whatever that timeframe is, do the work, and when we're comfortable, we can lift it and not even see it out to the full 12 or 18 months. And that would be a compromise to the 12 months and also addressing the needs of council members. I see that's nodding that, yeah, we're going to do the work. And when we're satisfied with our work or somebody of that work, we can lift it and move forward. And it doesn't have to be the 12 or 18 months because we control that moratorium timeline. It's just giving us a protected space to do the research and That to me seems like a possible compromise. If the moratorium still is a possibility, it's not a definite deadline is what I'm saying.

Another possibility is to put it in place for a shortened period of time and then continue to extend it. when our work is not done. I've seen some of these local governments do that.

So one of those, maybe we'll get the division amongst the body off of like, well, I don't want to say no to business for 12 to 18 months. Like we have a tool that we could utilize and lift as needed, but it also gives us a space to do research. So maybe that's the compromise is what I'm putting out there.

I have Drew, then Devin, then Roberta.

Yeah, I was just curious if as part of this research before or after the moratorium decision, it seems that we can actually include the Google facility as part of looking at what's the utility usage, what's the capacity of you know, building what's the draw on our infrastructure or any of that would be, I think, pretty helpful since we actually have one in our city and we're not operating in a vacuum. You know, we do have a real place that exists as an operating for, you know, since Google has been around. And yeah, we might find some valuable information, you know, one way or the other. Like, I mean, I'm not tied to the outcome. I am just curious about data. No pun intended.

Brian, couldn't we treat this in the same sense we did with the drones where we just have a special permanent access that would be required instead of doing a moratorium and completely blocking it? Because as a business person, if I'm looking to expand my business and you have an 18-month blanket, no chance, I'm not going to put an application process in. I'm just going to look for another city. Why would I even consider your city at that point? Regardless of if you change your mind six months from now, that's not something that they're going to do. And instead, nothing's going to stop them from going to unincorporated Adams County, building one, and there's no restrictions on them at all, but they're still using the same utility. The only difference is water. And again, most new systems run on closed-loop systems, so water is not really an issue, contrary to all of the TikTok videos that are out there. The we can treat this in the same sense that we do with the drones and be like, we're gonna have a special permit in place for this, and then we can treat it as a sense of going, great, if you wanna have a data center, these are the requirements we can add on top of that for this special use permit that's gonna be in place for it. And then that solves all of it because from a business standpoint, the business can look at it and go, yeah, okay, if I want to come in here, I have to have 80% usage of my roof covered in solar or something like that. And they go, I'll take that cost and put everything out. That's fine. But just to do a blanket, we're doing research on something when we already have 50 of them in the North Metro area. It seems counterproductive and I don't see it as effective. a good move for the city when we're literally having conversations about how we don't have revenue streams coming in. And Parker just built $193 million data center that's on a closed loop water system there that's using Excel. So it's using the same energy source as we are and on a closed loop water system. So it's not costing them anything else in water, but they got a massive amount of revenue from this building. And again, I get your point about building a giant building next to a school. And so it's there, but I think that ties into something with a special permit where we can be like, you can't build a giant concrete building like the core site ones that are actually opening this year in Denver. So they put this in place, but they have core site den three opening this year. Um, and turn around and be like, oh, that one's, you know, it's fine, whatever, for these guys to do it, but not us. Like, we can have a policy to be like, you can't have this big, ugly concrete block building. It has to look nice and fix it that way instead of just doing a blanket no across the board.

All right, Roberta.

Sorry. I just think, like, when you have, I just want to manage expectations of the community, too, since this is such a hot topic of like what exactly you know what folks are in their mind a data center is and what it is in reality or two different things possibly so yeah like I said it's I just I just want for us to have some time to look at this stuff that's all I mean if that means we do a moratorium but it's for less time I'm more comfortable with that than 18 months because then if we have to lift it And you're talking about people being upset. They're going to be real upset when you have to lift it because we did a long one. And then we're like, just kidding. Now it's over. We're going to, you know, I'd rather do it shorter, learn shorter, learn, you know, extend if we need to. That's kind of more comfortable with that type of thing, specifically around the whole thing with the zoning and all that. I mean, I've talked to a lot of people. They're not like, you know, they get upset about things, but a lot of times it's because the media and TikTok and all that.

I'm going to wrap this up.

No worries, absolutely. Go ahead.

So what I'm hearing is that there needs to be more discussion on a potential moratorium, potential outcomes, whether it's 12 months or 18 months, what that might look like and language that would be associated with that to have discussion before it comes to a question at the formal council meeting. But it is not off the table. It is just not determined how long yet or the details of that and what that could look like what staff would need to be successful with that.

If you run that back then, because I think it sounded in my mind that like we were leaning more towards the three month and then doing extensions. So

So I think what it's asking staff to draft language related to either three months, 12 months or 18, because there's still all conversations based on, but I'm asking staff for a recommendation of what they would need to make that successful, whether it's three months, 12 months, 18 months, but to come back with that conversation, it's not, we're not going to vote on this next week. So we have in a couple of weeks, we can bring back more information about what that moratorium looks like. So agree to bring it to the purpose. To bring it to a future vote.

I do think if the council wanted to accelerate some code development in the short term, we would likely need to look at other projects that are on the planning team's plate right now in terms of prioritization, particularly if the goal is to include a public process in this. So we do need to calibrate the staff effort to this. I think the opportunity to to outline what would the impacts and options look like in different timelines would be helpful. I do have concern about producing land use regulations the next three months with a community process. At the same time, we've got the Weld County stationary master plan processes already and housing choice already ongoing. So there is a workload consideration here that depending on the timeline, which I think needs to be considered.

I think it's a both and. If a moratorium is to go in place, what does that look like and does that help staff get what needs to be done? If it does not go in place, what does staff need to do to be successful? And what options would be in place should an application come in while that work is going on? It is not off the table.

We'll work together on a date. We likely will have to move something else off of one of your agendas, both your July 21st and August 18th agendas are both. So we'll look at those agendas and see if there's something else that can be deferred.

All right, I had John and Roberta. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah.

I'm going to stop. Okay. No separate. No, I mean, you had, you had pressed your button before Justin had pressed it.

Yeah. I just had really quick. This will be like, so quick, you guys. Um, July is, I think we're still early enough. Um, disability pride month and August is national immunization month awareness and women's equality day.

To add for next week? All three of them?

No, August for August. So just that's the look ahead. And then just for July, Disability Pride.

Just Disability Pride. And then the one Drew brought forward, that'd be just two?

Yeah. Okay. And then for August, those are just two so they can have those and get them ready, you know. For the next one? Yeah. Any objections?

So I had sent an email out last week as well, asking for council to consider a potential ballot question related to a resign to run initiative similar to what they do in Greeley. I think similar to the data centers, it probably requires a lot more conversation to not have at 10 p.m., but I would like to see if staff could do some work similar to the data center conversation about what that might look like, what the potential consequences could be, and whether it's something we want to consider.

Chris? I guess the question is, because you're the one with the experience and history of this, you ran for Congress while serving as mayor. You mentioned, you know, conflict of hearing duties and things like that. That's a big race. Why now and not then when you were living it? You experienced the congressional campaign while as mayor. I know there's some residents that maybe have brought this to you, or at least that's what your email stated, but you didn't seem to have that experience or opinion yourself and you've done the job to a high level. So I guess, did you push back on the residents or like, it's weird and ironic that it's being brought forth by you.

So a lot of the, I got a lot of comments during the race specifically about why I was doing that while I was mayor.

What was your experience? I mean, like you carried it and did it.

I did.

I mean, you were, you were- I'll say since that's why I know how it came out. But in the term of being capable, I guess, of doing it. And the only reason why I bring that up is because I know that all of us put a lot of work in campaigning to get to these seats. And when you look at something like the passing of faith winners, and if you were to throw your name in the hat for that,

that position's appointed you don't get it now you've lost your council seat because of the that's a really good point actually that i think should be included in the analysis of does appointment mean the same thing as candidacy for an election yes and that could be defined because that's where my mind's going it's like man you're risking a lot just to get an appointment and an appointment process is what a couple weeks versus running potentially for what you lose right your butt off to

in a campaign you've worked hard for.

And I would agree an appointment is very different than an election to a seat for sure. So that's, I think that's a point that should be clarified.

Yeah. Okay.

But that's why I want to have more discussion about it too. It's because though that makes a lot of sense to me.

Yeah. And we have that discussion.

I got a lot of negative feedback while I was running about how I was giving up my position in the city. because I was caring more about CD8 than I was about the city of Thornton. Right, wrong, indifferent, right? So it's more about allowing people to have the conversation and vote whether they want to do that or not. Justin?

I'm just kind of following up on that. So you got a lot of daily feedback, but when you held the position as mayor while you were running this for Congress, were you able to, in your opinion, hold down the duties and responsibilities of the mayor properly while you were running for Congress?

I think this doesn't matter what I felt. It was a matter of what the public felt in the moment. I felt I could, but the public didn't seem to think that. And so that's why I'm bringing it forward is because I got that criticism. I'm listening to the criticism. It's not that I support one way or the other. It's I support bringing it to a vote of the people. because that's what's been asked of me, specifically based on that. And it's not just me, it's others have done the same, successful, some, some not.

Yeah, no, I understand. I was just genuinely curious as to how that, that's a lot of work. And I'm amazed at, very impressed at your ability to manage your job.

Well, I lost, so there's that. That's funny. No, we'll be specific.

You didn't lose because you didn't work your butt off. You kind of lost for other reasons. Which I don't necessarily think are fair, but you know.

We get a lot of criticism that doesn't feel fair, right? And as a resident brings something to us, I have to look at it not just from my perspective, is that I have to look at it from what if that rule had been in place? Would I have run? I don't know. But it's a fair question.

Well, I'm in favor of having more conversations. That's probably way too late to get into this now.

Yeah, that's why I want to talk more about it. What year was it? 22. I saw someone press the button, but I missed it. Devin?

Yeah, I mean, I think this is a good thing to have the conversation around because if... I want to run for County commissioner right now. And I know that a data center wants to come in. I can be like, no, we're going to vote no at Thornton. But when I'm. Chris Wanner, As the county thing everybody be like great he said no to the data center so he's got my vote, you can swing things based on the decisions we're making here every day, depending on the roles are going for so I think it's definitely a conversation, we need to have. Chris Wanner, Because you can play both sides pretty easily in the sense of trying to sway votes in one way or the other, to get into a position that you need.

So it sounds like we have consensus to bring it forward for additional conversation, which again, time frames are tight. I know there's probably a lot of outstanding questions, specifically Chris's question on appointment. Is that the same as running for election? And maybe there's others that our attorney can figure out need to be answered to in a future discussion.

So if we brought it back for a, if you're looking at this year to have a little discussion to possibly get it on this year, we probably have to bring it back for some additional discussion on the 28th, maybe with the exact kind of nature of the language, because it has to be adopted by ordinance as council knows that's two readings. We could, we have worked with the clerk and looked at the statute. So We could do first reading on August 11th, second reading on August 25th, have time to post the ballot question if it indeed was adopted by council, and then report it to the county by September 4th. So that's kind of your, it has to go the two regular meetings in August if we're going to do it this year. And so we could come back on the 28th. 28th is a formal meeting.

You mean the 21st?

Yeah. The 21st, whatever we can fit it into, fit it into Tansy's already very packed agenda. But for my edification, what do you want? What do you want? Like, do you want me to bring back language?

What are we talking about there? I think it's the questions that need to be answered in order to craft language. Cherish.

Can we do some polling on this? And also, can we give an estimate on what the process? I think we should.

The process? Yeah. I think last time when we did our ballot questions, we turned it into a public hearing. So we took comment at the, you don't have to, but you can have a public comment on, first reading if you wanted to do that. So make it a full on public hearing. But it's a legislative item. So you really could just have a council hearing and adopt it in two readings.

And the estimated cost? Pardon me? The estimated cost?

To put it on the ballot?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Sure. That could be part of it. Yeah. Gotcha. And you wanted options for polling as well?

All right, I guess we'll talk about it on the 21st. Anything else? All right, thank you.

Do you have an executive session?

Oh, my gosh. Oh, I'm so excited. Let's call the special meetings.

I think I can hold it for all right, we're gonna we're gonna call I'm gonna call the special meeting of the city council. Can I please get a roll call?

Here. Here.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right.

Before we get a motion to enter executive session, can you please give us an overview of the purpose?

Yes. The purpose of the executive session is to give direction to your negotiators and develop a strategy for the potential incentive agreement for a primary employer expansion of operations in the Washington Square business.

Are there any questions? All right. Can I get a motion? Or can I get the motion, please?

The motion would be for an executive session pursuant to Colorado revised statutes 2464024E to determine positions relative to matters that may be subject to negotiations, develop strategy for negotiation, and instruct negotiators regarding a potential incentive agreement for primary employer expansion of operations in the Washington Square Business Park.

Can I get the motion as stated?

Motion is stated.

Thank you. Is there any discussion? All in favor, please say yes. Yes. Yes. Any opposed, please say no. All right. We'll take a quick break while we switch the recording.