City Council - workshop

start started now um he um he told me earlier he was gonna do the line okay okay um so who would like to ring the land acknowledgement tonight i would i'll be Who would be able to read 11A?

We have presentations first, right? That's for Peter, correct?

Oh, yeah, we have to do those first. Yeah, sorry. I was going right to legislative. Yeah, so we have Peter. We have Peter Wong. Who would be able to read Peter's resolutions? And then hence retirement. I'd like to do that one. Okay. And now we can do legislation.

We have immunization.

Oh, immunostitution, yeah.

And I will do that one. Okay.

I usually do that one. Okay, now we can feel it. 11A. Who would be able to read that? I'll do that one. Okay. And 11b.

Intensive.

Yeah, that's it, that's right. All right.

Okay, our first item on this. I just have one quick check-in item. So we were recruiting for a couple of Tashko vacancies. So you had both Ward 2 and a Ward 3 vacancy. We have received two applications for Ward 3. We did not receive any for Ward 2, so we're still advertising for that. So the council could decide to interview those applicants yourselves. or refer that to applications to TASCO for their recommendation.

And then you can refer to TASCO for their recommendation. Yeah, I've heard of TASCO if they do.

Yeah. You have done it both ways, but in recent, you have been largely referring it to the committee or board.

Okay, thanks. Anything from the city attorney this evening? No, not tonight. Thank you. All right. Okay, let's get started. We'll call to order and we'll do the financial auditors report for 2025.

Yeah, so we'll have a very brief staff presentation. Ken Newhart is here. And we do have Mark Sewell, who is representing our independent audit firm. This is on your agenda tonight. for consideration as item 13C, so as a part of the consent calendar. With that, I'll give it to Kim.

Thanks. Council, I'd like to start by introducing you to Jamie Miller. Jamie has filled our open position as the new city's control room. So we're excited to have her. She's been with the city for about 13 years. So she's got lots of experience and knows what she's doing. And I'm going to, Mark is here tonight. He's the audit partner with RSM. RSM is our external auditors. And so they're required to come out once a year and audit us, our financial statements and our single audit. And I will turn it over to him and let him

give his presentations. All right, perfect. Well, thank you for having me. As I said, my name is Mark Sewell. I'm an audit partner with RSM, and we conducted the financial statement and compliance audit for the city for the fiscal year 25. The report's been issued on time back in June. I'm so sorry. I was going to say it was a nice boring audit, but then I threw some excitement in there. Boring audits are good, right? Exciting is not good for anybody. But so I'm going to forward down to my executive summary here. So really what I was going to concentrate today on was the results of the audit. And then we have some required communications. And then, of course, stop me if you have any questions. I'm happy to provide any context or any color to anything I have here. So, like I said, the audit is complete. We issued an unmodified or a clean opinion on the financial statements, which if you look at those, it's a very robust document. We have different opinion units, different sets of financial statements in there. So, all the numbers presented are materially correct. And then there's a whole host of financial statement footnote disclosures that are required by GASB. Those are included as well. In addition, since you receive some federal dollars, we look at federal compliance as well. So we audited one major program related to the city's dollars. I think we hit 63% of the dollars based off a risk assessment that we performed. Again, an unmodified opinion, a clean opinion. We had no findings with that program. So very positive results when it comes to that. And then also, you know, we issue a letter at the beginning of the audit kind of detailing our scope and our procedures a little bit. Nothing changed from our original scope. I'm happy to present that. We did, and I'll provide a little bit of clarification here. When we talk about significant risks, every audit has different risks within there. Some of them are prescribed by the auditing standards, so those are usually related to revenue recognition. management override to control. So we do specific procedures to those. There was a president on almost every audit. There's a couple of complicated liabilities that the city has related to workers' compensation, actuarial type determinations, and pension liabilities. We reported those at significant risk at the beginning of the audit. There's also an OPEB, another benefit obligation. We added that too, because it takes actuaries to do that. So we use our actuaries to look at your actuaries to make sure that the assumptions are correct and no issues there to report. Later in the presentation, we had a couple of adjustments and a couple of what we call past adjustments, which are immaterial differences. Talk a little bit about those in a little bit. And anytime we have any adjustments, we evaluate those for impacts on the internal control and talk about those. and a little bit, but overall, like I said, boring, clean audit. So very positive there. Next slide here is talking about the accounting policies and practices by the city. The way I think we presented is pretty meaningful is there's a yes. That means that something was out of the norm. No's is everything was within the norm. So everything is sitting there in the norm. Not going to really read all those to you. There was a new like Gatsby this year, didn't really have an impact on the city. So everything pretty straightforward there, nothing really to dig into there. If there was something a little bit different, we would highlight that to you. Next slide is something that we like to highlight, and we're also required to, is that your financial statements include various estimates. I talked about a few of those earlier. Management has a process where they develop that estimate based off the judgments, and sometimes they use outside specialists to help them. We evaluate those methodologies to see if they're reasonable. Our conclusion is that they are. We highlight it partly as you're doing your fiduciary responsibility monitoring. They are estimates and they're a subject to change. So it's one of the things that you can monitor as you're doing your fiduciary responsibility, but everything there came out to be reasonable. Next slide is just the highlight in our opinion. We have a paragraph there. Within your financial statements, since you receive a certificate from the GFOA about excellence financial reporting, you actually put a lot more information in there that's actually required. Some of that is unaudited. We read that information. There's statistical information. There's a transmittal letter. We read all that to make sure it sounds right, but we don't audit it. So this is just detailing that piece of it. On the first slide, I talked a little bit about adjustments. I'm not going to go into a lot of detail. We had two adjustments, and these were, if you look at your financial statements, you have your fund-level financial statements, which is your day-to-day operations and probably what you budget for and everything like that. Then there's also a government-wide financial statements, which is a longer-term view financial statements. We had a couple adjustments that impacted that statement. I'm not going to talk specifically here because we'll talk about it on the control side a little bit. And then we had a couple uncorrected misstatements. And what this is, is basically we take anything that we don't think is material to the financial statements, we add them all up to make sure that we don't think it has a material impact. Management looks at that, we look at that. Both of these are at the consolidated financial statement level, the long-term view financial statements. And really, most of these were for corrections that were made that had a prior year impact. So corrections have been made. There was a prior year impact. The ending balance is all correct. So not much to go there. Both of those, we evaluate all those adjustments or past adjustments. And we have a couple of recommendations. So first, as I already mentioned on the compliance report, we had no issues noted. We did have two recommendations related to those adjustments. One of them we classified as a material weakness. It sounds like a bad word, and it kind of is. It just really means is that the control breakdown could have had a material impact on the financial statements. And this one was related to a pollution remediation liability. What GASB says is if you have a pollution remediation issue, once you know about it, should record it on the financial statements. So the city actually had it disclosed in the financial statements, and it budgeted for it and accounted for it in the fund statements properly. Just on the government-wide financial statements at consolidated level, that obligation was not initially recorded. So that was now recorded on the financial statements. So the corrective action there was just to record it. It was a debit and a credit. All the other information was present and available for us to compute that amount. The overall impact is there's now a liability reporting on financial statements for $7.9 million. That was already funded and there was already a contract in place there. So it's just our recommendation there is to continue to monitor those sort of transactions to make sure that they're properly recorded. The next one, significant deficiency. We define that as something less severe than material weakness, but we think it's important enough To communicate to those charged with governance, there was a grand. Reimbursement this year about 2.6Million dollars. Recorded again, properly on the fund level, financial statements, because of timing. Those financial statements really are concerned with. You collect revenue soon enough after the end of the year to be available to any current current uses. The previous year. It was not recorded as receivable, just recorded as revenue this year. It should have been recorded as revenue in the government-wide financial statements. So it's just a timing difference between one year and the next. And the revenue should have been recorded prior year, got recorded this year. So our past adjustment was just reflecting that effect. So ending balance is all correct there. I'll pause there and just make sure there's no any questions before I move on to the next topic. Perfect. Next slide is another one of those required communications where we kind of do this yes, no box. These are really about the audit process. So the other one, you could have had practices that changed. Those are normal. Here, everything being in the no box is a really good item. So really, we had no difficulties encountered during the audit, no disagreements with management. We got full cooperation during the audit, full disclosure, requests were turned around timely. If we had any of those issues, we would communicate those to you, even though it'd be really awkward conversation, right? But we were required to do that, and we would report those to you, so the audit process went really smoothly. Next slide here, just highlighting We work really closely with management to perform the audits, very collaborative process, but ultimately we're independent from the city and we report to the city council. So this is just highlighting our responsibilities and some of your responsibilities. Most of this information we get from management. So we're required to be independent. We have a quality control system to ensure that we maintain our independence. Management provides us a lot of information about changes in the reporting entity, a new component unit, If there's changes in key individuals, if we happen to perform services outside the audit, that they take responsibility for the management decisions of that. We don't really have any of those. We do perform a smaller agreed upon procedures engagement, which is still in a test engagement, which actually had no issues either. So collaborative process, but we're still independent from the city. Last slide is just to provide maybe a little bit of context on the financial statements of what the numbers mean. So we included here just some of the information about the bond rating information. Probably the one I focus on is, I don't think we've presented this in the past, but the GFOA, which is the Government Finance Officers Association, which reviews your financial statements and says, you have all the disclosures and you provide really excellent financial reporting. They have some policies that they recommend that cities adhere to. And so one of those key ones is general fund budget, you know, or general fund available fund balance compared to the expenses per year. So GFOA recommends that you have at least two months. You're sitting at about 51%, about six months. So you're in a good spot. You're above the recommendation. Now, of course, you don't want to go too high because then you're not using PB, Harmon Zuckerman, The resources provided to the city, but that's a good benchmark to monitor from year to year to see how you do we can continue to present that and then PB, Harmon Zuckerman, You've received the GFO a certification for the last 40 years. So that's a long time. It's longer than I've been in public accounting. That's a good long run. We've reviewed those financial statements. They'll be submitted to GFOA, or they probably already have been. And they'll be reviewed. We expect that you will receive that same award again next year. I know I flew through that. The rest of this is our representation letter that we got from management, our detail of our compliance report, et cetera. But that's the highlight of our presentation. And I'll pause again and see if there's any questions that I can help answer or writing the clarity.

I had to, you all got an updated packet this morning. And that updated packet included the AUP audit that he mentioned, and the AUP audit is agreed upon procedures, the audit, we asked the auditors per council direction to go in and audit all directors and all council members, key cards, expense reports, any anything like that. And so we give them 100% of that they audit it for compliance policy. And so that's what changed in your updated packet today, earlier today, so.

Was there any other questions from us at council? Okay, I think we're good.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right, next we have municipal fine and fee schedule.

Judge Soros and our court administrator, JJ Johnson are coming forward I think they will potentially have some assistance on some of these from officer Martinez. I believe that judge will be kicking this off. We do not have, these are recommendations to update fines and fees. We don't have this currently scheduled for council action pending the discussion today.

Thank you, good evening. We appreciate the time for you guys to discuss this topic with us. We are recommending a modified fine and fee schedule. And just to quickly give some context to the conversation before we kick off the slides is there is separation of powers, but there's also an essential interplay between the council and the municipal court operations when it comes to fines and fees. the court can sort of be split down the middle where there are payable offenses where someone can pay without going to court and an officer will write down that predetermined amount that counsel decides on the summons. They pay it ahead of time, that's a guilty plea, they don't come to court. So that's on your more lower level offenses and that's why we're here to address those payables when we use that word payable fines. And the other is fees and those also are applied to almost every case the payables and the mandatory in court appearances and that fee schedule is set by counsel as well. So we are here after information that JJ is going to go over in a moment, JJ Johnson, Officer Martinez-Dockery, and a collaborative effort to produce all of this, but it is really us persistently being good stewards of the city resources while also paying attention to best business practices and best operation practices. So with that, I will turn it over to JJ. Thank you.

Good evening, City Council. So the purpose for today is to recommend changes to the fine and fee schedule as Judge Soros had indicated. Tonight we'd like to just go through a quick background of the fine and fee schedule. We will talk about traffic, parking, general ordinance, fine recommendations. and then get into more of the court fees as the judge had indicated. Then after that, Judge Soros and I will kind of go back and forth with that. And then after that, Officer Martinez-Dockery will go over the commercial vehicles and the recommendations associated with that. At the very end, Judge Soros will provide some legal information in terms of how we all brought that together, so. Okay, so the background. So in the city charter, it provides a city council upon the recommendation of the presiding judge, shall approve court costs, fines, surcharges, assessments, and fees in the municipal court. The last time that this was presented and adopted by city council was back in August of 2023. So it's been about three years. And that's consistent with what the judge would like to do in moving forward in terms of assessing the finance fee schedule, at least looking at it every two to three years. So the fine survey information, what we did, we looked at seven other, we looked at Thornton and we looked at seven other municipalities around the Denver, Colorado area. And we assessed their traffic, parking and general ordinance fines and fees. Sometimes it's just kind of going line by line and kind of comparing and contrasting where our fines and fees are compared to other municipalities. We also provided an average and a mean calculation just to kind of put some more comparisons in there to make it more readable, more viewable to anybody that's looking at the survey. We also took into account recommendations for inflation. And we took that from the Consumer Price Index from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. And so we used that from August of 2023 when the last recommendation or the fine and fee survey was adopted to March of 2026. And at the time of completing this whole survey, that's the latest information that was available.

Right now on the traffic infractions that are payable without somebody coming into court, it's the civil non-jailable offenses. And we assess $35 for every original points on the summons. So what the request is, is that we move that from 35 to 40 on two, three, four, five, six point violations. For point of information, no pun intended, there is another six-point speeding traffic that becomes criminal. So there's two six-points. One is civil, one is criminal. And the criminal one is not reflected on here because it's not payable. So going from $35 to $40 per original point on the summons, except for a one-point, we're wanting to increase it from the $35 to $60 and then the zero point from $35 to $50. Our parking violations are encompassed right now into one $35 fine. What we'd like to do based upon information that we were pulling out from the survey data is grab these two offenses, parking and fire lane and handicap parking to increase those as reflected. That is comparable with the survey data. And these are two offenses that one could probably objectively argue are pretty more offensive on the parking category. There are certain offenses that are outside of traffic that you see here on these two lists that currently based upon the approved council fine schedule is at 75. And again, based upon that survey data, as well as the other information we pulled, we think it makes logical sense to move this into an 85 instead of $75 fine for each of these, again, payable without coming into court.

So the next section is court fees so each municipal court sets their own fees, based on a number of factors ordinances budgets policies and procedures. We took the same survey same seven cities or municipalities and. As a result of that. we're looking at making some changes or some recommendations in four areas and adding a new court fee for unsupervised probation.

We have a question from Councilor Martinez.

Yeah, thank you, Mayor Pro Tem. The previous slide on the, or just in general, all the different payable fines that you talked about, where does the money collected go? General fund. The general fund. Yes. And so it is, not designated or earmarked for anything. My next question is, have the administrative costs in the court or collecting these fees, have the costs gone up? You mentioned inflation on the fines as a motivation for changing them. How does that tie back into the costs that the court and your department has incurred over the years with inflation?

I'm going to try part one and then turn it over to JJ for part two. There are so many variables that play into that. If you have more senior tenured employees whose salary may be increasing, that's going to be a variable that increases your employee salary and benefits that's not attributed to just the passage of time. We recently flipped from paper files to electronic files. So now we're not having to buy the materials that it would take. So there's so many different facets that change operations. It's really hard to say passage of time increases that long.

Can you repeat the second part of the question?

I'm sorry.

I was going to say, I think she covered it.

So I guess my last question is, These bonds, they're going into the general fund. And you kind of explained a little bit about the increased costs. I think that's it for now.

The only thing I would add maybe is just as you have the conversations about the municipal justice master plan is really thinking there's a broader system behind these fees. So there's certainly increasing costs in the court, but also in traffic enforcement and code enforcement and the other enforcement systems that are also as a part of this broader system.

Yeah, that just actually reminded me of the question. The last question I have for now is, You have stated in the past that we do not, at least your office does not see fines as a revenue collection. Is that still true?

Without a doubt. That's, and I can tell that you've heard me say that. So thank you. That the court, any court, municipal, state, federal is never to be seen as a revenue generating entity. Otherwise it loses the integrity of what the purpose of the court is. So that said, I'm stealing Tansy's words. Or a phrase that there's also a cost recovery component. We are still a business. It has to operate. It's does go into the general fund and Some of this comes to our attention when we're on listservs and we see court administrators or other municipal judges and They're providing information of reviewing theirs. It's like, wait a minute, it's been two or three years since we need to do ours as well. So I believe that what we're seeing is the city's surrounding, and we went as far as Fort Collins, do this increase incrementally, somewhat synchronized with one another. So we're certainly not outliers. And when we did a median and an average of all of these costs and columns, and we'll get to the outlier in a moment, is everything else really stayed in line? And if something already was in line, we didn't request to move it.

Okay, so just the last bullet point. In terms of court fees, we are recommending an increase in four different areas and adding a new court fee, which what we call unsupervised probation. So how that looks, these are the fee recommendations. You can see that deferred judgment is increasing the default judgment, show cause fee, and the warrant fee. The witness fee, the off-duty officer, that is for when there are trials. and officers are called in on their schedule and the defendant FTAs or fails to appear for court. So we did some investigative work and found out the $75 is kind of what the officers, that's what their overtime pay is on a general basis. So that's kind of where we came up with that number. The addition of the unsupervised probation fee, that's very comparable to what we do administratively for the deferred judgment administrative fee. Previous to this, we did not have a fee associated with that, but the workload, the administrative lift that we do as a result of unsupervised probation is very similar. So we're adding, we're recommending to add that fee.

And to add to that, there's statutory language that mandates that The fees that we are assessing needs to be tied into the, there needs to be a nexus to the administrative resource, the workload that supports the activity. And that's where the unsupervised probation fee came to origination is there's so much work being done at the court to monitor completion of community service hours and classes and mental health therapy, substance abuse therapy, but there's not a fee associated with that administrative lift. So that's why we added that in. All right. So before I turn it over, I didn't know Officer Martinez Dockery until he sent an email. It's very long and detailed. What's the acronym? Too long to read. It was so good. And it went into through this process of me meeting him, seeing his work. You have in your on your staff, we'll say one of two experts in the area of commercial vehicles. And to have this resource available is just astounding.

All righty. So before I start going into the overweight fine proposals, I'll give you a baseline of why I decided to start looking towards the proposal, and then also a baseline of kind of what's legal, what's not legal as far as commercial vehicles go. So for a tractor trailer or a semi on interstate roadways, so the only roadway that it'll apply to here in Thornton is going to be I-25. It's 80,000 pounds. road vehicle weight on any surface road. So all of our city roads here, it's going to be up to 85,000 pounds and that's without a permit. Um, so the city offers permits, um, the state offers permits kind of depending where people are traveling. Um, big issue that I was seeing is we have a lot of larger vehicle, low weight vehicles traveling a lot along our surface roads. Um, and what that's doing is it's accelerating our deterioration along the roadway, as well as increasing the maintenance costs for all of our residents here. Um,

Councilmember Byrd has a question.

Why does the city allow a heavier truck than the highways? And then immediately afterwards we go, our roads aren't engineered to have overweight vehicles.

So that's not necessarily up to the city at that point. Federal or, I guess, state guidelines are any surface road. So anything besides the interstates or highways, they're allowed that extra 5,000 pounds. You see that quite often. It's like, we don't want to fix the roads, but you guys can fix the roads. Exactly. So you see that a lot, a lot of heavier vehicles will choose to not go down I-25 just due to that. The reason that I have issues with that and everyone should have issues with that is, yeah, our streets aren't engineered for that kind of traffic. Okay, so to develop all of these recommendations, we looked at six different municipalities, along with our historic fines here in Thornton, and then the state fines through Colorado as well. As they were saying earlier, calculations were made for inflation, as well as the average and median calculations were generated in each category. So to start off with the overweight vehicles, there's a tiered system that we are proposing. There's five different groups within this tiered system. Some of the fines are a little bit higher than other municipalities. Some are lower, kind of depending where it falls in the fine schedule. Starting off between one and 1,000 pounds overweight, we're proposing that that stays at $100. mainly because the 1 to 1,000 pounds could be a clerical issue when they get loaded. There's a lot of variables in there to get to that under that 1,000 pounds overweight. So starting off from there, we'll start with Group 1. Group 1 covers 1,001 pounds up to 3,000 pounds. It's going to be in increments of every 1,000 pounds is going to increase by $75. Group two is gonna jump up to $100 increase for every 1,000 pounds. That covers our 3,001 pounds up to the 6,000 pounds. Group three is $150 for every 1,000 pounds. This is where you start seeing more of the intentional noncompliance with our vehicles out here. That covers the 6,001 pounds up to the 10,000 pounds. Group four of our largest group, it covers 10,001 pounds all the way up to 19,000 pounds. It's gonna be a $250 increase per 1,000 pounds overweight. Once we reach group five, we're proposing to kind of stay along the lines of what the state chooses for overweight vehicles. So for us, we're looking to do a base fine of $750 and then 15 cents per pound rounded down to the nearest 250 pounds for any weight over that 19,000 pounds. To give you an example of a vehicle that we had in 2025, They were 43,000 pounds overweight. They had traveled southbound on Quebec from E470 area. And then they headed westbound out on 120th before they got to I-25. So they traveled through many city roads. Under our current fine schedule, that fine would have been $1,000. Under the proposed fine schedule, we'd be looking at approximately $7,200. The state's fine for that would be $13,040.

Council Member Salazar has a question. Are we just doing this off the books and when they're loaded? Or do we have a portable scale in the city?

So we do have portable scales. That was one thing we were able to acquire earlier this year. So we have portable scales that we can deploy essentially when we believe a vehicle is overweight, as well as during our summer months and into early fall. We do Board of Entries with State Patrol. And so we try to do those about once a month. And if we have the staffing, then we'll increase that and do them a little bit more frequently if State Patrol has the staffing. And if we have the staffing on those, we usually have up to two sets of scales that we can run at a time. Okay, so after the overweight vehicles, there were a few other increases we were looking to do. The first increase is going to be oversized vehicles. Oversize is going to cover all of our over width and over height vehicles. We're looking to increase from $70 up to $100 there. Baylor to weigh and stop at a weigh station is a larger issue that we see, and it's an issue that we see nationwide, honestly. Trucks will choose to either drive right by our weigh stations or they can go out of the way to intentionally avoid them. We have signage up to inform them that there is a portable weigh station and that all commercial vehicles need to pull into the weigh station. It tends to be intentional non-compliance when we do see these vehicles. So we're looking for that to go from $70 up to $300. Failure to comply with minimum standards for commercial vehicles. This will cover anything from faulty brakes on a commercial vehicle up to cracked frames. It can be drivers not taking their required rest breaks. We're looking for that to go from $35 up to $100. Weight over the posted limit is something that I've been seeing a little bit more often. It's something I'm sure you guys have heard of. So from Washington eastbound, or yeah, Washington eastbound on 128th, I'm sure you guys have seen that there's a weight limit on that roadway. We have a lot of heavy truck traffic over that roadway, as well as up on some of our other bridges. We're looking for this to go from $35 up to $300. Spilling loads is going to be when you see like the larger trash trucks moving down the highway, gravel trucks, dump trucks, things along those lines when they have either their loads or other items falling off of their truck as they're going down the roadway. We're looking for that to go from $35 up to $500. And then the last thing we're looking for on commercial vehicles is going to be Vehicles that are required to have mud flaps when they don't have the mud flaps. We see a lot of issues with debris being kicked up off the roadway into other individual vehicles. We're looking for that to go from $35 up to $75.

Council Member Burt has a question.

Do we as a city have our own definition of commercial vehicle or we base everything off of the state's definition?

So we base everything off of the federal definition when it comes to this stuff. So in order to become like a commercial vehicle inspector, we have to go through, we go through state patrol, we have an MOU with them. And then we're taught all of the federal regulations. And that's the book that we have to work out of. It's the Code of Federal Regulations, I think 49 is what it'll be.

Okay. Based off of the state stuff, my truck classifies as a commercial vehicle. So I'm just like, am I going to get a $500 fine for something?

The reason, just to interrupt for a minute, that that is so important, as opposed to us creating our own definition, is that the federal regulations and the case law and statutes really need to apply squarely with the incident that you're seeing. And you start to change the definition. Now it becomes very tricky on applying the regulations in the law to what we have here.

Yeah, I guess I know by state definition, anything that has a GCRW of 16,000 pounds or more is a commercial vehicle. Well, any three quarter ton truck is going to have a GCRW of 24,000 pounds or more, so.

Right. And so the things we're looking for here are vehicles that are actually in commerce. So essentially people making money with the vehicles. So you will see some of those smaller vehicles such as that.

But that might be like taking a trailer to the dump or something and they're going to be classified as a commercial vehicle on that stop or if they're going to be classified as a resident who's taking furniture or something to the dump.

So we would still classify those over on the passenger vehicle side of it. Essentially up until they're required to have a DOT number on the side is when we would start looking at the commercial vehicle. Gotcha.

All right. Now to get into the legal conversation, and this is applicable to what you just heard regarding the commercial vehicle violations, because in December of last year, if you remember the camp opinion that came out that mandated or the Supreme Court that if there's a municipal ordinance that mirrors a state statute prohibiting the same conduct so that the elements were identical, the municipalities cannot sentence above and beyond what the state sentence was. In the camp opinion that was attached in your packet, it highlights note 12 that says this holding subjects municipalities State sentencing laws for traffic offenses conflicts with this opinion, meaning this opinion in camp only applies to what's entitled 18 harassment steps shoplifting your your criminal ordinances. They specifically the Supreme Court specifically calls out that the camp opinion does not apply to. anything outside Title 18 as the law stands right now. So the reason that was important is you heard Officer Martinez-Dockery say that what is being recommended in fines, which is part of sentencing, is above what the state is, what their fine is set in some of these categories. You can also see how we're presenting this because the tier system makes sense because it is proportionate to the violation that you're seeing. And that if you are going above and beyond what the state sentence is, that pursuant to the camp opinion, that that is authorized for us to do as the law stands now. Questions on the legal implications of camp as it applies to commercial vehicles? That's the end of our presentation. It is your presiding judge's recommendation that you adopt alternative number one, which is to adopt the fine and fee schedule as recommended.

Council Member Martinez?

Yeah, I have a few more questions. So on our packet, it says under budget staff implications, expected additional cost recovery per year is approximated to be $211,129. Is that inclusive of all different things we talked about, including the commercial vehicles?

It's inclusive of everything except for the commercial vehicles. And it's based upon the filings that were generated in 2024. 2025 was a bit of an outlier when we look at year-to-year trends. So we went back to 2024 so that our predictions could be more predictable. So it's based upon the filings from 2024 minus commercial vehicles.

So if I understand that right, you took the filings from 2024, you applied the new fee structure, you subtract that to the total cost recovery from the actual value, right? And that was $211,129.

I wouldn't, when we were doing the math, I wouldn't say there was a subtraction, but took each of these categories. So where where we were asking for a warrant fee to be increased by $5. We took every case in which a warrant fee was assessed, added on that $5, and that difference is what's reflected in the 211.

Yeah, generally the same thing. Okay, so my comment is, you know, I appreciate the messaging from your department saying, you know, we're not trying to, raise it and collect revenue. You don't call it revenue, you call it cost recovery, which is smart. But unfortunately, I think your headland might be the only place in the city that sees it that way. If you talk to residents out there, talk to anybody in the drive-thru city, anybody who gets a ticket, they see it as, oh, the city, they're trying to make money. Why are their fees going up? Because they want to make more money. And so the public, they either, they don't, They've never actually been, they don't understand the municipal finances, first of all, that it's just a really small drop in the bucket. And they also don't see it the way that we see it because they don't know all the information. But I still think it's a problem when the vast majority of people that I've talked to, at least, or the people that I've interacted with, see it as, you know, this is a source of revenue for the city. And so that's why I do have concerns about raising those fees if we have this perception among our residents that, hey, we're out there to get more money out of them, off of violations that a lot of them don't think are that important. I think they're important, but fact is they see a bit differently than we do. So that's one concern I have. The other thing is I think we might be leaving some opportunities on the table here with the methodology that we're doing because another and just for the record, I'm just saying specifically focusing on those payable fines that you're talking about, not the commercial vehicle stuff. and not the court fees. But when it comes to the fines themselves and those moving violations and the traffic fees and all that stuff, you know, why do they even have fines at all for these types of things? They're supposed to be a deterrent to keep people from breaking these lower level ordinances. And I think that that's a very powerful tool that we may not be using to the best that we can. And So I know that there's been a lot of research on topics of what's the impact of traffic fines on the actual outcomes of improved safety. For me, one of my goals is to have fewer violations in the first place. And I think the fee structure and the fines is a powerful tool, along with our enforcement strategy as to how we can accomplish that. And so my concern is around the motivation and the amounts being, well, other cities are doing it, so we should do it too, or also inflation, which makes a little bit more sense. But I'm concerned that, you know, other cities are doing it. It could be a situation where the blind is leading the blind, and we're there increasing arbitrarily, and we see their increase, and we're following suit. And so, so my concern there is around those two things. And I think that we, since we have this municipal I mean, this municipal long-term strategy, that there could be opportunity to really take a closer look at how we could use these fines in tandem with enforcement strategies, where the actual goal is now to reduce these violations and make our city safer. you know, our job here is to make our city safer and protect our residents. So why not look into this in a way that we can do this? And that could mean that the fine increases that you asked for go up dramatically. It could mean that the frequency of enforcement is more important. Those are things I think that are worth asking. So, and again, my concern is really around those beginning fees that we talked about. So, you know, before... I don't feel comfortable raising the fines unless I can go to my residents and constituents out there and say, this is going to make you safer. These additional fees, this new fee structure, we have evidence to show that it's going to reduce the number of It's going to reduce the number of violations and it's going to keep you and your family safer. And I don't think we can say that with what we've heard today. So I'm not opposed to raising the fines. I don't know if this is the right amount to be effective to the goals that I would see this. So I see that we could do something more and incorporate it into our strategy. My thoughts on the other fines and the court fees. I think those are fine. That's not the same kind of mindset I have on those. And then the commercial one, since that's a new thing, I think that, you know, maybe we could go forward with that. We could also bring it in. I don't feel as strongly about that as I do as the first part of the presentation. So those are my thoughts. I would love to hear what everybody else thinks, but I just think there's a lot of opportunity here to take this, you know, regular process and translate it into something that could yield results that actually will make people's lives safer and better off in the city.

May I have a moment to equip the messaging? Is to answer to the following our partners because they're increasing theirs, we're doing the same. survey each of those presiding judges and court administrators are held in my regard. And I know they do their due diligence when they are getting the same information. And then we added objectivity to that with the inflation calculator. So leaning into that objectivity and that supporting the increase is a, I would argue, a safe place to go, as opposed to we're doing it because Westminster and Fort Collins are doing it. When we sentence on traffic cases, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe speeding is a leading cause of death and injuries in the US. And we are trying to deter noncompliance, incentivize compliance, and what grabs each individual is going to be different, what their metaphorical currencies is going to be different. So based upon their traffic history, the fact that this particular case, their response, is it is often a fine in court costs along with community service hours to give back to the community that you put in risk when this happened. Here's your class, a live at 25, if you're a younger individual, level one, level two traffic class. So we're really trying to figure out what is the currency for you so that you stop being a danger on our roads in your community. So it's grabbing all of it. And the individuals that are in financial hardship, we have those conversations. it's the fine is not going to automatically go down because you're in financial hardship. Because then that I feel is arbitrary because someone has a different idea of what financial hardship can be. But we do have payment extensions. Sometimes we charge, the default is to charge for a payment extension. Then you get up to 60 days or longer if you're in communication with us. If there's obvious financial hardship, we can waive that fee. So it's really working with community members, not being oblivious. And it's not to invalidate the message that you are given, the community members that say the porch is here to make money. But I do feel like you talk to individuals, a large sample of them that go through the system and hear what we're saying and how we're listening and how we're sentencing individuals. By and large, I would say that that's not their impression, that their impression really is because they hear the conversations like, When you're going 81 and a 55, this is your community you're putting in risk and you can't unring that bell. So it's really trying to tailor to create behavior pivots, if you will. So I would offer that as equipping that conversation. So out in the community, it changes because I don't think that's what's happening in the courthouse.

Well, in the courthouse, you've got the people who've decided to come into court, right? When we talked about these being panicked, So that conversation, how is that being had for the people who just pay the fine?

They have an option and their summons lets them know that. And often they're coming into court because they got a four point speeding down to a two point defective for around 140. They want a lower point reduction. When an officer pulls someone over on the street, they don't have access to the driving history when they come into the court. Now they're going to meet with the prosecutor, look at all that here. Someone may have taken a class ahead of time. So there's further conversations and negotiation that often does happen. So I see people come into court for that reason.

Our city manager has a question. Yeah, I just had a really simple clarification to make sure that staff and the council were following your comments. Councilmember, I think you referred to a longer-term initiative. Were you referring to the strategic planning team that's looking at our fee philosophies more generally? Okay. I thought that's what I inferred from your comments. Just wanted to make sure we were following the sentiment.

Councilmember Byrd? My opinion is we would go with the recommendation, though I understand some of the context around not wanting to push for more. I also see it as a situation where if you're getting six-point tickets, you should be fined a lot more than $240. I say that from experience because when I was a teenager, I had a sports car and I got in a lot of trouble with one. So I know that if it was a much larger fine, then it would have slowed it down. And mine was a lot more than that. Um, and it made sure that I didn't do it again. So I would actually say that we should encourage for the higher tier points that those get a higher fine. Um, but I would go with your recommendation. Correct.

Council Member Morris.

Thanks for the due diligence you've done on this, on the fees and all the tourist structure, the commercial vehicle side. I would agree with Council Member Burr. I mean, instead of like a linear, maybe more of like an exponential, you know, and some of those higher violations, but definitely would go with our recommendation here.

Council Member Russell. I'm just trying to see what consensus is on this issue.

I'm fine with the recommendation and I have the same story as Berg, so I learned my lesson. So, yeah, 240. Sorry, David. 240, I'd be like, oh, David. Yeah, it was a lot more, and that was 30 years ago.

Councilmember, my chance.

Okay, one question for my colleagues, because I actually agree with you guys that you know, my concern is that actually on some of these being too high, but there may be being too low. And so if we're concerned about them being too low, that was an opportunity to modify the recommendation and meet them higher promise. I don't know what number that is. And so, um, I don't want the number update. Well, because at the higher end is when things get more dangerous and, um, you know, you guys brought it up tonight. So it obviously made an impact in the way that, you know, your behavior is, and it went on anybody. So if we think that the recommendation is low on the higher end, maybe we should ask our staff to reevaluate at the lower severe infractions and come back to us. That's kind of one of the things, like the by where I'm coming from. I'm concerned that we're not, we're not doing enough to keep it safe. This is an opportunity to do that.

Okay. I have not heard from David or, or me or, so David. Yeah, I'm fine with the number one. Okay. And Council Member Algy.

Yeah, thank you. Thanks for the presentation. Great job. I do like the recommendation. I will go for it, but I do also agree with Justin and Devin. Can we review this and maybe go higher if we need to in the future?

Yes, and there's a sweet spot where if we are making things so egregious and individuals aren't going to pay at all and it's not going to incentivize them to comply, and the balance will be sent to collections, and then it'll just sit there. So it needs to be enough that it jars them to pivot their behavior, but still is manageable. And if someone's behavior or driving habits are above and beyond the payable that you see here, they're coming into court. It's a mandatory appearance. These are for the lesser. Even though six is a lot, the more egregious offenses, they're coming into court.

Okay, so Councilmember Algi, are you in favor of one, or are you saying that we adopt a different municipal code fines fee schedule?

One for now, but then if we can review again and go higher, then I would like us to do that.

And to be clear, the judge and I have communicated about the strategic plan team around fee philosophy, so I think the intent is to revisit and to collaborate on both these fees and potentially other fees that as a part of that larger fee philosophy. So I don't, I guess I do want to say I open to the feedback to defer to all that effort, but I do think the judge was aware of the review of fees and the work on the broader fee philosophy. I think this work had already been initiated before that work began on a broader citywide perspective. I have to speak for you, Judge.

No, you're great. We're in line. We're there.

Can we hear from Council Member Salazar? Well, if that's the case, then I agree to one.

Okay. And Council Member Bird, you had another question?

Yeah. You said that there was a difference between the six-point violations. What was the delineation between the one that's criminal compared to one similar?

The speed, 20 to 24 is civil, 25 to 39 is criminal. Gotcha.

So the six-point is like up to 25 miles over?

They're both six points. But the speed of 2024 is six point civil. And then 25 to 39 is six point criminal. And the second one comes into court.

Explain my price difference.

How did you show up at the podium? So we have consensus to move forward with number one. I agree with that. I think there are socioeconomic implications to raising fees. to astronomical amounts where it puts folks in a situation where they can never catch up and are just perpetually criminalized. But I also see, I, what I hear from the community is people want enforcement, but then they also don't like when they get enforced. So our lovely red light camera, I've had folks that are, I'm very familiar with, you know, text me, call me and be like, Oh, and I'm like, yeah, that's why. you know, careful at the red light camera.

So that'll be, that'll be a topic for the meeting tonight.

Yeah. So, I mean, I think that's kind of the thing is like, we're balancing people want the roads to be safer. When I ran in 2024, that was the hot topic was safer roads, safer roads, safer roads. And then we start to enforce on those rules that make things safer. And then folks are like, well, I don't want to pay fees and fines and it's, you know, a balancing act. So, um, Yeah, but I do think all in all with fees, we do have to also look at socioeconomic implications on our community if they become astronomical and unfair and unruly as well. So that's where I'm at. But anyway, we have consensus to move forward. And that is the finish of our update session right now. So we have like about 14 minutes. Thank you for your time.

Thank you, Ron.

Until council meeting. Thank you.