City Council - workshop

All right. Council Member Morris, Council Member Algin, Council Member Martinez will all be online. Do you see them on there, Kristen?

I see Council Member Algin online right now.

Okay. I know Drew is running a little bit late, so he might pop on. If you could just let us know when Justin and Drew pop on, just so that we all know they're there. And then, John, just raise your hand when you want to speak, and Kristen will let us know that you want to talk.

Thank you.

And it looks like Council Member Martinez just joined.

All right. So, Justin, same to you. When you're ready to talk, just raise your hand, and then Kristen will hit your button for me so I'll know you want to speak.

Okay, sounds good.

Any questions about the agenda? Anything from you, Tammy? No updates, thank you. Jessica?

Nope, nothing from me.

All right, we'll jump right into the exciting 2027 budget.

Yeah, so I'll do a brief introduction. Erica Sena is going to kick off the presentation itself. We do have all the department directors sitting at the table. Most will be sharing a little bit about the services and efforts of their departments as we go through the presentation tonight. Just as a reminder, you have the entire planning session tonight. And then two weeks from now, we have that time on the 29th as well. If you don't get through materials between those two meetings, we'll work to identify a backup session. Our hope tonight is to get through the general fund and reserve the 29th for special funds and those kinds of things as well. We know that there's a lot in the general fund, so we know that may not be possible to do. One of the things we have in the order of the presentation, we are going to open back up and revisit some of the information that you saw before on wages and benefits. You do have a memo in the backup, and you've gotten an additional memo since that time that's got some more detailed information and charts, those kinds of things. We'll be going through quite a few follow-up requests related to wages and benefits from your last meeting. I would encourage this in the interest of time that we try to limit questions and discussion as we get through the personnel pieces, just a clarification on the slides. If there's more discussion or direction, I might be better held just to make sure that we can get through the rest of the slides and that you can have some of the broader context in the budget recommendation. So with that, I'm happy to give the floor to Erica. I think she'll introduce members of her team that are here as well.

Yeah, good evening, Mayor, Mayor Pro Tem and Council. So tonight, as Mayor said, it's the exciting 2027 budget. I just want to recognize my team here. So I'm Becca Abrahamson. She's our grant program manager and she'll be talking capital. And then back here we have Emily Whittington and Joe Fry. who have been instrumental in creation of this budget recommendation as well. So tonight we're going to start off by talking about just an introduction to the 2027 budget. That's going to include a brief discussion sort of rehashing the financial management philosophy. This is something we've discussed with council several times before, but we just want to talk about it sort of as grounding for how this recommendation came to be. and then key considerations that went into building this budget. Next, we'll get into the strategic plan and organizational review. Basically, the idea here is, how did those two items tie into what you're seeing as part of the budget? And also, a little bit on the organizational review, how are changes shown in this budget and how they potentially aren't yet shown in the budget? Next we'll go into summary data. That's sort of a bird's eye view of a number of like high level items. So revenues by total revenues by fund, total expenditures by fund. It's just a really big picture look at the city. Then we'll get into pay plan, including the follow-up Tansy mentioned. General fund by department, all of All of the department directors are up here tonight and the idea is that they will be sharing about their departments, their mission, their levels of service, especially the ones that tie into the strategic plan. And then we'll also do some budget analysis for each department. GovCap or governmental capital is all about the five-year capital plan of the city with particular projects being highlighted. Same goes for special revenue. So special revenue has a number of funds within it. Most of those funds are related to parks and recreation, but there is also a road and bridge fund. Then we move into utilities, so water, sewer, sanitation, and stormwater. Other funds sort of includes all of the smaller funds, 136GID, E911, TASHCO, and the TDAs. We have a summary roll-up of all unfunded items at the city. I think it's important to show. There are a lot of needs within the city and a lot of good ideas, and We're just frankly not able to fund all of them. So we wanted to talk that at a high level. And then lastly, next steps. Tansy mentioned this also. We are likely, I think we're targeting getting through the general fund tonight, if possible, with the remainder of those agenda items covered in two weeks. So our financial management philosophy. really the philosophy here is to balance available financial resources within these different priority areas. Uh, as mentioned earlier, this is something that council has seen previously. We, we think of them as sort of tension points. You know, you can do, you can do all of them to some degree, or you can, you know, you can decide to wait certain things. Um, so previously when does in discussions with council, we waited maintaining levels of service and, you know, making sure that we, um, We prioritize not laying off employees as part of this during this slow revenue growth period. Some other attention points are this idea of enhancing current or creating new levels of service. That's certainly a tension point that we have, especially as levels of service expectations change in the community, that's a tension point. Also as part of the strategic plan, there are new ideas coming up all of the time. And then lastly, financial sustainability. So we do have our 10-year financial sustainability goal. And we sort of think that also is a tension point. It's a policy decision. So the decision, at least right now, is that we hold on to this sort of 10-year plan. But it's a tension point as well.

And just for the record, Drew's joined us. That's my remorse. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you there.

That second major bullet is to prepare. So what that means is ongoing revenues meet or exceed ongoing expenditures. And then lastly, I mentioned this just a second ago, we have a goal of meeting or exceeding our financial sustainability goals now and in the future. So what are some of the key considerations that went into this budget? The goal of this budget and likely future budgets is to advance the city towards the four adopted strategic focus areas while still building long-term financial sustainability. We have seen definitely some challenges in this budget. It's not unique to Thornton. This is both a local challenge as well as really a national challenge. So we are seeing continued slow revenue growth. I would say that this started in 2026 and we are anticipating for it to continue into 2027 and potentially 2028. That's certainly the state forecast as well. So the large driver here is slowing development activity. That's reducing our growth-related revenues. But we are also seeing a flattening of sales tax collections. So we are hitting our sales tax growth projections, but those growth projections are relatively limited. And we're not anticipating large growth in that area in 2027. The next challenge that we're facing is we're seeing large increases in resource requests and also just, I mean, those resource requests are being driven by the fact that things just cost more. So we're seeing that in terms of some of our base building areas. So over time, we're seeing it in specific utilities and we're seeing it in software. Those are three of the biggest areas. They're certainly not the only areas. So what is our response to these different challenges? Well, we are trying to maintain visible core levels of service. We are trying to, as part of this budget, create cost-saving measures and sort of incorporating that into this recommendation. Just generally careful consideration of anything that's being added to the budget and making sure that the strategic focus areas and master plans that have been adopted are prioritized as part of this budget. So now we'll move into discussion on strategic plan and organizational review.

Thanks, Erica. Just as a reminder, the strategic plan is organized around four strategic focus areas, vibrant and purposeful development, which focus tracking commercial development, pursuing diverse housing choices, and maintaining inviting public spaces. Connected communities, focusing on reducing congestion, providing safe multimodal transportation options, supporting active and inclusive communities, and expanding meaningful connections. supported in the community, which have is focuses on having a safe, resilient and meaningful collaborations, impactful community programs, and outstanding utilities and organizational excellence, which is building an organization with their culture of accountability, continuous improvement, one that has customer service centric that leverages technology and building intentional community engagement responsive to the community's needs. So throughout the 2027 budget recommendation, you'll see integration, wanting to continue the implementation of the strategic plan. This will include both operating and capital items. Throughout each of the department summaries, you'll see alignment with strategic plan, with the associated actions, and it'll highlight the team leaders that are associated with the actions. So just to highlight some key investments found in the 2027 budget recommendation, You have the non-utilities fees and charges study, which is associated with the organizational excellence strategic focus area. The TDA North branding and placemaking associated with our vibrant and purposeful development. There is strategic plan and performance measurement software, which is associated with the organizational excellence strategic focus area. The public safety facilities evaluation, which is part of the safe, supported, and livable community. And then the transit study implementation, Associated with the connected communities.

So. The strategic plan obviously is a major line of this budget recommendation and we hope future budget recommendations as well. The other one is Erica mentioned is the organizational review, which I think most of you are familiar with what we're working on. Wanted to provide a little bit of background again, kind of where we started and where we are right now. So, I think, as all of, you know, we conducted the organizational review in 2025 and actually those results were presented to city council about a year ago. I think it was October of 2025. The results were. Presented to to you all and again, we've got a line. I won't read all this to you, but we outline kind of some of the key intents of the organizational review really looking the city structure. as well as the city had grown in size and complexity. And so recognize there was a need to review our structure ultimately with the goal of realigning functions to reflect your policy priorities and the areas identified in the strategic plan as well as maybe in a way that could better deliver on your results. So as I said, in 2025, the recommendation was finalized and moving forward from that, we started, it says implementation plan, it really started with an evaluation. We took the recommendation from the third party consultant, and assessed it as a leadership team, got input on, hey, what works, what maybe different people not consider as part of this review, but eventually adopted the new or realigned organizational structure based on that feedback. And I'll touch on that new structure here in a minute. As you know, we have been and continue to recruit for new positions to establish and realign the structure around those departments. And we are in the process of establishing those new departments, realigning functions and adjusting processes. We anticipate that that process will carry on through the balance of 2027. There's some departments that have a lot of processes that with the realignment, this is an opportunity to rethink them and rework them. I wanted to really be clear. We've been really intentional in trying to be communicative with the organization and what we'll start to do with it, start to be more communicative with the community as we start to see these changes come to fruition. So as I said, this should look familiar to you. This is the new adopted organizational structure. I don't really need to dwell on that one too much. So as Erica said, wanted to talk a little bit about how the organizational review is reflected through this budget recommendation. So as a reminder, the reason why we conducted the review and are looking at realigning is to provide long-term alignment with higher priorities. The changes are cost neutral in the 2027 budget, and we'll get to a little bit more detail with that here in a minute. Funding for the new positions was identified by holdings, like vacant positions throughout 2025 and early 2026. So most of the positions that we've used to fund the executive position to implement the recommendations in the review for positions that were vacated and held in 2025, a few in early 2026. The majority of the new executive positions were actually funded by existing executive positions, not all, but the majority. And again, I'll show a detail that breakdown here in a couple of slides. And then the last point I want to make is as we continue implementation and live in the new structure, we will continue to evaluate staffing opportunities and challenges throughout that implementation to make sure that staffing aligns with our new department alignments and processes. And this is the point that Erica made. The 2027 budget recommendation that you're seeing today reflects the prior organizational structure. It just wasn't realistic for us to are realigning the organization. So the numbers that you see and the kind of the structure of the recommendation largely follow the prior organizational structure. It is our intent that the 2027 budget book, the official budget, once you all hopefully adopt a budget, will reflect the new organizational structure as much as possible. And then, as I said, we're going to continue work through 2027. And so with the 2028 recommendation, you'll see that kind of full realignment come forward with the budget recommendations. So this is a high level chart that we thought might be helpful just to provide some context again, noting that the 2027 budget reflects the old structure. We did want to reference what the new structure looks like. So I'll just orient you the chart on the left hand side are the department and offices in our. Our prior structure on the right hand side of the chart are the departments and offices in the new structure. The FTE count are the recommended FTEs in the 2027 budget. So we've kind of taken the 2027 budget recommendation on the old structure and realigned it to the new structure with this FTE count. So you can see the 1,182 proposed FTEs in the 2027 budget. And again, see the new departments or realigned departments and their new FTEs in those departments. We do have a caveat. There are some, right away being one of the notable ones, there are some alignments that we're still working through. And so, for example, the Transportation Department does not yet reflect what that thing is, but it's our anticipation that right away maintenance will end up in the Transportation Department. Those FTEs just aren't shown yet. And then this is my last slide. So this gets to the funding for the positions. You can see on the left-hand side, the 10 new executive positions. And on the right-hand side, you can see where those reallocated positions came from. And we've asked for the last three positions, the community programs, chief information officer, and transportation director. Those are, in our minds, kind of the net new executive positions. This gets to be a little bit more art than science when you're holding these positions vacant. What we've tried to show is you can kind of crosswalk from the reallocated positions to the new executive positions where most of them came from. So hopefully that's responsive. I know there were some questions on the specific alignment.

So now we'll move into that summary data. So again, this is sort of a bird's eye view. Anything that we're showing here, we're going to speak to in more detail in the fund level sections as well.

I'll start with the revenue summary by funds. So this is your group of funds. The first column is the 2026 projected revenue. So this is the revenue that we used when we built the 2027 budget. Next column is what we're anticipating for the 2027 projection revenue. You have your dollar change and your percent change. So in total, we're projecting 502.5 million in revenue for 2027. That's about 4.8 million or 1% below the 2026 projection. The overall change is relatively small, but when we dig through these, there's quite a bit of movement. Most of that movement is related to one-time revenues, grant revenues, development activity, and then some transfers between funds. So we'll talk through those as we work in those groups. The general fund is up about 1% overall, and we'll go through that in more detail. If you were to remove grants from that line, they'd be essentially be flat. The 27% decrease in the special revenue funds is primarily related to timing of grants and one-time projected revenues. And then the 4% decrease in water is due to one-time and miscellaneous revenues, including PFAS, settlement money, we had oil and gas and some other miscellaneous dollars there. The biggest change that you'll see on the slide is the risk fund at 68%. That's primarily due to two things. One, in 2026, there was a one-time credit back to the funds that reduced the risk fund revenue in that year. And then we have an increase to health insurance costs. And so kind of the takeaway here is that across the board, city revenues are essentially flat year over year.

So on the expenditure side of the equation, similar to Kim, Similar to Kim, we've got all of the funds listed on that left-hand column, followed by the 2026 budget, then the 2027 budget, the dollar change, and the percentage change. You can see in total, this budget is a significantly reduced budget compared to prior year. That is almost all entirely related to capital, specifically capital in the water fund. So we had a very capital-heavy year in the 2026 budget in the water fund that included the PFAS improvements, Holly pipeline, and some larger expenses in the Thornton water project. So as those things have been already been appropriated and we don't have other large projects taking their place, that is why we're seeing that very sharp decrease overall and especially in the water fund. You'll also see in the general governmental fund, the general fund and governmental capital fund combined. The reason for the decrease there, the general fund, which is the major operating fund of the city is growing. And we'll get into that in more detail later tonight. But the governmental capital fund, similar to the water fund, had some pretty heavy capital projects that were budgeted in 2026, specifically the 104th Avenue widening, which was budgeted for $25 million. So though it looks like a large increase, it's really on the operating side of the equation, there's really no change there. FTEs by department. So these are FTEs, not just for the general fund, but really across all operating funds, which includes the general fund, the utility funds, and the risk fund. And you can see here that the recommendation includes an increase of 1.5 FTEs across all funds. Even though we are not recommending adding a lot of FTEs, you can see that there is a lot of movement. And I think that speaks to two things. One, we mentioned earlier, one of our strategies for this more challenging year was to be creative in our solutions. So we looked to, when possible, reallocating positions that were vacant to priority needs in the city. And then the second reason for the movement you're seeing between the departments is really related to the reorganization effort. So you'll see in the city manager's office, there was a reduction of 8.5 FTEs. The city manager's office sort of worked as a holding bay for vacant FTEs. We would basically, once a position was made vacant and frozen for the reorg, it was pushed into the city manager's office just to be held, and then it was reallocated. So that's the 8.5 coming out of there.

again any new activities we'll be talking about in more detail later in this presentation the slides uh high level overview of the debt the city has um the reason why we show you this is this is one of the obligations that we fund first um at the beginning of each year so um what you'll see here is the final maturity is when our debt um expires that the We have the remaining principal, what it'll be as of 12-31-2026. And then what our annual payment is that we're required. So we have a total outstanding debt of $178 million. Annual debt service payments of $18.6 million. And then we're also planning for later this month to issue the 2026 water revenue bonds for about $200 million. That'll... The annual payment on that will be 12.5 million, bringing our total to 377 million or annual payments of 31 million. Not all of this debt is supported by the same revenue source. So each one of our debt issuances is paid by the individual's funds. And then there's a dedicated revenue stream that's assigned to that debt. And so when we look forward and we talk about debt capacity, Right now, it's limited across the city unless we were to find new revenue sources or additional ongoing financial capacity within the fund. But for us, this is an important long-term consideration when we're planning to make sure that we can make the payments in each of these funds.

Before we move on to pay plan, I just want to check to see if there are any questions. So then we will move on to pay plan with Patricia and Connor.

Thank you. It's good to be back in front of you all. Some of this information, as Tansy said, is going to be a little bit repetitive, but then we wanted to dive into a little bit more detail based on some questions and some feedback that we've gotten. So this first slide is almost identical to the slide that you saw weeks ago. There's a lot of information on there, but it does provide to you the different employee groups by the number of FTEs, the cost for certain things, talks to you a little bit about and gives you a good comparison between the economic adjustments being recommended, lump sum merits, markets, and so forth. But we're going to dive into a little bit more detail here on our next slide. So we're going to tell specific to the economic adjustment and merit increases. Again, similar to the previous slide, we are recommending a 1% cost of living adjustment that would add to base for general and police union employees. In addition, we're recommending a $1,500 one-time lump sum merit For employees. Fire Union is on here. They're a little bit different, but I didn't want to leave them out there a little bit different. They're 4% plus that 0.9 really includes economic adjustment, merit, and markets kind of all together. So to talk a little bit more about economic adjustment and merit eligibility, I know this was a question from last time as far as who is eligible for these two types of increases and how does that come up with. In 2025, we formed a performance appraisal committee, I'll use PA probably more often, that met, they were probably 30 plus people, all different departments, all different levels, supervisory, non-supervisory, and that group really went through the form and they recommended some changes to the form and some of the things that just the way the process works. And then there also was a lot of discussions about this topic of how economic adjustment in there is actually applied. So that chart just gives you an idea of what the recommendation was out of that committee that we're currently adopting. And that just shows you on that left-hand side, there are five ratings that an employee can receive. Superior exceeds expectations, successful, needs improvement, or acceptable. That next column over just tells you the eligibility for those types of increases. And so you can tell that those first three, superior exceeds expectations and successful, those folks are all eligible for the economic adjustment and the merit. Next row down, needs improvement. The recommendation was that those folks that received a needs improvement PA were eligible for the economic adjustment only. They wouldn't be eligible for merit. They also were not a requirement to be part of a performance improvement plan or a PIP. That last category of employees that they were rated as unacceptable, those employees as part of the recommendation was that they would be eligible for the economic adjustment only after successfully completing a PIP. So the performance improvement plan, that is something that the department leads and takes the employee through. Those last two columns are just to give some reference in terms of the number of employees during the last cycle of how many people got those ratings and then the percentage of what that equates to. You can tell literally 99% of our employees were rated successful or higher. Only six were rated needs improvement and then another five were unacceptable. I will tell you, two of those five did, as part of their PIP, bring their and so they received that economic adjustment. So really there was three people that did not receive that.

Roberta?

what were the like adjust when you said there was a group of employees and supervisors that met to go over this merit plan what were the major adjustments made to the to the plan for last year so this this is in place from 2025 for 2026 and so we're recommending the same thing for 2027.

I don't know if that answers your question or not.

You said there were some adjustments made or some different considerations.

So the PA committee in 2025, they made some adjustments to the form. And so there were previously, there were, I think, gosh, 12 to 15 different performance characteristics that employees were rated on. And the feedback we got from supervisors from that committee was that it was just too many and there was too much overlap. There were also things in the definitions that they found confusing. And so that committee, during those discussions, they whittled it down to, I think we now have five characteristics. They actually spent an entire meeting wordsmithing the definition of those characteristics. And so they've also, part of it, we talked about whether or not goals should be required. We're also, which is new for this year, I will say, We are requiring the employee input form be required so that we make sure that we're hearing the employee's voice when we're doing the performance appraisal. Okay, thank you. Moving into market adjustments. Again, I think last time I used my fingers to roll these up alphabetically. So I wanted to just show you visually what our survey jurisdictions are. Again, Adams County, Arvada, Aurora, Broomfield, Fort Collins, Lakewood and Westminster. I think I also last time more verbally talked about what our process is and so I wanted you to be able to see that a little bit more. I'm a very visual person. So part of the process is we do identify benchmark positions. We do that by reviewing job description to job description. And so we're actually looking at the essential functions, the KSAs, so knowledge, skills, and abilities, things like that. We don't just compare on title alone. If we find at least three matches out of those seven survey jurisdictions, we consider it a benchmark. If we can find more, that's great. It just makes it a stronger benchmark. We do use average actual pay as well as salary ranges when we do the analysis. We wanted to make sure we use both of those pieces. If a position cannot be a benchmark because we just can't find the data out there in those seven survey jurisdictions, we consider them tied. It's really, really important as part of the city's pay philosophy that if you're not a benchmark position and so the market isn't directly setting your pay, you're at least tied to one of those benchmark positions that we're constantly keeping track of that internal equity of one position moves, the series moves. And I'll show you that here in a second. The thresholds that we call them when we do the analysis is if a position or a benchmark is found to be 3 percent or more low, we recommend that it go up or down. If a position is found to be 5 percent or more high, we recommend the position go down a range. So detail that was not shown last time when we met was what are the actual positions that are receiving these markets that we're recommending? Lots of color on here. The green and the red show you the benchmark positions. So those are the positions that we were able to find three or more matches in our seven survey jurisdictions that we feel very strongly that they are very comparative positions. The positions that are not highlighted, those are the ties. And so as an example, administrative supervisor, that very top one is a benchmark position. That's a really good solid benchmark. We've got probably five matches to that one. the Environmental Services Program Coordinator and the Executive Assistant, those are tied. And so again, we weren't able to find at least three matches to our seven survey jurisdictions, but we really wanna make sure we keep that internal equity with those positions. The red position on there, Building Inspection Supervisor, actually let me back up. So if the green positions and those ties are on there, we are recommending they go up one range. Our ranges are about 3.5% apart. The actual employees, not only does the position move in range, but the actual employees receive a 5% increase not to exceed the top of the range so that we're keeping them moving through the range, which is really important. The red position, I'll go back to that. The red position, building inspection supervisor, as well as the tight position of plans examining supervisor, we are recommending based on the data that that position go down. When the positions go down, they move down that approximately 3.5%. By city code, these employees that are in these positions, their base pay will not be affected. City code for years has allowed employees to be 7% outside of their range in these cases. So even if they're at the top and the range moves down, they'll be about 3.5% above. And that's just until the economic adjustment catches back up. The positions that are at the very bottom there in the green, those look a little bit different because I don't say that plus one, minus one on them. Those are more unionized positions or associated with the union where we just do the analysis a little bit different, but I wanted to still show those are the more specific increases that those positions would be receiving. The next slide is the excluded positions. For those of you who may not be familiar with excluded versus career service, the primary difference is who you report to. So career service positions make up probably 80, 90% of our employees. Excluded positions are positions that report directly to the city manager or they report to a department head, department director. So it's a very limited number of positions and you can tell it's just a shorter list. We've got one position that is being recommended to move up and one position that's recommended to move down. Any questions before I get to insurance?

Okay.

So this slide looks slightly different. It's very similar to what you saw a couple weeks ago. I did break down the difference between the HMO plans versus the high deductibles for each carrier. Last time you may remember, it was kind of a weighted average number. These actually show you specifically the Cigna HMO is a not to exceed 19.2 while the Cigna high deductibles is not to exceed 16.6. Similarly, Kaiser HMO not to exceed 11.7 and Kaiser high deductible not to exceed 6.2. These next few slides are again in response to just providing counsel a little bit more information so that you have that background. The first table on this slide was in response to kind of a question of what is health insurance costing us as a whole? And so you'll see it's broken into three main categories, and then it breaks it into the all-employee cost versus the total employer cost. So that first grouping, those first two columns, that is today. So in 2026, if you add all of the employees' premiums and all of the employees' share of premiums, you're going to get to that 3.8 number. Today, in 2026, the city is contributing total for all employees that are signed up. I need my glasses on. Six number. Next column over. Again, this was a question that was raised. That was the initial renewal that we received just saying to our existing carriers, what should the premiums be for? What will the premiums be for 2027? When we got those numbers, they were a bit shocking. We haven't seen this type of increase or this type of numbers for years and years and years. And then those last two columns are the response or kind of what resulted in with those plan design changes that we're recommending, how we mitigated those increases. The second table on this slide is trying to show, and I'm going to talk a lot about impact, trying to show some impact to employees and employers. We just did the lowest and the highest is that first column. On that lowest row, you'll see our lowest plan and tier is our single high deductible health plan, which is that single tier. And again, you can see that same breakdown of what is the employee paying annually in 2026? What is the employer paying annually in 2026? Next grouping of columns is what was the initial renewal that we received from the carriers? And then those final two columns, what is the, with the plan design changes, what are the premiums that we're seeing?

Last, sorry, Roberta.

Can we go back to this last slide? Of course. So the biggest increase is to the HMO Cigna at 19.2%. Is that correct? That's correct. Okay.

All right. Thank you. So then the highest probably not surprising is the Cigna HMO and that family tier. So the data, again, is showing for the employee and employer annual cost of what they're paying in 2026. what we received from the carriers for the initial renewal, and then ultimately what the premiums would be following the plan design changes that were being recommended. further impact that we wanted to look into. Two things that we wanted to kind of look into were on that left-hand side, whether or not the recommendation for pay, so specifically that 1% economic adjustment plus the $1,500 lump sum merit, and then any associated market increases, whether or not those three things covered the health insurance increase. we actually went through and pull a listing of every single person's annual pay and what their current election is. And so we were able to determine this is every single employee's actual pay, what plan that they're in and what tier that they've chosen. And so what would be the net effect for each individual? And in that first scenario, if you apply the 1% plus the 1500 in market increases, that by itself, ensures that all employees will be not having what I'm going to call a negative net effect. On the right-hand side, we wanted to do another kind of scenario of what if you pulled that lump sum out of there? This is not saying we're not giving the lump sum. This would just be like something that we wouldn't necessarily touch. So that second scenario is what if we gave, what if we just considered the 1% economic adjustment and the market increases and we did find out that there were 75 employees that would have a negative net effect. Okay. And we're going to talk about that negative net effect then.

The 1% and the $1,500 will equivalent for the $1,700 difference in the two plans. But what is the impact going to look like as far as people who actually hit their max deductions? Because looking at the plans, the maximum deductible went up double what it was before.

I have a slide that somewhat answers that question in two slides. And I don't know if we can either jump to that right now or we can, okay. Yep. And please let me know at that point if I don't answer the question. So further detail on this idea of impact and whether or not there is a negative net effect when you compare the recommended pay increase with the carrier and tier that employees are currently enrolled in. What you see here in this chart is, and again, we're looking at that scenario of those 75 employees that we identified as being impacted. What you see here in this chart are the two Cigna plans, HMO and high deductible, and you're seeing each tier. The first column, or sorry, the second column over, what that number identifies is the number of people that would have a negative net effect with getting the 1% economic adjustment and market adjustment. So for Cigna HMO single, there is one person that would have a negative net effect, and that impact is $20 annually. Okay. Um, if you go down, um, Cigna HMO employee plus one, so that's other people call it dual. There are 13 people that have a negative net effect. If you're, if you're just comparing economic adjustment and market with what their actual health insurance premium increase will be. Um, that range is from anywhere from $92 to $480. The highest one. I don't think this is a surprise because again, it is our, it is our, um, kind of most expensive plan plus the most expensive tier. There's 27 people there. They range, that impact ranges from either $112 to $1,076 annually. That $1,076, that is one person, not minimizing it, but that is one person. There's about four or five people in like the $900 range that starts to drop off a bit. Cigna high deductible single and Cigna high deductible employee plus one. There's nobody that has a impact when you compare the pay increase with the health increase. And then high deductible family for Cigna, there are 17 people again with that range of 13 to 525. Questions? We did the same thing for Kaiser. So on the Kaiser model, you'll see the three, you'll see the two plans, Kaiser HMO and Kaiser high deductible. And then you see the tiers broken down. Kaiser, all but the Kaiser HMO family tier at 1% in market adjustments covers the health insurance increase. So Kaiser HMO family, there are 17 people that are currently enrolled in that plan at that tier. And their annual impact is somewhere between six and $167.

Do we have included here? I know if I missed it, the exact number of Kaiser, each exact numbers of employees in each plan.

I do not have that in this particular slide deck, but I can get it for you both before the end of the night. Okay. Thank you. I had it in a previous slide deck and I, I think this goes to your question, but please tell me if I don't address it. We wanted to look at not only like premium impacts, but we wanted to look at the two biggest changes in the plan design are those deductible increases and that out-of-pocket increase. It's hard to forecast this. And so we looked at both those folks that in 2025 hit their deductible with both carriers and those people that have hit their deductible year to date with both carriers. So what does this table tell you? For Cigna in 2025, just looking at those two deductible columns, there were 129 people. So about 25% of the Cigna enrollments, and this is in both HMO and high deductible plans, about 25% of those folks hit their deductible. What is unknown about this is we don't know if They were $10 over their deductible or if they were a $1000 over their deductible or more. But we do know or we can see there was 120 there would be 129 people that would would have been impacted with these plan design changes. Same thing for Kaiser that number is 214 for 2025, 102 year to date for 2026. Moving to those last two columns of out-of-pocket, these numbers are smaller, which is a sliver of good news, only from the fact of impact. There are 33 folks in 2025 with Cigna that hit their out-of-pocket. Again, we don't know with the out-of-pocket change if they were $10 over that they would have had to pay more or if it's $1,000 or what it is. So about 6%. Kaiser out-of-pocket in 2025, it was equated to about 9% of those enrolled. 2026 year to date, it was three and four respectively. Did that answer your question though?

Maybe. The out-of-pocket expenses, do we know what that total amount was for those plans at that time?

Help me with that. What the out-of-pocket amount was?

Correct. Like what the top limit was for the out-of-pocket.

Just give me a moment and I can get that for you. And I can actually get that at the same time by the end of the night.

And then as far as how that compares the deductibles and the out-of-pocket expenses for this current one is kind of what I'm trying to compare the two with. Because when you look at something like the 2025 number, if the deductible of the staff and then 40% for Kaiser. That's some pretty large numbers of significant stuff.

Yeah, I would agree. When we pulled the information, the numbers for the deductibles were not as I'll just go with the word positive. We were hoping that the way the out-of-pocket came out, we were hoping for more of that.

So, yeah, I'd be curious what the out-of-pocket expenses would be because, I mean, if 15% of our staff is paying out-of-pocket expenses and that number is $15,000 and they're still exceeding that, that's a pretty high number to be concerned about.

Can I ask a question real quick? To Mayor Pro Tem. Enrollment in plans and by tier?

Yes. And I apologize, I have a phone call I have to take real quick. Roberta, can you take over for a few minutes? Sure. I'll be right back.

All right. So this was brought up last time we met. Really some good ideas came out of this. We've also brainstormed some additional ideas of things that we need to do as staff to educate and support our employees with these big changes that they're seeing. First one that we thought of and talked about with our consultant is Educating employees on steerable emergency room visits. There are statistics that we were able to get that there are a number of employees and members, I should say, because they're families that go to the emergency room that at the end of their emergency room visit, their diagnosis or whatever ailed them could have been resolved in an urgent care facility. for a cheaper cost, both to the plan and to the employee. And I think we could do a better job of really educating people of what kind of services urgent care provides, where they're located. It does feel like they're on a lot of corners, but some are good, some are not so good. And so if we could really educate employees on when to go to urgent care versus when to go to emergency room, that would be, I think, a healthy. That second bullet is educating employees just on the whole idea of consumerism. And this is with, you know, where you're picking your provider, where you're picking your pharmacy. People think of this more on the high deductible plans, but it really can impact you even on the HMO plans. I say it available on Cigna only because Kaiser has a really good efficient model, just the way they structure themselves, the way they're organized. You know, Kaiser, when you have a prescription, you're going to go to the Kaiser pharmacy, most likely. Cigna, when you go on a prescription, you're kind of out there in the wind a little bit. You can go to Target, King Soopers, CVS. You can go to a number of places. And so educating those folks, like there are certain pharmacies that for certain medications and prescriptions that are better and less cost. The Employee Emergency Fund, this was something that, for those of you who are on council, that council helped us create. I think in this educational and support, we can actually... I don't want to say market, but we could communicate this out to employees more. We have had a handful of people take advantage of this fund. Interestingly enough, two of the refunds or two of the folks that were approved for this, actually, they were for unexpected medical care. um, that they just, they had an appendicitis or they had, you know, whatever this, whatever the circumstance might be. And so letting employees know that this fund exists for these reasons, I think would be a good, a good, um, communication. Quick question. Yeah.

Um, cause that's kind of my little baby. Uh, what, um, can you get us like at not now, but at some point, just the numbers of utilization on that? Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Thank you.

And then the last bullet on there is just other ideas that we can educate and just communicate out there. Again, the Healthline 9, the Parent Smart Healthline, the Children's Hospital, even one of the directors suggested even just promoting our employee assistance program more. There's lots of free services or discounted services out there that people just aren't taking advantage of because they don't know about them.

Oh, and also like how many people are donating to it too.

This is a very similar slide to what you saw last time is this transition from an HRA to an HSA. As a reminder, this is only associated with the high deductible health plan. So if you're on the HMO plans, this would not, this is not attached to that. One thing that is different with this slide from the previous slide from a couple weeks ago is you do see the seating options or the employer contributions options under that last column labeled HSA and the row labeled seeding, last time we had that as predetermined. Those amounts, In the market, those amounts tend to be lower for HSAs versus HRAs. The way we came up with those amounts was a cost-neutral calculation, knowing that the employer portion that's going into this account is not going to be forfeited back. And so there's, I will say, there is some savings with those forfeited dollars coming back. And so these recommendations take that into account, so it's cost-neutral. You've seen this slide before, too, but I want to just emphasize it. We're not done. There's so much more to do for 2027. The numbers that I gave you earlier, again, they are not to exceed. We are going to do more extended employee outreach during the 2027 open enrollment. We've already started those conversations. We're also going to activate any planning tools the carriers may have, be that, you know, PDFs or flyers or actual automated tools on their websites. We're going to continue to explore alternative plans for the 2028 plan year, which means what other carriers are out there other than Cigna and Kaiser. And for 2027 and 2028, still evaluating the stop loss carrier options. It's the stop loss carrier option that we did this not to exceed idea last year. It was that stop loss carrier option that in the end, kind of saved us and came in with the lower premium amount. And then other options, you know, other cost savings measures we can find, not even necessarily tied to health insurance. This idea of a compensation and benefit study that we had already started kicking off with the request for proposals out there, and we've already It looks like we're getting close to some type of selection and really having that additional involvement. So more out there for employees to see and and participate in. So they really, truly. One other thing that's not on here is we have recently moved and you're going to get them. You're going to get an email about this very shortly. We have moved to work day as our payroll provider and They have some really cool tools in there as far as total compensation dashboards and things that we really want to utilize and just bring more education to not only kind of that employee level, but supervisors and managers.

I think that might be my next level.

I got one more. Other benefits, in case you forgot, we focus a lot on health insurance here. This is just a summary and combined slide from the previous couple of weeks. that we still provide retirement, post-employment health plans, lots of leave, a wellness program that's really robust, life insurance, death and disability, multilingual tuition reimbursement. I could go on and on and on of things that we provide, but these were kind of the ones that kind of leap off the page.

Any questions?

There are no questions that will move on to talking general fund.

Just as a reminder, general fund is our major operating fund in the city. It houses the all public safety services, general infrastructure such as traffic, snow and ice response, a lot of the internal service groups as well. So as part of the general fund, we will cover more detailed revenue analysis, expenditures. That's that first bullet there about expenses is more of like a high-level roll-up. And then by department, we'll talk mission and areas of focus, departmental costs by division, including major drivers in the variances received by division, and then key changes as part of this 2027 budget.

This slide provides context on where our general government revenues come from. In 2027, we're budgeting approximately $257 million in total revenue. The largest portion of that is our sales and use tax, representing almost 60% of our total, which makes consumer spending and the broader economy particularly important to our financial outlook. Property tax represents another 9%. services is 11 percent. Our remaining revenues come from a combination of grants, intergovernmental revenues, licenses, permits, fines, miscellaneous revenues, and other sources. This mix is important when we talk about financial planning because many of these revenue sources respond differently to different economic conditions. Sales tax is sensitive to consumer spending. Use tax can fluctuate with development activity. And then grants can vary significantly based on timing of when we do projects. So with that context, the next slide looks at what's changing in 2027 and what those major revenue drive-ins are. Again, general revenues are budgeted at approximately 257 for 2027. That's an increase of 2.8 million or 1% over the 2026 projection. A significant portion of that is related to the timing of grants. If you were to remove grants from both years, our ongoing and other general government revenues are approximately $240.9 million in 2027 compared to $240.2 million in 2026. That's an increase of about $630,000 or essentially flat year over year. With that, sales, use, and other taxes, we're expecting to increase approximately 3.9 million or 3%. Again, this is our largest revenue source. That growth is largely offset by revenues tied to development activity. Development taxes decrease approximately 3.9 million or 38%. License and permit decrease approximately 812,000 or 10%. and that reflects a continued slowdown in development. Property tax remains essentially flat. Charges for services and governmental revenues show very, Very mild growth. Our grant revenue increases approximately $3.4 million. That's what we know to date. And this, again, is due to timing of grants. And then miscellaneous revenue decreases approximately $1.1 million. And that's primarily due to projected interest income. So the key takeaways here are, although total revenues show 1% growth, once again, once we remove grants, we're essentially flat year over year.

Similar to what Kim mentioned on the revenue side, I have broken out here in the table all departments that make up the general fund. First up, we have the 2026 budget. The third column over is the 2027 budget. Total dollar change and the percentage change So as mentioned previously, we're actually going to talk all of these departments in greater detail So I'm not going to go line by line here, but I think some big takeaways To me one of the biggest takeaways is that this budget is growing by 5% now about 2% of that increase is coming from the general fund admin division and So you'll notice that that is the very second to last row. And the majority of that budget is made up of workers comp and property casualty. Council may remember last year in 2026, we had a little bit of a workers' comp property casualty holiday as the city had accrued enough in reserves to limit, to basically credit back some of that money to the operating funds from the risk fund. And so overall, that $4 million increase, the majority of that is basically that credit going away, that one-time credit going away from 2026. and reestablishing a more normal workers' comp property casualty. That's something that we knew was going to happen, even as part of the 2026 budget, and we've been modeling it all along. So in reality, outside of that, which we knew that increase would occur due to the one-time savings, we're really looking at a 3% increase overall. As Kim mentioned, she's seeing 1% revenue growth, we on the flip side are seeing 3% expenditure growth. If this is something that would occur in perpetuity, we would quickly run into an unbalanced budget. But the way that our structure works at the moment is that we have enough, we have greater revenues than we have ongoing expenditures. And so even though expenditures are growing at a faster pace in 2027, we have capacity to cover it. And then in future years, we are planning on more, but still limited growth on the revenue side. So jumping right in. This is just one more sort of large overview slide from the general fund. I think the real benefit of this graph is to show sort of where are the key investments we've been making in the budget over the last five years. Now, the different ... What we wanted to show was the total budget overall. And so you can see that from 2023 to 2027, the budget has grown from about 180 million to the 230 million that's being recommended today. And each of these sort of colored layers are different functional groups within the city. So that dark blue that's at the top, that's the fire department. Over a five-year period, the fire department's budget has increased by 58%. Parks and Rec is that sort of mint green that's right underneath it. And over the five-year, Parks and Recreation has increased by 25%. And then the police department is that mustard yellow, um and they've increased over the five year by 30 percent those are the top three functional areas that have grown over the five-year period and i again i think that this just highlights um where sort of major investments have have happened if the city um through budget over the last five years so with that we will move into the departments

Good evening, Mayor and Mayor Pro Tem and members of council. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to discuss the police department and some of the ways that we serve your constituents. Before I get started, I do want to thank Erica and Kim and their teams. This is a complicated process. This is the first one that I've run all the way through. I kind of fell into it in the middle of the process last year and had the opportunity to see all that goes into it. It's quite a bit and that's just with one in the park. On the police department side of the street, because of the complexity and size of our organization, the budgeting, the budget development is a shared responsibility of the entire executive leadership team of 10 people. However, I wouldn't say everybody does a tenth of the work. I'd like to point out the back wall back there, Tanya and Greg. They do the lion's share of our work on the budget every year. And frankly, Tanya does a lot more than Greg does. At the Thornton Police Department, our job is simple in a lot of ways. It's to serve and protect the community. We do that through by providing high quality police services. Some of these are reactive and some are proactive. And I'll talk a little bit about each of those. Most people are kind of familiar with our reactive mission of the police department. You call, we haul, and something that's just occurred or something that had occurred recently that we have to follow up on. Sometimes it's criminal, sometimes it's not. But then we also do a lot of, we do what we can to deter crime and to improve quality of life. And so we do that through development and maintenance of effective partnerships and collaborative problem solving, mentoring. One of the things when you heard regarding the reorg, the police department was largely not impacted by the recommendations in the Black Line report. So we didn't have huge reorganization impacts in the PD. However, we did make some internal changes in the PD shortly after or sort of kind of contemporaneously with some of the other things that had occurred. So what you're going to see with each of the departments is that we're going to talk about some of the programs and services that support those strategic focus areas, the ones that are highlighted will have dedicated slides. So kind of the first one of that. So we're going to talk in a little more detail about community service community engagement community education. in the ways that we enhance our effectiveness and our efficiency. Some of the other ways that we aren't highlighting today is our problem solving with some of the partners to address some of the persistent residential and business issues that we see. We also have a huge emphasis right now on our leadership, on training and development of our personnel. Community service engagement and communication. Our goal is to increase both the real and the perceived community safety of all neighborhoods in the city of Thornton. Obviously, those are addressing a perception of an issue and addressing an issue or don't always have the same solution. And so we have to be flexible in our approach to make sure that we're hitting it from both sides. One of the ways that we really try and do this is by strengthening our power within the community, with agencies that we work with. We have a lot of collaboration that we do with other law enforcement agencies. With the victim advocate group alone, the list of additional agencies that we work with was an entire 8 1⁄2 by 11 piece of paper. They really do a lot with other agencies. Some of the other things that we've been doing, Chief Reeves, he chairs a community advisory board at the hospital. That's another way that we're able to tap into various issues that are coming if they have some kind of a nexus with the hospital care. Ralston House and many others through the victim advocates. Then the other thing that we've been trying to emphasize a little bit more recently is our relationship with the business community. I have a police advisory committee, and one of the things we've been trying to gain a little bit of participation in is from the business community. and reaching out to members of the alliance and various businesses in town trying to get some more participation. In addition to the school district and some other targeted groups that we would like to have represented on that team. And I'll go back. I'm not quite done with that one. I know you're trying to get through this, but give me a second.

I don't want to rush it.

One of the things that the second bullet point there, one of the things that we do after every serious and fatal traffic crash is we review it with infrastructure, traffic engineering, communications, and if it happened on the highway, CDOT is involved in that as well. Trying to look at ways that if there's anything we can do from any of those angles to improve safety or to address issues. We do see that a lot of it, unfortunately, is just behavior related stuff. can be a lot of control over as far as community service community engagement and community education the strategic plan alignment we're looking at that first one they're expanding public awareness and engagement to improve community resiliency one of the things that one of the ways that we did this was the with the when dispatch rolled out the new emergency alert system, new RAVE system. Actually just did a test of all department personnel here about an hour. Be interested to see how that turned out. You may also recall a couple of presentation that we did for council kind of in light of some of the things that were occurring in Minneapolis and what some of those things would look like if they were to occur here. And then we also have queued up, we don't have a date set yet, but a public safety communication Steve and I are teams now. So we are always trying to enhance our effectiveness and our efficiency, trying to do it through data driven decision making technology integration modernization. and including one of the things that you all approved last budget, which was our CAD and RMS replacement. So I do have a little bit of an update on that project. A lot of what we're trying to do to be data-driven, we really need this down to no default. This really gives us the ability to be more intentional in a lot of these areas. But real quick, we are in the process of developing the scope of work, and we should be done with that by the end of the month. We will then enter into contracts, discussions, and negotiations probably for the remainder of the year. And then the actual work will start at the beginning of 2027. We're anticipating some backside system configuration stuff in Q1 and Q2, testing and training in Q3. And then we believe an ambitious start date is Q4 of 2027, but it could be Q1 of 2028. And then trying to improve effectiveness, strengthening our violent crime response. I shared a public safety update. We've had, although violent crime in general is kind of down in the city and practically the whole metro area, we've had a lot of homicides this year. It's really, it's been a lot. And one of the things I mentioned before is that we had some internal realignments in the police department, even though we were untouched by the black line. One of the things that we did in an attempt to help in this area is we moved our youth services and our SROs from patrol into investigations. They are case-carrying employees, and instead of having these siloed investigations for the SROs and then the others, we tried to put them all under the same management supervisory system in order to ensure just that quality of service. And a lot of times there's a lot of, you know, some of the youth involved in our, are involved in some of the crimes that we see on either the victim or the suspect side. So trying to align this. And then a couple of areas, a strategic plan alignment on this, on the effectiveness and efficiency is the development of the public safety technology plan. And then trying to evaluate and expand some of our alternative public safety response models as well.

Getting to the numbers on the police department. So you can see that overall, the police department is anticipating an increase of about 1.4 million or 2.3% with the addition of one FTE. So you can see that there is definitely some movement between the different divisions. As Chief Baird mentioned, there was a reorganization effort within the police department. And so there were FTEs that moved between the different groups. You can also see in police admin as the movement of the North Metro Task Force. So this is a contractual payment about, I think, $390,000 that moved from admin to detectives. So the contract didn't go away. It just moved between divisions. We also had a one-time CAD patch upgrade in 2026 to basically continue our current CAD service as we're moving forward towards that RMS CAD, that new system. That was one time, and so we're seeing a reduction in the budget due to that as well. Police training facility, we're seeing more limited increases. This is generally speaking. For overtime increases as well as health insurance, I would say generally speaking, you guys are going to see health insurance popping up a lot throughout this, where we're seeing health insurance increases, or you might see movement between divisions and departments related to positions. Whenever that happens, we're trying to call it out here. Criminal investigation or detectives, again, we saw some of that staffing movement, their health insurance increases, North Metro showed up there. Patrol operations is actually decreasing. This is due to off duty pay is decreasing. So you may have heard me previously say in one of our 2026 updates that we are seeing some savings there. On the flip side, these are reimbursable. And so we're also seeing a reduction on the revenue side. And so we just want to make sure anytime we can If we're seeing changes in spending patterns in 2026 or revenue patterns in 2026, that you're going to see those affecting the 2027 budget. And this is like the first example of that happening. In the emergency communication services, there's an increase of just over $700,000. This includes that one additional FTE that I was speaking of. That's an additional dispatcher. Again, there are health insurance increases, and then there is a one-time payment to ADCOM for radio maintenance, which we'll be talking about in a little bit more detail on a coming slide. Before you move, Justin?

Yes. Could you tell us how many staff are moving into the criminal investigation, and what's the net change in that one? And I'm guessing they may be coming from police administration because it also has staffing movements, but just a little bit of detail for that would be helpful.

That's correct. That is where the movement is happening. That's something that level of detail. I'll have to get back to you, Councilmember Martinez on but happy to send a follow up on it.

Okay.

So what are the key budgetary changes impacting the police department budget? So as mentioned previously, we have the addition of an emergency communication specialist for the communication center. This was funded by repurposing a school resource, oftentimes referred to as an SRO, This was a position that was vacated over a year ago. Thornton High School previously had two SROs that they had contracted with the police department. They ultimately decided to back off the two and go down to one SRO. So at that time, basically as soon as that happened, there was a vacancy that opened in the SRO position. And that position has been held vacant since that time and is now being repurposed for this dispatcher. Proposition 130, which was approved and is moving forward, we should be receiving the final 2027 allocation amount in Q4 of this year. There is no funding that has been allocated as part of the 2027 budget currently that's related to Prop 130. So it is very likely that we will be back in front of you early 2027 to talk a budget amendment related to that funding. In the detail of the budget, so it's not really a dollar impact, but in the detail of the budget, the shift to Axon is not currently being recommended from FLAW. This is just given limited accountability measures within the Axon system currently. However, the police department will be continuing to monitor.

And then last, Sabrina. Can you just give us the cost difference between your analysis of Axon and Flock? I know we've talked about, I've talked to folks about the accountability issues and auditing tools and how they're not as robust with the Axon system at this time, but just so we have it for the public, what the cost difference would be alongside with that information that y'all found.

We can definitely provide that, but I will say it's a little bit nuanced because flock is a clear, true cost that we can tie to the LPRs. In the case of Axon, it's very much a bundled thing with our body cams, with our tasers. So it's a little bit more tricky to parse out, but we can provide the information we do have.

Okay, thank you.

And so that last major bullet there are the different Adams County regional initiatives. These aren't necessarily new costs. Some of them have been increased. Some of them are one time. So the Juvenile Assessment Center was previously called The Link. We are budgeting 230,000. This is really similar to prior year. The Link opened up in 2026, mid 2026, and is currently open seven days a week. The animal shelter is budgeted at $350,000. This is about double what was previously budgeted in prior year. The animal shelter has come and spoken to council about this increase. And then lastly is that adcom radio maintenance, as I was describing, that's hitting the emergency communications division budget. This is a one-time cost. So a couple of years ago, the adcom radio system was hacked. and basically went down. And so they wanted to make sure that that didn't happen again. And so this allowed for a redundant system. So that way it will always be functional. This was the city of Thornton's share of that cost. And it was based on the number of radio consoles that each entity had. Again, this cost will not continue in perpetuity, nor is it modeled to continue. With that, we will move on to the fire department.

Great. Erica, Union Council, I'd like to thank the Budget Office as well for the work they're doing in this and your review of it. Really, the fire department at a high level, our goal and mission is ultimately to affect positive outcomes from critical emergency incidents. And we do this through the delivery of what Also, we spend a lot of effort on preventing incidents before they occur. We do that through our fire prevention division and our community programs through things like our code enforcement, outreach, anything that we can do to keep an incident from occurring. Is it an incident we don't go to? Is it an incident that we want? Those are the incidents we want to have once we never show up again. Also supported through other programs and other areas of the fire department. Training and professional development. We're going to cover some of that. And emergency management. This is making sure we have a well-prepared and resilient community. And to support more of our administration. This is where we set our strategic plans. We look at data. We look at the analytics. We're always looking at ways to From the reorg standpoint, we were not directly affected by the city reorganization, but certainly we were working all the time with other city departments. And as the reorg progresses, we are very engaged with that. Next slide, please. So emergency operations. This is really the largest division of the fire department. This is, I would say, the face of the fire department. This is what you see every day here on the streets. This is not just our fire and EMS teams that are out there in the field working, but our specialized teams as well. These are hazardous materials teams, our dive team, our wildland team, technical rescue. We're strong regional participants from both the CAD to CAD. system where we leverage resources across our boundary with neighboring jurisdictions. We work with the state of Colorado Task Force One, which is one of 28 urban search and rescue teams that's managed by FEMA. We have a number of seven personnel that are on that team that go out to various deployments around the country. In addition, our emergency operations supports many other city initiatives. This is through Vision Zero. We work on innovation. This summer, we brought Whole Blood forward as it relates to trauma care. These are all tied to our emergency operations division. The basis of this is our daily staffing. And every day, we are providing a very high level of service to the community. And this budget supports that continuation. There's a number of areas, I won't go into detail on them, but emergency operations and many other department areas tied directly to the strategic plan. This other area of focus is our training and professional development. This is the academies that we run through each year to get new hire firefighters. This is also individuals that we bring through paramedic training. On a daily basis, we are staffing eight frontline engine in the truck and five medic units with a minimum of one paramedic on each apparatus to make sure we're providing that level of service. And it means we're going to be hiring and training paramedics. And this budget directly impacts that level of service that we're trying to provide. More than just training for new hires and for Our U.S. division, but it's also regional exercise as an example of that is today we had a regional drill with RTD on light railing stands. So these are things we're constantly doing here in the city and in the region to improve levels of service. And we're working on a strategic plan alignment for this one. This area is regional training department. As you're aware, we're in a partnership with North Metro for our training center. And that's an area we continue to work on.

So getting into the number side for the fire department, the fire department is planning to see an increase or recommended to see an increase of just under $4.9 million, bringing their total budget up to $46.4 million. You can see some of the large increases here. Fire administration is increasing by nearly $900,000 or approximately 38% increase. Really the big change driver here is the old higher fire COLA increase. HAB-Masyn Moyer- That proved about a month back, this is a majority of that cost is one time in nature. HAB-Masyn Moyer- And has been basically removed from the model in 2028 moving forward. Emergency services, we are seeing an increase of about $3.3 million or just under 10%. So there are a number of variables adding to this increase. We do have additional staffing recommended. There are three new firefighters being recommended as part of this budget. This is related to the goal of getting each engine to a 4% minimum staffing. This is our second-to-last engine to be staffed to this manner. In 2028, that'll be the final addition of firefighters to get to that four-person minimum. We are also, as mentioned previously, seeing health insurance increases and then an increase in overtime and training. We'll talk more about overtime on the next slide. Fire prevention is seeing a smaller increase. The majority of this is just related to personnel, but we are seeing some additional support related to fire investigation efforts. Fire support services saw or is recommended to increase by about $250,000 or 18.5%. Large drivers here increase in overtime as well as training. I would say the vast majority of the increase there is actually in the training budget as was previously mentioned by Chief Kelly. And then ambulance services, we are recommending an increase of about 425,000 or 15%. So what we've noted here is health insurance increases. But in addition to that, there was one position that was moved from the emergency services division into the ambulance division. It's a lieutenant position. So what were some of the key budgetary changes as part of the fire department? So again, as Chief Kelly mentioned, there was training recommended to increase the city's total number of paramedics. That increase in training was for $114,000. We also have the hiring, equipping, and training of three additional firefighters for the continuation of the four-person minimum. that amount that covers about $450,000 of the increase. And then as part of the recommendation, there is an increased overtime expenses based on need and utilization of just under $700,000. So one thing I want to note here is that, and we've mentioned 2026 updates, we are seeing projected overtime in the fire department right now at about $1.4 to $1.6 million over budget. So even though there is an increase as part of this budget, this increase does not match what the projections are saying in 2026. The reason for that is we are actually starting to see a slowdown in utilization in that over time as more staffing, more mature staffing comes on board. Um, the other reason for it is because part of the overtime is coming from, um, the paramedic. I don't know if we want to call it a shortage, but paramedics. And so we are anticipating by training at more paramedics, we will actually reduce our overtime, uh, needed within the fire department. All right. And we will move on to infrastructure.

Good evening, Council. I'm Emily Hunt, and I'll compliment Erica for her and her team's herding cat abilities. So, infrastructure department is one of the larger departments in the city. We have 214.5 employees, and really operates a wide range of services. So we've got our streets group, streets department, that is our asphalt, our sweeping services, snow and ice, pavement management, bridge maintenance, road modifications. Then we've got our traffic group, which is traffic operations, as well as mobility, traffic mobility. We have the engineering group who manages capital projects, both utility capital projects, as well as road capital projects. Those are pretty well the general fund groups within the infrastructure department. We have five funds that we utilize. The other ones are the funds that we'll talk about next time on the 29th, but those include our trash and recycling enterprise, our drinking water, water utility, our wastewater utility, and the stormwater utility, as well as our newest sustainability program is all housed under the infrastructure department. So that's clearly a lot of different functions, which means the infrastructure department is experiencing quite a few changes because of the reorg. One of the main changes is that those functions are going to be split into three separate departments so that they're We're closely aligned and specialize in a way. So we'll have the transportation department, which has recently been set up, which will handle the streets, operations, and traffic, as well as some of the right-of-way functions will come over. We'll have the engineering and asset management department, which will be focused on capital improvement projects. And that director, his recruitment is underway right now. And then we'll have the utilities department, which will be the water utility, the wastewater utility, and the environmental services trash and recycling utility. And again, that direct recruitment is underway. So in addition to the existing infrastructure department functions being split into three, We'll also be bringing in a few of the other operations from the city to kind of align with these strategic focus areas. So since tonight we're just focused on only on general fund, we'll highlight primarily our traffic engineering and operations group, as well as the programs that are associated with mobility and accessibility. Obviously engineering services and street operations also have budgetary impacts and And I just wanted that Todd Rulos here who oversees pretty much all of the general fund utilities or general funds in the infrastructure department. Slide. So traffic engineering and operations. So this is really the traffic management, the design and operation of all of the traffic signals within the city, designing intersections and restructuring those intersections, as well as implementing traffic safety measures that we have. Chief Baird mentioned the Vision Zero Action Plan. So that follows under this group's purview as well. Lots of strategic plan alignment here with connected communities, strategic focus area. We've got a Vision Zero communications and implementation spot, which is led by Todd Barnes, our communications director. We've got bike and pedestrian safety improvements, which is run by Marta, who's over our mobility group. And then we've got operational improvements to maximize user safety, which is overseen by Daryl Alston. And then we've got the mobility and accessibility vision. This is a little bit higher level planning for coordinating and improving safe, accessible, connected transportation for all different types of traffic or movement, whether it's pedestrians, cyclists, motorists, and ensuring that we've got individuals with all different kinds of abilities to be able to move through the city safely and efficiently. So this includes our ADA compliance and ramp installations and upgrades. So again, this area aligns with our connected communities strategic focus area. And we've got two spots, a plan for easier multimodal connection. And so that's kind of looking at the various, you know, HAB-Juliette Boone, Light rail bus services and how can we, how can we really make those multimodal connections efficient, as well as strategizing for the future mobility hubs that we anticipate seeing city transit stations and the various trail connections. HAB-Juliette Boone, And I think that's it.

Okay. So talking through the numbers for the general fund infrastructure department, in total, the budget is recommended to increase for just under 1.2 million or about 8%. The budget went from about 15.3 to 16.5 million. And we are seeing an increase in the number of FTEs associated with the general fund section. of the infrastructure department of two. So as we've got, let's see, let's look for some of the big changes. So street operations is interesting. We're seeing only a $93,000 increase or recommended increase in that budget or about 2% increase. However, there is a reorg transfer that is showing up in there. So that is related to our transportation director. So that's one of the positions that was moved from the city manager's office budget into the street operations divisional budget. So you would think that the increase would be larger than that. However, we did see some offsetting decreases in street sweeping, which we're not actually decreasing the level of service of street sweeping. You will see a similar size increase in the stormwater fund. where street sweeping will be occurring, and then a reduction in snow and ice supplies. Again, this is not really related to a reduction in our snow and ice level of service. It's just about bringing the cost of supplies down to our three-year average. So what this means is if we have unseasonably warm winter again we might actually be under that budget again or if we see a heavy snow year we might wind up going over that budget because we're just using that three-year average In engineering services, we are seeing a recommendation of an 8% increase or, my eyes don't work that well, about $270,000. There is also another one of the reorg transfers hitting this budget as well. This is for the asset and engineering director position. These are unlikely to be their final resting place, these divisions, but we're basically budgeting for them there before a new division gets set up. And then lastly, traffic engineering is seeing the largest increase of about $800,000 or 15%. The vast majority of this increase is really related to the streetlight utilities that is run by Excel. So as we have been sort of pushing Excel to perform greater maintenance or faster maintenance on that utility system, we are seeing great maintenance costs being pushed through our bill from Excel. And so that's causing a relatively significant increase in the traffic engineering budget. So what are some of the key budgetary changes? I think I've mentioned all of them. Again, it's the addition of that transportation director and the engineering and asset director positions. Again, as Rob mentioned previously, these were positions that were created through the reorg process, so not really new FTEs, just repurposed FTEs. The snow and ice account saw that adjustment down to the three-year average. and then those utility costs going up in traffic engineering related to Xcel Energy. Now we'll move on to Parks and Rec.

And before we move on, can we take a break?

Thank you for giving us a short break.

Sorry to interrupt you. Would you please continue, Parks and Rec?

Okay.

Before we start with Parks and Rec, I just want to mention Trisha has been able to put together a follow-up on the questions asked earlier related to health insurance. So we'll be sending out an email to you all with those responses. But please let us know if you have additional questions.

All right. And then with that, I'll start.

Good evening, Mayor, Mayor Prokofiev, city council members. We're here to talk Parks and Rec, but like everybody else, we have to compliment our budget department. But the difference I do want to bring up, though, is that Joe Fry is our budget guy. Sounds corny, but Joe has been a tremendous help for many years, actually. And so I just want to call Joe out because I do appreciate all his help. And we talk on a regular basis. And he's a great resource. So with that said, we'll get started here. Start with our department mission. We want to enrich the quality of life by creating healthy and welcoming places for the community to gather, like festivals and events, provide diverse recreational programs, preserve and connect a system of parks, trails, and open spaces for the future generations. That's kind of what we do. And we can be pretty broad at times, but we try to take care of the community. We have seen some reorganizational impacts. I'm sitting next to Beth. Our community programs department, which is community connections and volunteers, went her direction. So it'll be in good hands. And then we're going to lose some of our parks crew to the right-of-way and maintenance, and then some project delivery team to the engineers over in infrastructure. So there has been a few reorganizational impacts. What we're going to talk about today, the strategic focus areas of volunteerism, outdoor recreation trails and open space, and parks and open space maintenance. So volunteerism. We do have, and as I mentioned before, that program is going over to community programs. But we've got a successful volunteer program right now. And as a matter of fact, I've been around the city for an extended period of time. And this is the best volunteer program that I've, quite frankly, ever seen in the city. And I believe most of you have participated in some of those cleanup projects. This past weekend, we had the 9-11 day of service with 180 participants, 180 volunteers, so a very successful day. And then we followed up today. We had a 15-person volunteer project over at Sky Park with Vivacity Tech. So, again, very, very good program. It's in great hands, and that program's worked well. specifically with the parks department and others, of course, but their partner has been the parks department. And that relationship will not change as we move this program, the volunteer program over to Beth and community programs. But the goal here with the movement of the volunteer program is to create new opportunities with other departments in the city so that we can hopefully strengthen the program itself. So kudos to that program. And real quickly here, I'm reading this slide of the volunteers. the social connections and the meaningful relationships. And both Bob and Belia said that that's exactly what happened this weekend with the 9-11 day of service is that there was true relationships being formed as folks are out there volunteering in the community. So kudos to them. So outdoor recreation, trails, and open space. As you might imagine, that's a critical part of the infrastructure for parks and recreation. And accessibility to these passive recreation spaces help provide recreational opportunities and supports our community members with different needs, abilities, and interests to participate. A good example of the investment is the renovated playground and splash pads. one of the best playgrounds in the surrounding area, and certainly one of the crown jewels in Thornton. And to emphasize our commitment to accessibility, our planning team met with Becky Post, our adaptive and inclusive coordinator, Adams 12 STEM Lab, the Center for People with Disabilities, and held a focus group with six families with lived experience of disability, all with the intent of making this playground accessible to all in the community. The next, and that's one of the strategic plan alignment areas is that accessibility piece. And from a trail connection piece, the trail connectivity continues to be high priority in the community. And amongst others, the city is making an investment into connecting the trail Northern Lights Ball Field Complex to Rocky Top Middle School, as well as the Big Dry Creek, which will be discussed later in the presentation. And as funding becomes harder to find, we're evaluating existing city-owned land resources to create additional activity spaces. Opportunities to create do exist, And we'll be working with spot teams and the master plan recommendations to prioritize and potentially take advantage of those resources. Parks and open space maintenance. You guys got to listen to us last week talking about the master plan and it called out safety and maintenance as part of our open space. And it's a high priority for our residents. And as Council is aware, the growth season can present many challenges. The ability to use technology will allow our workforce to spend more time in the field, respond to work orders quickly, and provide asset inventory and tracking, along with task and job completion documentation, and ultimately lead to better response time for our community. A city investment into tablets for staff working in the field is best practice and aligned Peace.

Moving into the numbers on parks, recreation, and still at this point, community programs. As Rob mentioned, this shows the old structure. So community programs is still included in these numbers. So in total, this budget is actually recommended to decrease by about $1.1 million or about 3%. Amy Dabbs, Though the FTE count is proposed to increase by one and we'll talk about why there are these differences. Amy Dabbs, So I'm going to focus because there are a lot of different sort of functional divisional groups. I'm just going to focus on the the bigger movers and shakers here. So parks is currently recommended to decrease by about $600,000 or 4%. That decrease is not related to a level of service decrease. It's really related to contracted services and supplies decreasing. This is based on what we've been seeing actually spend over a three-year period, sort of bringing those costs into alignment with the reality of what we've seen. The other item that's going on in parks And this is a little bit inside baseball, but the Parks and Open Space Fund allows for a 20% operations utilization of 20% of the revenue coming into that fund, which is a special revenue fund for operations and maintenance. So depending on the year, there are fluctuations in how much 20% is in parks and open space. So this year we saw a greater transfer of costs from the parks division and general fund into the parks and open space special revenue fund. So again, just a little bit inside baseball there, but that is part of why we're seeing a decrease in the parks division and the general fund. Golf we're seeing limited increase just thanks to some small personnel and contracted services increases. Recreation is another group that's experiencing a large decrease of recommended at $740,000 or 6% of the overall budget. The big driver here is related to temporary salaries. And again, this is really just related to actual utilization. It is not about levels of service. So we realized that once we looked at sort of a three-year period of actual utilization, that how we were budgeting was overly conservative and temporary salaries. and that we were able to actually reduce those salaries without actually reducing levels of service. In active adult, we're seeing small increases. Same can be true for open space. In arts and culture, we're seeing a 15% decrease or just over $80,000. This is related to staff transfer out of the arts and culture division, which is going into the economic development department. This is the public art coordinator position. In community programs, so this is sort of a conglomeration of divisions. It includes a new community program admin division, as well as the community connections division. What you're not seeing here yet is code compliance, which will be moving over to the new community programs department. That is still being reported in city development. So what is included in this $300,000 increase or 16% increase? This is related to the reorg transfer, the addition of the director of community programs, as well as some transferring costs related to the volunteer program. And then the Parks and Rec communications division is decreasing by 7%. Again, that's related to a transfer of costs from that division into the community programs department. So... We're keeping track of the FTEs. Right now we're at zero because we've added one and we've transferred one out. But I'm saying there's one positive. So I forgot to mention that there is a conversion of a contract position at the golf course. It's an assistant kitchen manager. who is going to be, or is recommended to be converted. This is a position that we've had for a number of years. It's been a contract position, and it's just being recommended to convert to FTE. There are limited costing cases related to conversions if the position isn't changing. And so we're really only seeing the increase of retirement benefits in that position. Kevin?

Chris, I think you missed something because you're the only department that asks for less money. So I want to know what you forgot.

We love Chris.

Make some friends and lose some at the same time.

So some key budgetary changes, I think I've mentioned almost all of these, but so we have that part-time staffing realignment that just mirrors more closely what we've seen in reality over the last several years. The conversion of the assistant kitchen manager at the golf course from contract to FTE. Two items that have been removed from this budget. So anytime we do have a level of service change, You all will be seeing that on these key budgetary changes. This is really the first one we're seeing where a level of sickness is changing or being reduced. And so there were funds associated with barrel and beers and the trunk or treat events that are being reallocated. And basically those events are not currently planned to occur in 2027. The last item on this slide is the mobile park work order and asset devices. So Chris mentioned this. This is related to the maintenance, basically keeping track of work orders out in the field for our parks maintenance crews. $8,400 is being invested in 2027 to assist them with this effort. If there aren't any questions, I'll move on to city development.

Good evening, City Council. I'll go through city development. And I will follow Chris's trend on Thank you, Joe Fry, the budget guy, as well. He is extremely collaborative and really taught this year creativity that we used for our budget. It's an exciting time for city development in all of our programs and services, many times the strategic plan. I'll go through a few of these here. Significant visioning plans that we're involved in, and I'll get to more details on the next slide. We also have the opportunity to analyze ever-evolving land use trends that you've seen through conversations with the community and city council in the last few months. and with the implementation of our new development code the council approved last year we have the opportunity to use that code and enhance many of our processes look for improvements to our development process or get into more detail and also the expansion and the use of new technology that we've been going through with many of our hard work teams and programs pumping into that board in terms of the reorganization some very minor yeah sorry very minor changes uh as i see them code compliance shifts programs, and I don't see that relationship really changing from us and the collaboration that we've got with community or co-compliance or building inspection teams and co-compliance and our planning teams. We're still very strong. And then planning and economic development, we will be former city development staff in the addition of the economic development team to that overall team. Next slide, please, Sarah. We'll highlight a few of these programs. And they're taught us the strategic plan in this long-range planning. I think council's very familiar with the long-range planning programs. Every other day, it feels like our team's in front of the community with stakeholder feedback and community outreach, gathering feedback from the community. meeting in terms of the stationary master plans we've got some ties to this team with the strategic plan alignment for specifically the comprehensive plan and stationary master plans visioning of the city we'll see those stationary master plans continue to move forward through the process in fact tonight there's a presentation with the planning commission for the stationary master plans and then october 6th you'll see at that same presentation in front of city council That is one of the two new station area master plans, one at 144th and New York and the other one up at Highway 7, Collar, Boulder. Also involved, this team is also involved in the refresher for the existing station area master plans from East Lake all the way down to Welby Station. Then those are, well, those are carryovers from 26 to 27. So we'll be still involved in those as well. We'll be involved in the wealth taxation fiscal analysis as well. See you on that soon. And then in 2027, we will start kicking off the work for the 2030 comprehensive plan amendment. See more on that than capital side. Then our building inspection programs, two significant ties here with exploring feasibility and just technology in general, I'll call it. And then also assessing the development review process and potential process improvements. I'd like to highlight a few areas here that I think Kepton may be aware of, but I'll just advertise some of the great work that this team has done over the last few years. Virtual inspections, we've done over 10,000 virtual inspections now. COVID helped kick that off. We were working on evaluating that right before COVID started, actually. And we were one of the first communities HAB-Masyn Moyer- About how great that team is we don't compromise any of the inspections that we can't see it all, just as we went in person we schedule an in person inspection and we fly out to the site and take care of those discussions. HAB-Masyn Moyer- That is very efficient and allowed us to be creative and some of the budgetary proposals that we made this year, we can save drive time right every roof inspection, have you. We do every morning from 8 to 10 is when we set up our virtual inspections for roofs and solars. So we're effective in getting that consistency every day with those parts of our development community. We don't have to go from one site to the next site. We can actually knock out four or five inspections in a 10 to 15 minute period because of that. We don't have drive time, especially with the solars. They're not knocking out right in a row like you see the new developments with maybe a framing inspection. So very efficient in that, very proud of our virtual inspection team. We also, like I mentioned, for two-hour windows that we do for the virtual inspections, we now offer that for the whole community. So no longer do you have to wait all day for maybe getting an inspection. You can request an 8 to 10 or 10 to noon, and we're hitting that at a very high frequency. That obviously allows, kind of is money, right? So that allows homeowners and contractors to be on a predictable time, but when we get there, they don't have to waste time for a whole day. Two other things that we've added in terms of our workflows for CityView. CityView is our programming process. We've got what we call over-the-counter permits now. So a homeowner can go in on a weekend, apply for a water heater is a good example of this scope of work. You can apply for a water heater replacement, go in there. If you're a homeowner, you don't have to have a license check. You go straight to paying for a fee, scheduling an inspection, and away we go. So you don't have that back and forth that was seen prior to in our previous process. Then we used to have what was called Fast Friday, where you'd come in pre-COVID, this was pre-pandemic. You'd come in on a Friday morning, you'd wait in line in hopes that you could convince the plan reviewers to approve an application and hit that weekend warrior project the next day. We determined that Friday wasn't special, so we have every day Friday announcements. We call it rapid review. Our hope is within 24 hours of one business day, you'll have your plan review comments back or your approval, if there are no comments. potential homework projects. Then the last thing I'd like to touch on is our multi-certification program. We've really increased that over the last few years, getting creative in how we're able to HAB-Masyn Moyer- staff and budget for our building inspection team, so if you watch 10 evening, though we were sending one inspector out for almost every inspection and every stop. HAB-Masyn Moyer- It's basically going to do a framing inspection, for example, but the most multi certification program enhancing our. HAB-Masyn Moyer- inspectors and making them all routed so now that we get certifications and framing plumbing H back mechanical. We have majority of our inspectors are actually electrical inspectors. So now one inspector can go out to a basement, finish and knock out every one of those inspections in one visit. And we're not sending two or three other inspectors to the same site. So that's been very well received by our staff. The last thing I'll add is we're very heavily involved in the regulatory justice initiatives. We're always looking for ways to improve our processes and we'll continue to do so, making the processes effective and efficient as we possibly can. That's all I've got.

So moving into the numbers on city development. City development, similarly to Parks and Rec, did see a decrease in their recommendation from 2026 to 2027. So their budget in 2026 was just under $10.1 million. And in 2027 is recommended at just under $9.4 million. This is a decrease of over $700,000 or 7%. I'm just going to, again, talk on the main drivers here. So city development admin is seeing a decrease of $400,000. This is almost entirely related to staff transfers. These were vacant positions that the city development team said, you know, given where development's at, we can live without these positions. So they went into the pool as part of the reorg process. Current planning decreased by 24% or just over $300,000. This group actually, I don't want to say that they functionally split. I don't think anything functionally changed. But we split it into two divisions. So there's now current planning and landscape inspection. And so there was movement of staff from the current planning division into the landscape inspection division, which is a new division, thus the decrease in current planning. Building inspection saw a decrease of about $330,000 in the recommendation or 13%. This is also related to transfers out of personnel and reduction of contracted services. So you'll see the total FTE count in 2026 budget was 65.25 and it decreased down to 63.25. That is basically from where we are today to 2027. There was additional movement earlier in the year that they had, if you were to look back at the 2026 approved budget, they had a higher FTE count. Again, as mentioned, as positions have come vacant in the year that departments are saying we can continue levels of service without this position, the city manager's office has been pulling that FTE count into that department to hold as part of this reorganization effort. So what are some of the key budgetary changes in city development? As mentioned, there's an operational assessment. Basically, any time an FTE comes open or is vacated, right now there is an operational assessment going on to see, can we maintain full levels of service and potentially reallocate the position to a priority need in the city? That's kind of occurring citywide for many general positions at the city. And so- You know, that's speaking more broadly, but it certainly happened in city development where we saw a number of positions reallocated out of the department. Jason already spoke on the virtual building and landscape inspection enhancement, so I won't. And then just generally speaking, we had several long-range planning efforts that are ongoing in 27, not necessarily blending them.

Seven.

Six. And also many. In fact, both of the ones I've mentioned here are grant funded. The stamp plan updates and the analysis of growth in Weld County.

Economic development.

Appreciate your time tonight. Excited to talk to you guys about economic development. I suppose I will follow suit. I don't want to look like a jerk here. Generally, we work with everybody in the financial department, and they are fantastic. We need a lot of help in economic development, it seems like, all the time. You guys are always there, so we do appreciate that. Well-earned shout-out. I'm not going to read our mission. You can see it there, but I do want to talk a little bit about the reordered banks. I know you've heard about those previously, so I won't belabor what you've heard, but CITY DEVELOPMENT AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT ARE JOINING TEAMS, BE ONE SUPER TEAM. SO WE'RE EXCITED ABOUT THAT. WE PROBABLY WORK VERY CLOSELY TOGETHER. WITH THAT, SOME ADVANTAGES FOR ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT BEING PART OF A LARGER DEPARTMENT. SO YOU'LL SEE LATER ON, WE'LL TALK ABOUT IT A LITTLE BIT. WE HAD A CONTRACT POSITION THAT WE ARE NO LONGER GOING TO NEED. WE HAVE BEEN WORKING WITH CITY DEVELOPMENT TO OFFSET THAT WITH ADDITIONAL benefit, I think, of the reorganization, at least for for us, for sure. And then I do also excited and excited about the public art piece coming to economic development and helping to grow public art in the city. So that's all I'll mention on that. And I'm going to highlight those are our kind of strategic focus areas. I'm going to highlight the small business support section here. Oh, I'm clicking on my screen and it's not going to do it, but it made me feel good. So small business support is a huge area that we focus on. We really work to listen to our business community and continue to adapt the services that we're providing to small businesses. And so I'm going to run through real quickly some of these. I don't know if council has heard of them. But we work really cross-departmentally, so every department pretty much is involved in these efforts with some capacity. So our small business support team visits, Moshe touched on this a little bit, we work with planning, we work with building, we work with fire, police to go out. If there's a new business that is looking to move into a building, we will take a team out there and we will uh show them what they need to do to that building get up and running or if it's an existing business that's having a challenge of some kind uh we'll bring out we'll come out we'll bring the team out there on site and meet with them which is really kind of a huge huge thing jason mentioned the regulatory justice initiative i know we've talked a lot about that we are currently working with the recommendations that we got from the consultants with inter-departmental teams cross-formal teams to assess those who will be bringing out those recommendations, both short-term and long-term to council after the first year. Certainly appreciate the police department's business safety, lunch and learns, and continuing to build that program. On the food truck side, we had, you know, we've been having a challenge in getting food truck inspections, uh, uh are actually having kind of a one-stop shop for food trucks and so uh they come and the health department's there we have our team there to uh fire department and other departments to help get that kind of all done in one uh and one opportunity we had we've had three of those events and we've had 27 uh food trucks uh past inspections so that's pretty exciting get their inspections that day which is pretty cool where's mine real quick justin got a question

Oh, yes. I know you mentioned the public art coordinator joining the economic development team. So do you anticipate any changes or updates to the job description or overall mission of a public art coordinator as they support economic development?

Yes.

Well, I'm sorry, what was that? So say, yeah, those changes to the job description were completed prior to her moving over to economic development.

OK.

Incorporating more things like placemaking and integration with economic development and project-based art and things like that. And then, as you remember, the arts and culture master plan you heard last week will also direct some of the work of that position.

OK, thank you.

Thank you. And then, and then so the business resource meetings are when we actually are going to. shopping centers and we are inviting the businesses, as well as our partners. There and other departments, both inside the city partners and external partners to come and talk about all the services that we have available for businesses, just to make them aware. of what's out there and meeting them on site at these shopping centers we've done two of those we've had 84 attendees at those events so pretty well attended so far we have another event coming up later this year and then food safety certification is one of our most popular classes we cap it at 20. we've done one previously this year where you can get your food safety certification throughout that process. And we're actually testing right there on site now, which is really cool. And then we have another one of those coming up later this year to get capped at 20 to 30 filled up. We track everything we do at the first of all businesses to try to continue to see what's working, see if there's things that we need to tweak and things that we need to improve on. And so those are some metrics there. some of the work that we're doing for small businesses and then for the strategic plan side of things uh this really ties into two different items one of those is the enhancing expansion of local boutique businesses which jenny leone runs and then the other is the development review process which is run by bedrile so moving on to the number side for economic development

This budget is recommended to change by a decrease of $78,000 or about 4%. So the big driver here is the reduction of the business assistance center's business specialist or business outreach specialist contract position. We are adding in the public art coordinator. So there is the additional FTE. I think the reason you're still seeing a decrease, even though you have one position coming in and one contract position going away, is because we also saw a reclassification in 2026 of a pretty high level position down to a position in a lower range. And so when an individual left, economic development took that opportunity to restructure just slightly. And so this shows some of that savings. So what are some of the key budgetary changes in economic development? So as mentioned previously, we've got the transferring of the public art coordinator and the removal of the contract for the business outreach specialist. We also have a reduction to business appreciation programming of $15,000. There is still business appreciation programming in economic development's budget. There's just the reduction of $15,000.

right we'll move on to management services thank you uh your name there uh i will uh not break tradition here hate to interrupt we just got someone online to ask a question drew before we move on to the next one hey good evening um on the counseling session list uh can we go back to that number i think it was 240

I want to confirm that number. And I was curious, do we do we know have a breakdown of like what type of sessions are happening? Like, you know, are there how many are people that want to start a business in their city? How many are looking to grow the business, et cetera?

We do track that. I'd have to follow up with that with that information. And we can certainly do that.

Yeah, that'd be great. I think it'd be good to know, uh, kind of like our eventually to start tracking, you know, how many businesses are actually wanting to start up in our city and what that success rate is. Um, so I'd be curious where that counseling number looks like.

Okay. Um, well, I guess as I was saying, I, I don't want to break tradition here. I do want to thank our budget team. In particular, I'd like to thank Rebecca and Emily for their time spent assessing our facilities and walking into our insights, and Joe and Emily for their time on the fleet, which is a surprisingly complicated animal in its own right. So appreciate their time. Management services. currently consisting of risk management, IT contracts, purchasing, building maintenance, custodial, and fleet maintenance. It recently also included the over the coming months with it moving to the an independent department of its own risk moving to hr procurement moving to finance and the remainder of maintenance services moving to the new engineering and asset management department reference earlier each of these teams a fronts. The most notable of those strategic plan action items really relates to deferred maintenance, public safety facilities master plan, the assessment of the organization or gaps across departmental committees, and then a number of technology-related ones, public safety technology plan, AI and smart cities, and auto Of course, I want to take this opportunity to highlight a couple of our operations facilities. Of course, our facilities team is responsible for the maintenance and construction of most of the city's major facilities, with the exception of water treatment and water delivery facilities. Notable recent projects that the facilities team has completed includes the police training facilities shooting range, new community center and anything library fire station eight and most recently the new ken freeburg fire museum which is expected to wrap up construction in the first quarter of 2027. information technology uh similar to operating departments and all the major underlying technology systems the city relies on to provide critical services. Our like those in this room. GIS team provides mapping and data visualization and analysis tools that our transportation, utilities, and emergency services teams really rely on. Cybersecurity is constantly monitoring for cyber threats and adapting our system to counter those threats. Our software team provides support and upgrades to hundreds of applications across the organization. And of course, our network team ensures everyone is staying connected through a variety of communication systems.

Okay, so a breakdown on management services. So as Sean mentioned, as part of the RE-ORG, this department as a whole will not be a thing, but right now we are showing it as a whole unit right now for the 27 budget. In total, this budget is recommended to increase by about $550,000 or 2%. So just talking the big movement here, management services admin saw a decrease of nearly $700,000, which is almost the entirety of that budget. There are two big driving factors here. The first one is there were two relatively high-level positions here as of 2020-2026. they wound up going into the pool for as part of their reorganization effort. The other item is that we track technology costs. Generally, we track technology costs within like the sort of role of division within each department. Last year, there were pretty significant one-time technology costs outside of software. So these are more like technology improvements in that budget that did not recur in 2027. The Consolidated Service Center decreased. This is basically an agreement that we have with Adams County School District, just to basically share a site for fuel. And the basically entirety of this budget is for fuel that the city pays for and then is reimbursed for. We are just seeing less and less utilization of fuel through this, agreement. And so that's decreased by 9%. Overall, you know, I haven't talked about fuel, but we are seeing increases to fuel citywide. This is just a decrease due to utilization of this in this particular agreement. IT is really the big change in management services. That's why we're seeing an increase in management services. The vast majority of that is related to software maintenance. So we've been talking about this a lot, just how much software maintenance increased from 2026 to 2027. A portion of that is related to new software that came online in 2026 and was then pushed into the IT software maintenance line. IT does host basically all software maintenance that occurs throughout the entire city. So that whole budget for the city is located here, an increase by about a million dollars. We also saw some realignment of positions in contracts and purchasing. There was a senior contract administrator position that was a vacant position that was utilized as part of the reorg. And then in maintenance services, there was an increase generally in building maintenance contracted services and supplies. And this is something we've noticed over the last couple of years. We have seen increases in both of those accounts in building maintenance year over year. So what are the key budgetary changes? So I mentioned that increase to software maintenance of about a million dollars. Generally speaking, I would say IT is supporting, and I think Sean mentioned this as well, IT is supporting multiple efforts across the city related to technology. So just mentioning some tech investments that are going on right now. Workday was just implemented. We're actually about to have our very first payroll on Workday this Friday. RMS CAD is in process. and should be operational, I think, by end of 2027. And then we are planning a sales tax software in 2028 as well. And IT is truly instrumental in getting all of these projects off the ground. There's also been, as mentioned, a lot of personnel movement throughout multiple divisions in management services due to that reorganization.

Move on to the municipal question. So I get the privilege to stand in for Judge Tiffany Source tonight. I consider that a compliment that she asked me to represent her tonight. She was not able to be here to present to you. So the municipal court is pretty straightforward. It hears municipal matters. And so that it processes all of our local summons and complaints. Again, follows through proceeding at multiple stages. So that could be facilitating somebody with some kind of pleading or settlement. Sometimes the actions are deferred and might come before the court on multiple occasions. If there is some kind of ordered action by the court and the court manages and maintains all of those records. A lot of collaboration between the municipal court team and the prosecution team within the city attorney's office, and then key stakeholders like code enforcement, police, and infrastructure. So those relationships, it's a big team effort to make the municipal court work.

So municipal court expenditures are recommended to increase by $225,000. This is really all related to the associate judge position that is being recommended as part of this budget. And what are the key budgetary changes? Again, it's that addition of the associate judge position and then technology upgrades to courtroom B. Really to mirror the other courtroom.

The only other thing I would add on that technology upgrade is there was a house bill that changed our requirement in terms of streaming court proceedings. This is responsive to that new legislation. Before I give up my talking point, I will take a quick point of privilege. just to recognize, you know, speaking tonight, we actually have four interim directors. So I just want to acknowledge all of them for their work. You know, some of them you see in lots of contexts, but others, you know, you don't see as frequently. So Sean Sadler, Emily Hunt, Kristen and Jason O'Shea. I just want to acknowledge some of them have been in these interim roles for an extended period of time to allow us to work through the org study. And so do just want to acknowledge their specific leadership while I've got the floor here for a second.

Okay. Bob Barnes here to talk about communications. You can see our mission there is to develop and maintain trust with our community by providing them access to the information they need in their day-to-day lives. As far as reorg impacts, we were realigned under the city manager's office and I report to deputy city manager currently. And before I move down, I want to say see because I forgot Emily was our budget person. I don't have the most complex budget, but Emily is still very helpful every year. You can see our strategic focus areas here and we're going to focus on digital content via the many channels that we have that you are most familiar with. And why are we focusing on digital content? It's the content that is most consumed on a day-to-day basis by our community. It's the most accessible and easy for them to use. It gives them timely communications better than most everything else that we do. It also is one of the few platforms that we have that gives us analytics that we can measure, and that helps us for determining changes in behavior. And it's also one of the best platforms that we provide that is accessible and multilingual. Our website currently translates all of the content to over 100 languages. It's also the systems that we use for rapid response in case of emergencies. You can see that this falls under the strategic plan under the organizational excellence to strengthen and streamline cities internal and external communications, which is a spot led by my deputy Lisa Wilson. Oh, I'm sorry. I already went over. I didn't tell you to change the channel there. Sorry about that.

I'm doing it again.

All right. So numbers for communications. So we are looking at a decrease in the recommendation for the communications budget of about $94,000 or 4%. This is really just related to, you know, the request was made to ask departments to see what savings they could find. And Todd's team really dug deep and found a lot of savings in a relatively small department. And so that has a lot to do with the change there in communication. Graphics did see, that's our print shop that is managed by communications. That one did see an increase due to an increase to CONICA staffing. That's the contract we hold for our printing. Moving on to human resources.

But of course, a compliment to the budget staff. I have to keep the pattern going. This group, as well as the student manager's office, has just been really supportive throughout the year that we've seen with all the health insurance and the pay increases and whatnot.

So kudos to that team.

As far as human resources and the mission, that opening paragraph, the bottom line of that is we support employees. We support employees in all the departments at all levels, whether you are a temporary part-time yoga instructor that works an hour a week or an hour a month to retirees, long-term employees at all levels. So that is what we're here for, and that's what keeps me and my staff coming back. RE-ORG impacts, actually really exciting, is for years and years, HR has reported through either a director or an assistant city manager, deputy city manager. With the RE-ORG, we now report directly into Tansy as the city manager. Really just an exciting time for all of HR because we are now able to be more participative of strategic alignment with things, communication with employees. And I'm just super excited about this year and going forward. We also excited about the fact that our risk management department is rejoining us. Risk was part of HR probably eight, 10 years ago. And they are coming back. So risk, if you're not familiar, they include safety workers comp, which is the on the job injury information, certificates of insurance, things like that. So Again, another great tie to HR and trying to be supportive to our employees. Programs that support our strategic focus area, you can see them there. There's a number of them from classification studies to payroll and benefits and policy, making sure that those are applied fairly and consistently. The one I will highlight is that recruitment and retention of employees. and trying to be supportive to them and their recruitment and their hiring process. There are two action items under the strategic plan that tie directly into this. That first one is evaluating our current practices and looking at our job descriptions. There was recently a survey that was sent out to hiring managers to just identify where were the pain points. We happen to know the processes very well because we utilize them on a daily basis. But sometimes our hiring managers, you know, they do maybe two or three recruitments in a year. We want to hear back from them of what are their pain points. And so how can we make that process easier? That second one, developing a plan to bolster interest in careers in local government. That one is near and dear to my heart because I grew up in a family with municipal workers in another jurisdiction. And I'm really just trying to get people to think about municipal government as a career field. We're trying to target right now looking at people that are veterans, high school students, retired individuals, even that we've got coming in on the golf course. And tomorrow and Thursday of this week, we actually have a group of employees from various departments that are going to the Adams County Education Consortium 8th Grade Career Expo. So we're going to start them early and get them exposed to what municipal jobs might look like in the future.

So human resources is recommended to increase by about $42,000. Um, with a decrease in the FTE count of one. Um, so the big drivers here, so we had held on to some temporary help as part of the workday project. This help is, um, since workday is concluding, I believe we're holding on to the, to the position for a portion of the year in 2027. Um, but then once the training wheels are off with workday, um, that will go away. However, we do have some increases as well. Those are really related to the wellness program moving over to human resources to be managed. So that was another area that was transferred from the Parks and Rec group into human resources. So that partially increased the budget in human resources. I think I've mentioned... Both of these. So there's the consolidation of the benefits and wellness programs resulting in that reallocation of one FTE. And then, as mentioned, we've got a number of operational highlights. They're not necessarily driving the budget. I mean, some of these don't have a cost, so they're already funded. But the continuation of that pay plan study that Tricia mentioned earlier, also the review of employee benefits, and then ongoing efforts related to the implementation of Workday.

Kudos to budget. At this point, it's just peer pressure. Honestly, though, this might be the one night that we're all giving them kudos. Usually, we're pretty hard on them. budget has a federal office and um if you don't know they go line by line through all of our budgets and you've heard all the all the services the city supports they're going through you know every single operating budget capital budget i mean it just it's it's a it's a process and they hold us accountable and i think that's important to to know and understand so they have a tough job um finance department um talk about them a little bit. So our work ranges everywhere from long-term financial planning, forecast to accounting and financial reporting. We do treasury debt management, utility billing, and tax administration. Our goal across all of this is to safeguard these assets. We want to maintain strong financial controls, provide reliable financial information, and support departments and council in making informed decisions. The reord will have an impact on us. You heard Sean say purchasing department is moving from management services over to finance. Next slide. The first program I'm gonna talk about a little bit is financial planning, revenue forecasting and analysis. This is really the forward-looking side of finance. So this brings together economic trends, historical performance, development activity, revenues and expenditures. So we can understand where we are financially, where we're headed and what that means for our future decisions. This work also supports the annual budget, our long-range financial models, revenue forecasts, and there's two strategic plans that this work supports right now. One is evaluating current or new expanded revenue streams. You heard about this a few weeks ago. and others updating our fiscal impact model so we can better understand how tax policy and different types of development and land use affect the city's long term build out. The second program is accounting and financial reporting. So the previous program was focused on where we're going. Accounting and financial reporting is is reporting on what's happened and where we've been. So this includes our day-to-day accounting work, reconciliations, financial controls, and all of our required reporting. The work leads to the preparation of the city's annual comprehensive financial report and our audit. We wanna ensure that we comply with all accounting standards and regulatory requirements. It's also important for transparency and accountability. Financial information is used by council, city departments, auditors, rating agencies, and the public. And then this work supports a strategic plan initiative focused on making financial information and financial models more understandable and easier to access. And so really this is looking beyond simply just producing some financial reports, but making sure that we're communicating in a way that people can make informed decisions going forward.

So on the numbers side of the finance department, we are looking at a recommendation that increases their budget by just over $300,000 or about 90%. There are a variety of factors leading to this increase. The first one and maybe the largest one is credit card fees. So there was an effort to consolidate these fees. They also, as people use credit cards more and more, These fees just tend to increase every year and how much we have to budget for them increases every year. The next one is a recommendation for a financial reporting software. And so this helps to create efficiencies in the finance department to help streamline the creation of the ACFR or annual financial report that gets audited every year. And then lastly, there was, as part of the reorganization effort, the addition of a treasury manager position that is being added. And all of those things together make up the $300,000 increase. And I think I've touched on, yes, I have. I've touched on all of these key budgetary changes. There are no level of service really changes outside of the reorg impacts that Kim has already described. I'm going to talk city manager's office and I'm not going to compliment myself. That would be weird. But overall, the department's mission, I won't read it to you, but ultimately it's to carry out the vision goals and objectives established by you-all. The reorganization efforts, I'm realizing now I definitely own this slide and that second sentence is not correct. This department did experience some minor impacts from the reorganization. As I mentioned before, we were really sort of like the city manager's office was the clearing house for positions that were basically held and then repurposed. And then some of the programs and services that support the strategic focus areas, Kevin Forgett spoke earlier on strategic planning, so I won't make him rehash that, but that is housed within the city manager's office. And then also the development and financial management supports financial sustainability. So on that note, what does budget really work on? We develop and manage the annual budget and capital improvement plan. That's actually what we're doing here tonight. We also support city council priorities through those funding allocations. So what we're trying to do is, you know, the budget document is really a way to set priorities And so we, I think our goal is to hear you all and hear you all through the strategic plan and then implement those priorities through the budget. We're also tasked with, I think ensuring, I believe one of our major tasks is ensuring long-term financial sustainability. So Kim mentioned that we like to give departments a hard time. That's part of the job in making sure that we're making smart decisions And decisions that we can fund today and in the future as well. So I believe that there's a lot of alignment between what we do and the strategic plan. So the first one listed here is to develop a list of services provided by each department describing performance measurement data. tied to the strategic plan and that cost. This is led by Joe Fred, the budget guy. And I think that this is a really important effort. This is something that I think is a challenge right now in the budget process is just talking to you all in a concise and clear way about what are the services provided by the city. We're really establishing an inventory of those services. So this is a really heavy lift to basically go department by department and talk about all of the services provided. But Joe and his spot team are working that right now. And I think it'll really yield positive results. The next strategic plan item highlighted is to explore feasibility of an incentive or recognition program for employee submitted ideas that innovate and improve service delivery or reduce long-term costs. This is led by Emily Whittington. There's no great way to rhyme that name, so I'm not going to try. But I think of this as really tying into the budget because the idea behind it, the driver behind it, was actually an individual from infrastructure who said, you know, like, what about, like, boots on the ground? They are going to know what are the best ways to innovate in the city because they are, like, They are in it day in, day out. That's really how this spot team came to be. He is on the team with Emily working this idea. But I think that if we can innovate, if we can find new and different ways to do things, we might find efficiencies and then be able to reprogram those savings. So that way we can help bolster current or new levels of service. And then the last one, and Kim already spoke on this one, but I did want to mention it, is to develop a strategy to create understandable, easy to access financial information and models. This is led by Rachel Walsh, who's in the finance department. Becca Abrahamson is also on this team as well. And I think this one's really important because if we can't communicate this information easily, in a way that's digestible um then i don't think we're doing a great job like uh it needs to be approachable by the community by council by city staff as well and so i think of this as a really important strategic plan item i might be biased though So what makes up the city manager's office department? These are the three divisions, the city manager's division, the city clerk, and the office of management and budget. And so really the big change you're gonna see is in the city manager's office, there's a reduction, or excuse me, there's the addition of $900,000 This is fully related to the fact that it's acting as a clearinghouse. So there are still positions that are existing within the City Manager Division that will eventually be reallocated out. There are also some positions that will stick around. There were some positions the Deputy City Managers were previously located in the Office of Management and Budget Division. They have since been moved into the City Manager Division And that's what causes the decrease in MBO and the increase in CMO. An item that's sort of a new ad that is included in the city manager division is the performance measurement software that is being recommended tonight. So this is sort of a dual-purpose software, and it's really tied to two different efforts. We want to be able to track and report on the strategic plan and progress within the strategic plan. We also want to be able to track and report on performance measurements generally, and that ties in a lot into Joe Fry's other spot which is on levels of service. So we wanna be able to track this, make sure that the outcomes, we are actually seeing the outcomes that we are budgeting for. And I've already talked both of these talking points. So legal just has this one slide. And basically, Legal is changing very little. There's about $42,000 increase in the department as a whole or about a 1% change. There is no change to the number of FTEs or levels of service. It's pretty much a status quo budget in legal.

Jessica, do you have anything you'd like to add or say? No, thank you. OK.

Then last up in the general fund are the legislative expenditures by division. Legislative includes both the city council's budget as well as the boards and commission budget. Total of these two divisions is just under $760,000. It is recommended to increase to $812,027. That's an increase of about 7 percent or just over $50,000. The majority of this increase is coming from the city council division, specifically related to training and travel and health insurance. So as you saw earlier, there is a, pretty big swing in terms of what a health insurance plan can cost. And so depending on the plan selected by anyone, council member, staff, you can see some pretty big swings in health insurance budgeted from one year to the next. And the way we budget is we look at actual spending in this year, we project it for the full year, and then we add on costs based on what our benefits are. team is projecting. So that's the majority of the increase there. We are also seeing an increase in training. This again is tied to what we are seeing in 2026. And we are just projecting that to continue into 2027. So I'm going to pause there. That's the end of the general fund. And so I wanted to stop, see if you all have any questions, any feedback for us and any desire to continue our March along in budget, or if you prefer to wait.

I'm looking at the group.

Yeah. Should we break here?

I think so.

Take a break, Chris.

I just had one question. I know it's not talking about this budget, but we had a lot of discussion earlier this year around the city pools and that being something that's very expensive, even between... the maintenance repairs around the pools and then the need potentially a future to replace them. So have we started cutting money or where can you touch base a little on that planning if there's anything being put aside for that knowing that big expense is coming?

Yeah, and we're actually going to discuss it in a little bit more detail in the special revenue fund, only in that we talk about the capacity we're trying to hold in the general fund. So there is an amount of budget that was set aside. I think it's about $1.5 million to go towards some preliminary improvements at the pools that will sort of help the pools stay functional for the next five to 10 years. And then during that time, what we're trying to do is plan what the future of these pools look like. in terms of like the locations of the pools, what's the footprint of the pools? How much will these pools cost? And then helps us also build up some capacity in the Parks and Open Space Fund to cover the costs of those pools or pool.

All right.

Thank you. We'll take a break then. Yep.

I think we're moving to the special meeting.

I don't think everybody gets the special meeting, but then we'll continue this discussion in the next two weeks, right?

The next 90 slides.

Yes. All right. So before we go into the special meeting, is there anything that council wants to have for discussion before the exec session? Go ahead.

Well, I just sent you all an email about the special permits process and wanted to see if we could build consensus on bringing kind of like an overview into the new year. So not like an emergency because we're already almost finished with the summer and probably most of the special permits won't be utilized through the fall and winter. I imagine not. So, but first of all, I just wanted to make sure that city staff would go through and address any concerns that are going on with the current permit process or the current permit that's been pulled in East Lake. and maybe just check out any of these issues that are outstanding. And then if council would be willing to have it on a future agenda item for a planning session in the new year, that way we can kind of really go through it with a fine tooth comb and make sure that the special permits are serving the community and our businesses in the correct way. Did anybody have any like questions about Any of the stuff I had sent out?

Is that something staff's already looking into in the specific situation that they need to be applying for?

Yes. So there already are some meetings scheduled with internal stakeholders just to debrief both the special permit in Eastlake, but actually to look at a few issues broader than that. We had the farmer's market at Carpenter this year as well. We also had the food truck pilot that we were doing this year. I think the intent of the internal review is to look across all of those programs that we use to do temporary activation. We know there's been some confusion even from a liquor licensing perspective in terms of special events and some of those. The goal of the staff team is to do a kind of a comprehensive review of all of those tools and look for any enhancements really across all of those different kinds of activations, but very much Eastlake isn't intended to be part of that. And I do think it would have been our intent to come with any process recommendations. happy to do a check-in early in the year. I don't know if they'll have final recommendations at that point, but we could certainly do a check-in with the council and like you one.

And I think it might be helpful to just to have like an inventory of all the special permits we've pulled in recent years that have been pulled, especially like car shows and things like that, just so we can make sure like we know how those work and see if there's any policy adjustments that may need to be made. in general, because I know there's a few at Carpenter and there's been other interests and there's back and forth on that. So that was the only thing I really had. I just wanted to make sure it was okay with council that we visit that in the future.

Happy to.

Thank you. That was all I had for tonight.

We're doing this before.

Yeah.

Yeah. So I sent an email to everybody. I have a resolution I want to bring forward. Tenzin, I spoke about it for a little bit yesterday on the phone. Essentially, the idea behind it is to get a little bit more transparency around a lot of the things we can get brought forward. I'm not hard set on any of the cost or time or those things are in there, but I wanted to bring it forward more of a discussionary piece to touch base on so that Every time that we ask staff to go look at major initiatives and kind of build things out, we have to also understand that there's a cost associated with it. And then if we don't end up doing it, then it's just wasted tax dollars that are going to get thrown aside. Or when we tell the taxpayers, you know, this is what it cost us, are we giving them the actual number or are we giving them the finalized number for more of a building cost instead of what it actually took for us to hire all the consultants and everybody else that was involved? I know Tansy's mentioned that one of her concerns was the tracking of the hours. Again, I'm not hard set on anything. I'm more malleable to that. But I wanted to get at least a discussionary piece running so that we can discuss and kind of move forward with ideas and feedback going on.

And I can say this for the actual conversation, because I had interest in this, and I guess we were briefly talking about this prior to, but this is only for all of the council initiated asks, not like everything the city does, because that would be very cumbersome. Yeah, we are. That's great.

And I told Tansy this when I was on the phone with her. I don't want this to be a burden of bureaucracy, just getting it thrown on top of everything. It's more of just adding to the ability to kind of fine tooth comb what a project kind of runs. We do so many things that kind of fall under general funds, and it's extremely difficult if you're not on council and just going to reach out to finance or if you're not part of the staff and know exactly who to speak to to be able to find that information and be able to see that. And I think that opening that up more will give our citizens a lot more fiscal awareness in the city. Um, you know, there's, there's other cities that kind of have a similar idea with it. Like if you go to Aurora, um, before council votes on anything being approved, they want to cost tied to it. They want to know what's going to run.

Go ahead, Chris. Um, I was literally just waiting for you.

We had drew and Justin both push their button. Let me see if they had something drew was yours on this or was it separate?

I was separated. Is it time to bring it up?

Oh, did you have a new item?

Well, actually, I was just going to follow up. I'm sorry. I was following up to Roberta's comment. And I just wanted to once say that, yeah, I support that. I appreciate her bringing it up. I did have some follow-ups to that. I have the, I guess, kind of unique perspective of living in the neighborhood. And so I hear Some of those complaints, of course, I've sent some of those those emails to staff and and I was curious in the in the near term What we're gonna do or what our expectation is around Like the alcohol being left on the site for the the rail yard Because I did see I knew that the first weekend I or one of the first weekends that we saw that and it was reported, you know, I was told it was going to be taken care of. And then the following weekend, I saw the same issue come up. And so I'm curious, just like what, I know we're going to do a review of our temp permits and our rules, but there is an immediate need right now to solve our accountability issue with events happening there. So I wanted to ask about that. And then also kind of a similar, along the same vein, the port-a-johns, I know there have been some complaints about those that have been left out there now for about, I think it's a few months at this point. I would say that in addition to the complaints that I received about these port-a-johns that have been left there next to the stage, I've personally seen in just driving by three people attempt to use these port-a-johns or try to access them. And of course they're locked now. But then worse, these three individuals have decided that even though the port-a-john is locked, they're going to find a way to still use the bathroom on site. So by going behind them or going into a lot next door. And so I think, I know that in past events at this same site, we've had pretty strict requirements about the earliest that Port-A-John can show up for an event and the latest that it could depart after an event. And so I'm kind of disappointed that we're not holding that kind of line here. And we continue to see negative activity happen. So in addition to what Roberta said, I would like us to have, I guess, some sort of direction or action to solve our current problem in the near term. So I just wanted to bring that up.

And Drew, one other thing that, because we were getting the same emails, the music piece, you know, the city says 50 decibels at 7 p.m., and I think it's still ongoing through the end of the month. I've attended the rail yard event, and yeah, if your house o'clock or thereabouts. So the alcohol getting out of the beer garden and the noise, those are the emails that we've seen that, you know, as we have the future discussion that Mayor Pro Tem suggested, I agree with Drew that there should be some sort of immediate action taken instead of just, oh, well, this summer's gone and we don't do meetings after this month because the residents are getting upset. I've had a few conversations around that. I'm sure Drew's had more of a living there.

How many more weekends do they have left? Do you know? So the end of September. Okay. So that it is an immediate response then, but then we need to address some of these concerns.

So we did ask for the photos and videos of cleanup to determine trash from the event versus other trash showing up and things like that. He did provide that both Saturday and Sunday this weekend. Um, the site looks to be cleaned up. Um, we did verify portal. It's our being cleaned. and locked, which was what our permit required them to be. Um, so, uh, that's kind of where we're at as a monitoring and part of this review process of the special event permit is having staff available to do real time monitoring of what's happening and even the morning after, um, sort of verifying.

of what's out there and we're not set up with that the way we have staff. I don't know that it's viable for us to modify the permit at this point. We can look to see if there were provisions in the permit and work with the city office to see if there is grounds to revoke the permit. I appreciate the feedback and future permits not to allow people to leave port-a-potties you know, Kaibos on site for an extended event, the flip side of that, then that would become our standard for all events, you know, going forward. So we can certainly re-evaluate, but I don't think we can probably modify the event permit at this point.

I wouldn't suggest modifying it, but is there any way to have even patrol maybe drive by? Because they are outside of the beer garden and the noise is a violation under...

I think those things are easier. I think I was speaking to the suggestion of not allowing port-a-potties to stay on the site. I think if the event permit allows them to stay as long as they're locked, I don't know that we... Two more weekends. Two more weekends.

So was yours on this one or on Devin's item?

Sorry.

Justin. Okay. Sorry. Yeah, my question was about Devin's item.

Okay, I'll come back to you. John, was yours on this one?

Actually on both, but yeah, thank you, ma'am, Mayor.

Okay, start with Roberta's, please. And I'll come back to you for Devin's.

Oh gosh, wait a minute. I'm lost. I'll defer to Justin first.

Justin has it on Devin, so right now we're talking about Eastlake, Roberta's.

Okay, gotcha. Thank you, ma'am. Thanks for clarifying. I don't have a lot of detail. I have not attended any of the rail yard events yet, but I have had conversations with both Mayor Bertan Mayala and Councilmember Morris about this, and I think there's good intent by the originator, but still it's kind of... not looking that way now um so we definitely need to do so i mean we only have two more weekends um but still the it's obvious the neighbors there are not very happy about it in fact there is one east lake neighbor uh that tagged um us that have instagram accounts um i did uh follow the east lake neighbor and they were and they followed me back i have not had a conversation with the individual yet um i will down the road once i get back from my trip um but yeah yeah this is something we definitely need to address and and i agree with the mayor burt tamayala we definitely need to look into our special permits in the new year and uh and refine them if needed thank you cherish our permits currently we don't

So they have to be to survive to be servers. So I've seen that there's number six. Also, a lot of things. When we revamp this, why aren't we saying that they have to have officers on site.

We certainly could going forward. Yeah, that's absolutely something to look into for a special event.

Yes. And that they have to be TIP certified in order to serve because they're saying in here that people are leaving. And I've actually been TIP certified for special events. And I'm like, we would have never, we would have stopped serving first of all. And then, you know.

Yeah. And they do still have under the special events license, they have to comply with alcohol regulations. Again, it's just identifying a violation and being able to hold them accountable. October, November. I don't think at this point we would consider that until we were to evaluate the program further. Again, we are happy to devote additional resources to just monitoring over the next couple weekends, continue to collect data, feed that in. Again, we can recheck to see if there are grounds to revoke. the permit. But I just I think that by the time we were able to amend provisions of the permit, I think virtually, we'd be out of time.

And then just to close the loop on this one, I think I had sent an email to both you and Jessica about the concern related to them tagging the space as a vent space that they own and operate when it actually is owned by the city. So concerns about how they have been able to do that. Don't need to follow up on that just yet, but it's part of this.

Yeah, it is part of our evaluation.

All right. Back to Devin's on his proposed resolution to talk about transparency. Justin.

Thanks. Thanks. Yeah, so my question was really kind of speaking to the concerns you mentioned that Tansy brought up about tracking the hours. And, you know, if there's flexibility in that, I think this would be a good idea. I do like the idea in general. I just want to make sure that whatever we do end up asking is feasible and reasonable for what kind of systems, you know, HR systems we have to track the work hours of salaried employees and stuff like that. If it's, you know, too burdensome to do with the existing systems we have, then a real focus on external consultant fees and stuff like that would be low hanging fruit. But yeah, I think I'm generally on the same page just wanting to move this forward, but just making sure that we don't put too much overhead on our staff and that we don't need to stretch the systems or that we can do what we can within the systems that we have in place.

John?

Yeah, thank you, Mayor. I concur with both Councilmember Byrd and Councilmember Martinez. I think this is a good idea with transparency being very important, but still, Justin's correct too. We need to make sure it's not going to create a huge burden on our staff either. So if we can find a balance for that, that'd be great. But overall, I am in support of this resolution. Thank you.

I wonder if there's an opportunity to take what Devin has proposed and then have you look at how do we meet the intent with the tools that we have without making it overly administrative? I don't know that Devin's intent was to track the every hour that's used to do this, more of a generalization of understanding the expectations. Does that make sense?

Yes, ma'am, it does.

Chris, did you want to add?

I just remembered my question. Oh, go ahead. I think you kind of maybe resolved it. It was just to see. you're amenable on some things. And it was coming forth as a resolution. So before we voted and spoke, read the resolution, I was curious if there was more detail that we were going to go through. But I think your process is even faster. And then we don't have to have a lot of conversation going back and forth. Just tell us what reason.

And knowing the intent is to understand the asks that we bring forward, how much that costs the city to do. order to be transparent.

Happy to collaborate with Councilmember Byrd and I had a very positive, helpful conversation just to understand what the intent was. Happy to collaborate further with the City Attorney's Office. One of the suggestions we may make is there may be opportunities to just to add additional language to your rules of order and procedure or to your policy direction, policy that already have some similar kinds of process. So we might be able to add some additional language that may need some of the same spirit.

And we spoke about that is that this kind of ties into that and kind of builds on top of that because we already are pushing for a better policy around how we implement our ideas and kind of bring everything forward. And I think this just kind of cooperates with that even more to kind of even push it to a higher level to be like, well, now we should actually be dragging way more detailed into it. And again, I don't want it to be a giant bureaucracy pile of crap. I want it to be something where the staff isn't obligated to feel like they're consistently having to track everything they do. That's what consultants do and they charge too much. But it's also finding that fine grain of, to the point you and I are talking about, you know, if $50,000 is too small of an amount or it's too large of an amount to have that negotiation pieced in there to kind of pull things through, I think that, you know, one of the areas that it's kind of more vital is the the time frame it takes for do things because if something takes 90 days to initiate kind of go through with something then i would say that's a pretty big initiative ask if we're telling staff because it's going to be pulling people off of things for three months an entire quarter that is already prioritized and already kind of laid out so um it may be something where we shorten that or but i would i would love to sit down and discuss

Does that seem reasonable? All right. Anybody else have any items related to boards or committee reports that we need to talk about before we do the special meeting? All right. I will call to order the special meeting of the city council. Can I please get a roll call? Here.

Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Councilmember Russell?

Here.

Councilmember Salazar? Here.

Thank you. And before I ask for a motion for the executive session, can you please give us an overview of the purpose?

Yes. Purpose of this executive session is to discuss confidential personnel matters that would not be appropriate to discuss in an open meeting. And therefore, we move into executive session. And the motion would be a motion to enter into executive session pursuant to CRS 246-402-4F discuss uh confidential personnel matters in crs 2464024b to confirm the city attorney for purposes of receiving legal advice regarding appropriate procedure to investigate and respond to city council concerns and a reminder for our rules of order those on zoom can vote to enter executive session but then you will not be able to participate in the session itself can i get a motion as stated

Thank you. Motion has been made and seconded. All in favor, please say yes.

Yes.

Any opposed, please say no. All right, we'll give it just a moment and we will transfer to the executive session.

Thank you all for participating.