City Council - Regular Meeting

🎵 🎵 Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Good evening and welcome to Westminster City Council meeting of August 10th, 2026. Please stand and join us in the pledge. Thank you for joining us this evening. Please remember that our meetings are governed by the rules of decorum posted inside the chamber doors. We ask all attendees to maintain a respectful environment. No disruptions, threats, or audible expressions of support or opposition are permitted. Signs and placards are prohibited and all attendees must remain seated in designated areas. If you wish to speak during public comment, please sign up in the lobby. Sign up closes at 6.45 p.m. Roll call, please.

Councillor Barajas. Present. Mayor Carmelia. Present. Councillor Azadi. Councillor Haught. Here. Councillor Ireland. Here. Councillor Johnson.

Here.

And Mayor Pro Tem Nurmela.

Here. Thank you. Councillor Azadi is not able to attend this evening. Is there a motion to excuse the Councillor from the meeting? Mayor Pro Tem. I move to excuse Councillor Azadi from meeting tonight. Thank you. Councillor Johnson.

Second.

Thank you. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay. Lovely. And do I have a motion for Councillor Haught to attend remotely? Councillor Johnson?

Thank you, Madam Mayor. I move to allow Councillor Haught to participate in tonight's meeting remotely.

Thank you. Mayor Pro Tem? Second. Thank you. All in favor?

Aye.

Any opposed? Excellent. Do I have a motion to approve the minutes? Councillor Brawhaus.

I move to approve the minutes of the July 27th City Council, July 27th, 2026 City Council meeting as presented.

Thank you. Mayor Pro Tem. I second. Thank you. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay, that moves us to this evening's presentations. Thank you all for attending. We will have a presentation from Adams 12 Five Star Schools on supporting thriving schools in a period of declining enrollment. I will turn it now over to our presenters. Welcome.

Nationwide, there's significant change that have gone on over the last 15 to 20 years in the demographic landscape. So often what I believe people focus on during my tenure in this role is the intensity of the COVID pandemic and a lot of the changes that we had to do during the pandemic and some of the effects afterwards that came from the pandemic. But really the biggest sea change for many of us in public ed and in municipal services started well before that during the great recession. Because the byproduct of that is people having many fewer kids ever since. And we're now in an environment that nationwide, there were more than a thousand school closures throughout the United States for the 25-26 school year. That's up from about 750 for the 21-22 school year. And that pace is gonna continue. What I'm here to share tonight is not unique to Adams 12. It's happened throughout much of the city. It's happening throughout the state. We expect that Boulder Valley and Poudre School District will also be looking to make some school closure recommendations this fall. So I just start with that backdrop before jumping into some more specific pieces of where we stand in Adams 12. In terms of advancing the slides, how best do I do that? On the computer. Let me try this one. All right, here we go. So what you see on the slide aligns well with the preview that I just gave that there's been a significant change over the last 15 plus years in terms of birth rates within our country, within Colorado and within our community. Beyond that change, which is significant, we've had a significant change in terms of the number of newcomers to our country within the last couple of years, a number of newcomers who left our community within the last 12 to 18 months. So that's also affected the number of kids that we have to serve. We have many more people who are aging in place, not moving from their homes. And so that contributes to the amount of families that we are here to serve. And a number of folks indicate that they, as they exit our community, they're looking for more affordable housing elsewhere in the state or sometimes out of state. As you see on the graph to the right, over time what we're expecting is this trend to continue for at least the next 10 years and that the biggest population sectors that will grow are not young children as in the past, but it's older people and senior citizens that will become a substantial part of our population. This slide more specifically details some of our enrollment in the district over the last seven years, starting in 2018 and to 2026. And I'll point out a couple of points on this slide. The first is a significant drop from the 2019-20 to the 2020-21 school year. We went from 35,000 students down to 33,000. So 2,000 students decreased that year. That was true of most school districts in the country. The fall of 2020 is when we were still figuring out what to do in the pandemic. And we were in a spot at that time that we were often having remote learning, hybrid learning where you were in person some of the time, learning from home at other parts of the time. And many families at that time decided not to enroll their children in school. Sometimes they started to homeschool their children. They might red shirt their kids who are in kindergarten and wait for the next year with hopes that we'd be back full time in person. That was a significant impact and here and elsewhere, those students did not return. And then you see this red square around the October of 25 count from last year where we had another significant decrease. of about 1300, close to 1400 students. We weren't expecting that. We expected the decline to be closer to 400 students. A lot of that appears to be driven by changes in immigration enforcement and immigration policy, but also just these cohorts of kids that have fewer children being born also catching up with us. As you continue to look down the road, you see that by 2030, we expect this district to be 27,000 students Earlier in my tenure, we had over 40,000 students when you also factored in COVA, which is a statewide online charter school. So a trend that's not gonna stop anytime soon. The net result of that is we have a lot of underused capacity within our schools. You'll see that we have, at this point, roughly 70% of our elementary schools are being occupied and the seats are filled at this juncture, but we have 30% of the seats that are not at this juncture. It's an even lower level of utilization at the middle school level. That's largely because we were, about 20 to 25 years ago, building really large middle schools. Demographers at that time predicted that we would get to a place of 50,000 plus students at build out given housing trends and family population at the time. And so schools like Silver Hills Middle School in Westminster, Rocky Top in the Northern part of our community, Shadow Ridge in Thornton, those schools were all built to accommodate 1300 to 1400 students. And some of them now serve less than 600 students. This slide here talks about the trends we're seeing over time in terms of the number of teachers per grade level. We'll also talk about that as rounds. So if you have two rounds in a grade level, that means you have two first grade teachers or two third grade teachers. Four rounds was where we were at pretty prominently 15 to 20 years ago where you'd have four teachers in every grade level. And as you look at this graph, you'll see that over time, we are getting to a spot where the most common configuration at elementary is to have two teachers per grade level, very small schools. There are a lot of negative implications that can come in a student experience because of that, that we identify in this slide. So when you get to be two teachers per grade level, In a small school, you often share your art, music, and physical education teacher with another school. That can mean weeks without having art, music, or PE. That's a tough gap for kids to have. It's tough to reacclimate when your teacher comes back from their other school. There can be long gaps where If you have an afterschool choir, you might have it for first semester at a small school, but second semester, you're not gonna have it because the teacher's gonna be offering that same choir after school at their other paired school. There's challenges in terms of teachers working together because sometimes you even have a singleton teacher in a grade level, so you can't really collaborate. with one another about how to break through with some students that you may be struggling with. We often have limited staff who are gonna raise their hand and say, I'll sponsor the chess club, the Spanish club, other things after school. And so oftentimes we just don't offer those programs because we don't have enough sponsors for those programs. Those are the challenges that come with two rounds and moving forward, we'd like to get more of our schools to three rounds because when you do that, It's more effective and efficient to staff art, music and PE with full-time staff. And you can have ample staff to do things like support the mental health needs of students, the academic intervention needs they may have if they're behind grade level and reading and math and other subjects. We just have more resources, can offer more clubs, have more activities. It's been the most efficient model that we have in recent years and we'd like to grow that three round model to more schools. Middle school being small also has some negative impacts. The smaller you get, you start to lose things like electives. We had one of our middle school principals talk to our long range planning committee last spring and said, I couldn't offer Spanish anymore at my school, even though there's a number of students who'd like it because they can't afford to offer Spanish and still have reasonable class size and language arts and mathematics and social studies and science. So you start to squeeze out some electives. You start to have teachers teaching on multiple content areas. So you may not just be a math specialist, but you might also be teaching science or another content area that you're not as expert in. You may be teaching multiple grade levels. So instead of being... focused on seventh grade physical science, you might be teaching earth science and a variety of other courses too. And when you have that many different preparations to make during the course of the day, the quality of teaching and learning often goes down. And so having a larger middle school size can help alleviate those kinds of concerns. So the net outcome of having fewer kids is what you see in the slide that if you have fewer students, you have fewer dollars per kid, we get around $12,000 per student. And if you're losing 400 plus a year or a thousand a year, $12,000 times a thousand kids, even with some averaging parts of the formula that takes some of the edge off, it's a huge revenue loss each year. And so if we want to continue to offer a high quality education to students, we have to find more efficient ways to support them in school configuration. We've been talking with our committees of parents and other stakeholders for the last 18 months about what are guiding principles for creating a thriving school environment and you see them listed here. We wanna have efficient use of resources. We want people to be part of a community that they're closely connected to. We wanna have robust high quality programming and we wanna make sure that we can support things like teacher collaboration and full-time art, music and PE throughout our system. Those principles were considered by the board and then they've elaborated in one of their policies, the criteria that you see here to guide me and my team in making closure and consolidation recommendations that will be coming to the board in September. And the factors that you see listed here include, again, we wanna have ongoing, sustainable, meaningful cost savings if we do this. We want kids to go to a school that's comparable to where they're at and be the same or better in terms of its academic standing. We want families to have enough time that if their new school isn't one that they find satisfactory, they can go through the school choice process and find another option that works well for them. We don't want to do this often. So one of the bullets you see in here is that we want kids to be able to stay put and families to stay put for at least five years. So it's not change after change. We did do that once upon a time in Adams 12. When I was a student here in my youth, there are lots of my friends and colleagues who went to three different elementary schools over six years. We don't wanna replicate that as we go the other direction and we become a smaller district than we have been in the past. And then finally, we want to be sensitive to neighborhood impacts. And as we have to repurpose schools, find new uses that are compatible with neighborhood and city desires. which leads us to this timeline. We've been working on this for an awful long time. I've been talking to city councils in Federal Heights, Broomfield, North Glen Thornton. This is my final stop along the journey. We've also met with Adams County to talk about where we're at, why we're in the position that we are, and what's gonna come in terms of next steps. And the most immediate next step is in early September. On or around September 3rd, we will be meeting with our Board of Education and publicly sharing our school closure recommendations. And then in early October, the Board is expected to take action on those recommendations that would be effective for the 27-28 school year. So that's where we're at, a little bit of why we're in that spot and how we're tackling this. I'd be happy to answer any questions you may have.

Thank you so much for this presentation and thank you for keeping us informed and bringing this to us. With that, council, do we have any questions for our superintendent? All right, Mayor Pro Tem.

Thank you for this presentation. I had gone through a lot of this as you had on your website, so that was great. So my question is more on the impact side to the communities. When you talk about wanting to be sensitive to existing neighborhoods, what are your thoughts about how you'd be working with the cities and neighborhoods on closures?

Sure. So most immediately we'll look to repurpose any buildings that close for our own school purposes so that if we have built programs that are crammed into a single place, if we can move them to some other location without creating lots of traffic burden or things of that sort, we feel like that's probably an ideal first place of consideration. And once the board takes action to approve a slate of closures in October, that would be the next step is what can we use for our own Adams 12 purposes moving forward. A second area is to see what municipal uses might be out there. And I've met prior to these council meetings with city managers in every city, including with Jody here, to say we feel like closures are coming. If you start to hear of other uses desired by nonprofits, by for-profits, for the city itself, Please just know that this is coming and after October, if there's a city use for like a library, a senior center, a recreation use, any of those kinds of things, those would be top parties that we would believe are compatible with neighborhood interest. If there's none of those uses desired, then we start to look at community nonprofit users and what might they be able to offer the community that would be well received by neighbors and neighborhoods. And then if none of those things work out, by the time we get to next spring, next summer, we'd likely issue an RFP to see if there's others in the marketplace who might have interest in acquiring one of these sites. I can just say, for example, one of the uses that I know has happened with at least one school in Jeffco is a special education facility school called the Austin Centers for Exceptional Students that provides programming for high intensity students. We might have some users interested in that kind of use of the school.

Thank you. And would you anticipate before going to the RFP route that you would potentially speak with cities to see if there's an ability to purchase the property themselves?

Absolutely.

Thank you.

We'll circle back to everyone. So we had the first meeting with city staff probably April or May and after October, The October vote by the Board of Education will be circling back and give cities some reasonable amount of time to say, do you have interest in looking to acquire or use this property?

Any other questions? Councilor Haught?

No, I don't have any questions. Thank you.

Thank you. I think that's everything. Thank you so much. And again, we appreciate you and your partnership and keeping us informed. Thank you all. That brings us to public comment, which is an opportunity for the public to address council on any issues or items pertaining to city business unless there is a public hearing on the topic. Tonight, there is one public hearing regarding the Mountain Range High School Nutrition Center. If you are here to speak on that item, please hold those comments until the public hearing is called. During public comment, each speaker will have up to three minutes for their comments. Staff will follow up with questions and outstanding issues. And City Clerk, would you please report the number of email and voicemail comments received, the number of individuals signed up to speak, and call the first speaker?

Yes, we had one email, no voicemails, and we have six people signed up to speak. Our first speaker is Beth McBride. Welcome.

Hi, thank you. Good evening, Mayor and Council. Real quickly, I have a low-cost vaccination pet clinic that I'm very proud to say that our Chief of Police has insisted that we do this and he's provided this and then our animal management supervisor, Kelly Jelen, is always trying to find locations. Last time we were down south of town and we had to turn people away. This time we're up north at Westview. We also have Spay Today, which is an organization that donates their time out of Lakewood for the vets and the technicians. And we also have a Colorado Pet Pantry that helps with food and people can sign up for additional food if they need it. It is a wonderful service and it is incredible prices.

The second thing I added on the back,

is a little bit of a rundown of what we are going to do. We have the pup party cleanup date there for you all. And we, I think we missed the Westy Fest, finally, over the last few years, we've always met same day. And then November 21st, we have our pause getting food drive that supports the shelters and fish. And so I'd love to have you all come and I know anyway, it's Saturday, this Saturday from nine to one. The last thing I wanna say is just real quick, I was having brunch with, I'm putting my hat on as a citizen of Westminster and I met with some friends of mine that were from outlying communities and they had come here last week to honor a friend of theirs who had been with a city employee for 42 years. She didn't have her family here so all of her friends amassed and they were so impressed by you all Mayor, they said that you just ran it really well and everybody was conscientious and spoke very highly of you all. And I just, I was very proud to say, well, that's where I live. And so thank you. I just wanted you all to know that. So thank you.

Thank you so much.

The next speaker is Kimball Edwards.

Mayor, council, hopefully I don't scream into this thing. Just wanted to stand up here first. Kimball Edwards, I'm the chief executive officer of what's known as DeGonterra US. In your agenda, it is known as Project Trace. Taking the public approach just for expediency and time to explain a little bit. And first and foremost, thank you for considering our company for the economic incentives, and certainly we support it. Quick thing about the company, we're a startup. We manufacture satellites and payloads focused on everything from low Earth orbit all the way up to the geosynchronous and beyond. So very technical stuff, and we're really excited to be in Westminster. Not only access to the Denver metro area, the location in the corridor with all the satellites in Westminster is phenomenal, as well as access to Boulder. It's close enough we can actually get some really good talent coming through the pipeline. Just so you know the economic impact that we think we're bringing, we recently signed a lease for 21,000 square feet over at the Church Ranch Business District. We're going to be putting initially about $4 million in capital expenditures to bring it up for labs and test environments. And then hiring over the next five years about at least 60, probably more, but that's a conservative estimate, with a median income well north of about 130,000 a year. So pretty significant, looking for very high technical folks, and we're really excited because I'm from Colorado Springs, and I got to tell you, you guys have all the right talent and the right locations for us, so I really appreciate your consideration. And if you have any questions for me, I'm happy to address them.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

The next speaker is Zoe Allender. Welcome.

Hi, good evening. My name is Zoe Allender. I'm the senior manager of economic development for the Metro Denver EDC. And we've been working in partnership with Kimball's team and with Michelle Claymore on the economic development team here to bring Diantera to Westminster. They received state incentives last year for their proposed employment growth in the state, and they'd like to do it here in Westminster. They are the kind of company that I think will really bring the right jobs, the right people, and the right investment to Westminster. So I'm just here to show my support for them and for Michelle and her team. So thank you.

Thank you. The next speaker is Chris Godowski. Did you actually want to speak at the public hearing?

No, I want to speak public comment too if I can. Okay. So this is my second appearance and hopefully my last, but we'll see on the third if Molly wants me to jump in. So Chris Gudowski, superintendent for Adams 12 five-star schools. I'm here to speak about the use tax and permitting rebate agreement that's part of your agenda later tonight. And just to share some perspective, I would urge and respectfully request that the council approve that agreement. The use tax history is complicated for Adams 12. We serve Northland, Thornton, Westminster, Broomfield, Federal Heights, and unincorporated Adams County. We've built schools or buildings in all of those places. Westminster is the only one of those jurisdictions that imposes a use tax when we build a new building. And we first learned about that practice when we built Mountain Range High School, Silver Hills Middle School, and our North Stadium that were part of our 2006 bond. When those projects were completed, there was an audit done afterwards and we received a substantial use tax bill. In the end, we worked with city leadership at the time to resolve that payment demand, but it prompted some discussions that have continued since from city leaders, I'm sorry, from district leaders and at times our Board of Education about where should we build discretionary facilities, things like stadiums, career and technical education facilities, nutrition services, warehouses and kitchens, because if we have to pay use tax in Westminster and we wouldn't have to do that in other places, it comes at a cost and it just limits the return on our investment to some degree. So given that dynamic, starting with our 2016 bond, we started to negotiate project specific rebate agreements so that we weren't paying all of the use tax. And the first two that we did were part of the 2016 bond to deal with the expansion of Arapahoe Ridge Elementary School. and the expansion of Cotton Creek Elementary School and in both cases the council agreed to rebate 100% of the use tax which in that time when things were a lot cheaper on construction amounted to about $200,000. This time it's our understanding that the council is most comfortable with a 50% rebate that between permitting fees and use tax totals about $317,000 for a Nutrition Services Center project We would be grateful for those fees to be rebated. They allow us to invest more in equipment and furniture and other capital needs throughout the system. The other benefit and going down that path at 50%, as we understand that there is some potential interest in the city and supporting a second school resource officer at the mountain range high school campus, which would be outstanding if that comes to fruition. We currently have a lot of activity in law enforcement space along the Silver Hills Mountain Range High School space. There's a lot of homeless individuals who frequent that area and having a second SRO there would be tremendously helpful. So if you could say yes to that agreement tonight and then also support an SRO, we'd be grateful. Thank you.

Thank you. The next speaker is Carla Flores.

Welcome. Hello, good evening. And you can tilt that down towards you.

Sorry. Hello. Okay, so my name is Carla Flores. We are, well, I'm here to represent a business location at 7280 Irving in Westminster. We back up to the local library and park that's right there. And so the reason I'm here is to speak on the homelessness problems in that area. I want to try to briefly express on how it affects other business and the neighborhood. I'm sorry, I'm a little bit nervous. I'm gonna try not to speak too fast. So again, daily we have to fuss and fight with the homeless. They are definitely dangerous and aggressive. When we call, we're told that there's only so much that the police officers can do and we understand that. We watch the rangers come and clean up the location as often as I think that they can. Within 24 hours, they come back, trash the location again, pop up tents. We don't understand why the tents are allowed because they're allowed for days at a time sometimes. We watch the legal activity that goes on in and around all of the area. We've had to literally kick them out of our bushes. And when I mean like literally kick them out of our bushes, kick them out of the bushes. The other owner, he's not here today, but he had to deal with death threats and just, again, just aggressiveness, just in total, I could go on and on. We've managed to get them off of the property, but again, we are standing back and watching what's going on. in the actual park, it doesn't go away. And recently we were told that they're considering to make this type of camping legal. And so that's actually why we are here is we're here to ask you guys to please reconsider that. Please reconsider putting that even on the ballot. Again, we directly watch what goes on when these people are allowed to camp. violence, scary, you know, the families don't want to walk up to the park. You know, people just kind of clench their kids. They don't want to come into the businesses. So you can only imagine how it affects, you know, trickling around in the neighborhood around there. You know, there's at least four schools that are walking distance from there. So again, you know, I could go on and on about the problems that went on over there, the hygiene, you know, needles and then using the bathroom and just, again, the stuff that we have to pick up. So please reconsider, put that on the ballot. And for the fellow people that are here, spread the word that they're going to put it on the ballot, I think. I don't know the exact details of it, but the police officers recommended that we come and talk to you guys and make ourselves heard. So here we are. And again, we could show you hours and hours of videos of the stuff that we've seen. I wish I would have brought a PowerPoint, but that's pretty much it.

Thank you. Thank you. And our last speaker is Tom Lampo.

Welcome.

Hey, thanks a lot.

Just up closer, I think.

Oh.

Thank you, Abby.

Yes, thank you. Okay, so I'm sorry. I'm Tom Lampo. I'm here to lift Westminster up to the Lord in prayer, so please join me in prayer. Heavenly Father, in Jesus' name, we ask you to be with us here tonight and every day in Westminster. You are God, the creator of all things, and there is nothing greater than you. Deuteronomy 435 states, to you it was shown that you might know that the Lord is God. There is no other besides him. Let us find comfort in you and help us to not fear the situations around us. Everything is changing, which can cause us to feel unstable. We can rest in you, knowing there is nothing greater than you, and you have all situations under control. The summer has come and gone. The county fair is over and summer trips are coming to an end. Teachers either have returned to school or will tomorrow. Some students start school tomorrow, others have one last week. Families will go through another adjustment. Children will face new situations. For some, it will be their very first day of school while others will start counting down their last year. A lot of change, a lot of adjustments. So we lift up to you all who will be affected by this new beginning. The unknown is before them and you have a word to cover them. Isaiah 43, 18 through 19 states, forget the former things. Do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing. Now it springs up. Do not you perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland. You are God and there's nothing beyond your control. Be with those that are making this adjustment. Help them to find peace in you. Watch over everyone and make a path for them to travel on as they begin this new journey. We lift up all those who are serving our military, all who serve and need your protection. Guide the individuals who are making decisions that impact their lives. Give them clear understanding of the dangers they are asking our military to enter into. Some who are serving will be sent on missions to free those that cannot help themselves. They have special purpose. Remind them of the purpose with Psalm 82, four, which states, rescue the weak and the needy, deliver them from the hand of the wicked. keep them safe and mentally sharp, guide their actions, and bring everyone home safely. You are our God, and we are your people. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Thank you, guys. Have a nice night.

Thank you. That was our last speaker. Excellent. Thank you, speakers. Acting City Manager Opie, do you have a report this evening?

Yes, Madam Mayor. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mayor. Mayor Pro Tem and City Councilors and the community members in attendance is also those listening online. I'm Barbara Opie, Deputy City Manager. I have a brief update for tonight. Next slide, please. In part of our City update, we have the Hello Neighbor Summer Affordability Series continuing. That series launched into neighborhood locations as part of Mayor Camelia's Hello Neighbor initiative. Residents can directly engage City Council and staff through casual drop-in conversations. Staff will have free passes and vouchers to local businesses, including free passes to AMC, Alamo Theaters, Lucky Strike Bowling, and City Recreation Centers. Staff can also connect residents with City programs and resources that can help address affordability challenges. The next tabling session will be at the Swim and Fitness Center this Wednesday, August 12th from 9 till noon. We have four items left for the remainder of the season. Next slide. Also in ways of updates, the City is delivering on the community priorities, a mid-year report on City Council action. Please join Mayor Cromelia, City Council, and City Manager Jody Andrews for a conversation about the City's work over the first half of 2026. These meetings are an opportunity to ask questions, share feedback, and help shape Westminster's future. This session is next Tuesday, August 18th from 5.30 to 6.30 here in the City Council Chambers. Light refreshments and snacks will be provided. Next slide. As Ms. McBride mentioned, we are having an affordable, low-cost pet vaccination clinic coming this Saturday. We're partnering with Spay Today, Westminster Dog Park Guardians, and Spay Today Healthy Pet Center to offer on-site vaccinations. That's this Saturday, August 15th from 9 until 1 at the Westview Rec Center. All leashed dogs and restrained cats are welcome. No residency requirements or appointments are necessary. Please bring any previous vaccination records, and as noted, the Colorado Pet Pantry will also be there to provide free pet food for families in need. Next slide. The city continues to celebrate Colorado's 150th anniversary. I'm not going to try to even state that. The city continues to celebrate anniversary milestones, including the country's 250th anniversary, Colorado's 150th anniversary, and the city's 115th anniversary. We've commemorating these historic events in partnership with the Historic Landmark Board as well as the Westminster Historical Society all summer long. There's still time to celebrate. Please make a button, get stickers, and pick up specially designed Westminster coloring books at some events that are coming up. This week, Friday the 14th, is a movie in the park. The movie will be Goat and Cuisine with the Cops at Legacy Ridge Golf Course from 7 to 10 p.m. Coming up in September, September 12th, we'll have the Westminster History Tours with the Westminster History Center on Lowe Boulevard from 9 until noon. And October 17th, we'll have the Westy Fest at City Park from noon until 8 p.m. And this one includes a special drone show dedicated to our city, state, and nation's milestone celebrations. Next slide. Tonight's agenda, we have one presentation, which has already been held. Thank you, Superintendent, for Adams 12, five-star schools. We have seven items on consent, which includes two second readings, and we have a public hearing in consideration of an appeal of the denial of an official development plan for the Mountain Range High School School Nutrition Center. Next slide. Also on tonight's meeting, we have under new business, a first reading of Counselor's Bill number 26, which is an ordinance amending various sections of Title 1, 6, and 10 of the Westminster Municipal Code concerning police regulations and penalties to align with Colorado state statutes. We also have first reading of Counselor's Bill number 32, approving an economic development agreement with Digantara U.S. concerning the location of its U.S. headquarters and operations to 7237 Church Ranch Boulevard, Suite 410. We also have first reading of Councilor Bill number 33, authorizing an intergovernmental agreement for development assistance between the City of Westminster and Adams 12 five-star schools regarding the city's support of the construction of the scratch kitchen and food warehouse located at 12450 Delaware Street. Under old business, we have the second reading of Councilor Bill number 31, which is modifying the Westminster Municipal Code concerning the roadway improvement fee for non-resident users. Next slide. This week we have continuation of the bite into downtown Westminster that goes through Sunday, August 16th. That's a great way to explore the offerings of downtown Westminster and all the food that it has to offer. Tomorrow, August 11th, we have the planning commission here at City Hall from 7 to 9 p.m. On Wednesday, August 12th, we have Hello Neighbor, the summer affordability series mentioned. The downtown Westminster summer concert series in Central Park Central Plaza Park, downtown Westminster from 5.30 to 7. We have the Inclusivity Board, which is a hybrid as well as in-person here at City Hall from 6 to 7.30 p.m. The Youth Advisory Panel Meeting here at City Hall from 6 to 7.30 p.m. As well as the Historic Landmark Board here at City Hall from 7 to 9 p.m. On Friday, August 14th, we have, again, the movies in the park, with the movie being GOAT, as well as an opportunity to have cuisine with the cops at Legacy Ridge Golf Course from 7 to 10 p.m. Next slide. Also this week, Saturday, we have the Carsey Clinic with Fire Station 2, which is located at 9150 Lowell Boulevard from 8.30 to noon. That is by appointment only. Please do call 303-658-4500 to make an appointment. As noted previously, we have the low-cost vaccination clinic at Westview Rec Center from 9 until 1. And then we have a downtown Westminster Summer Concert Series at Aristadt Park from 6 to 8.30. And then on Sunday, August 16th, we have the Swashbuckler Regatta at Stanley Lake from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. That's a fun event with rowing crews competing, kayak and stand-up paddlers also competing, as well as food truck games and other activities on land. And then lastly, we have the Downtown Westminster Summer Yoga Series in Aristadt Park from 9 until 10 a.m. Next slide. Our next City Council meeting is a study session. It's on Monday, August 17th here in City Council room at 6.30 p.m. in the boardroom next door. We'll have four presentations. Overview of the proposed updates to the Westminster Municipal Code to modernize tax administration. Second item, review current noise regulations and provide direction with potential amendments to the Westminster Municipal Code regarding unlawful noise within the city. Those two items were started last week and then we had a slight power outage and so those will continue to next week. We also have follow-up discussion on the 2027 and 2028 water rates and rate structure, and then a Westminster Municipal Court overview. There is an executive session to discuss strategy and progress on a proposed economic development agreement involving restaurant prospect in which the disclosure of such information, such as financial data or proposed incentives would, if made public, seriously jeopardize the city's ability to secure the prospect. Next slide, please. Lastly, as always, you can contact us to help solve issues with our Access Westminster. That's westminsterco.gov forward slash accesswestminster. Always can call us at 303-658-2400. Look at our website. Tap into our engagement portal at our.westminsterco.gov. As always, also looking into our transparency portal, which is westminsterco.gov forward slash transparency.

With that, I conclude my report. Thank you.

Thank you so much are there any questions on the city manager's report Okay, thank you so much with that that moves us to City Council comments Councilor Island I just want to thank everyone that came out for whatever reason for your cause and also Tom always things for praying Beth My bride mentioned this low-cost pet vaccination clinic. We also had three dogs bit by rattlesnakes out at our dog park, and she told me she would send me a map and the list of vets you can go to if that happens to your dog, because not everyone has an anti-venom. So I will put that on my Facebook page. She's going to send that to me, and we're glad the dogs are all going to be okay. and the people, so be careful out there. A couple of things I've got emails about this week. Google Fiber rollout I'm kind of concerned about. residents and how their properties have been left after this rollout i don't know if there's a moratorium we can do on this particular company if they're not going to do things right i don't know what is what we can do but i want a discussion on that the automated phone system not working and people not being able to talk to anyone at city halls is a concern i've heard many complaints about access westminster that Their questions are never listened to. They never get a response. And if they do, sometimes it's closed before they even had a response. I know we're rolling out our Westminster. I don't know what the difference is between the two, but I would like an answer on that. And I'll talk more about the homeless situation when it comes to City Council requests, because I wanna make a request on that. And that's all I have, thank you.

Thank you. Anyone else? Councilor Brawhaus.

Excuse me, thank you, Madam Mayor. I'll be quick. Thank you for the speakers who came out and spoke. I also get nervous speaking up here, and so I appreciate everyone who had the chance to speak. I want to note a few things as well. First, I won't use kind of a slot on the kind of potential policy discussions, but in our strategic plan, we kind of noted the use, kind of like this, like what Google Fiber, the use fees that they pay. i hope that in the near future maybe in that discussion uh or in like kind of overall discussion on this we can get into um the kind of fees because i think that is a mechanism i know we're kind of bound via federal law on um telecoms because they're considered you know like a federally protected uh industry that they can kind of go in but in whatever mechanism the city does collaborate and work within those easements and rights of ways um you know we had mentioned this in our strategic planning meeting and so i think uh this is a good time to bring that up Particularly whether it's a way of deterrence or in my mind, you know, my neighborhood has been very much disrupted and impacted by multiple. We had Google Fiber and then an unknown fiber still don't really know who came in literally three days later. And a lot of our easements have been left damaged. uh and i couldn't help but think this could be a little bit easier to swallow if i knew the city was making a lot of money off of like the the use of it um so those kind of discussions i would echo you know i'm not going to ask for a specific discussion on a specific date but um just referencing the strategic plan on that one Also, a week ago, a little over a week ago, I had the honor to represent the city and to welcome delegates from Oaxaca, Mexico to celebrate Guelaguetza, the Oaxaca Fest that we had at City Park Rec Center. We had the distinct honor to welcome the Council General of Mexico in Denver, Pavel Melendez Cruz, and then a senator from Oaxaca, Senator Luisa Cortes Garcia, also had a chance to To welcome us and do a lot of the ceremony for you that gets out here and it was a really cool time There was a lot of people from all across the country who came to celebrate here and all across obviously the world And it brought a lot of people from all across the city to all across the metro area to our city And so I was grateful for the flexibility and quick work of the staff who made that that event possible And I and uh just note yeah that um you know i living you know very close to south westminster irving street library is is a very uh important uh location it's a central location the businesses in that area are central leaders for for that location so we hear you um note that a lot of times when you see kind of the dispersal and return you know that is like the city getting involved doing the kind of booking and then you know just because of state statutes that are automatically automatically released and then they return and so we're oftentimes what i feel like with the homelessness issue is that municipalities are given the smallest budget with the largest issue. State and federal governments have kind of dropped every single ball when it comes to that. We hear you. We spend lots of time and energy and money, but please continue coming to us. Please continue talking to us. Do not stop. I think it's helpful to constantly have these kinds of engagements and conversations because it helps inform the way that we proceed as we try to continue the city policy on the continuum of compassion. There's ways that we can get further insights, so these comments and conversations are helpful.

Thank you. Anyone else? Councillor Haag? No, thank you. Thank you. Well, I will be brief. Just thank you, speakers, as always. A special shout out, Beth, I see you right from the front. Thank you for your continued work. You have not stopped for, I think it's two years now or so, and we're going on three. And you continue as well as all the dog park guardians continue to work for the better of our whole community as well as for our pets. And thank you to city staff for partnering with them. But these vaccines are not cheap. You know, I just did mine and they're $100. So this is one fifth of the cost. So, you know, attend this vaccine clinic if you can. Take advantage of it. This is a great effort. And if you can participate in the November food drive for pets that they run, last year and the year before, it raised an incredible amount of food for the community. So it's just, I think it just goes to show how much of an impact a small concerned group of citizens can have, which is so impressive. So thank you. I also want to say thank you to the staff for obtaining those passes and tickets and gift cards, etc. for the affordability series to help drive folks out. If you haven't attended one, please attend one. This is your chance to take part in the conversation where you have a council and a city that is actively working to do everything we can to combat the inflation crisis that we're seeing. We know that affordability is getting more challenging for families and we are actively taking a stand in very real ways. We've passed real ordinances recently which often fall into the hands of county level or state level and we've decided, you know what, we're going to do something right here at the city level because we can. And so we want to hear your creative ideas on what next to do. And I also want to say I just want to echo, thank you, Councilor Brahas, that was eloquently put around our homeless situation, and thank you to our citizens for speaking up on it. We did receive a few emails about that Irving Library area, and I will follow up with staff to see what we can do in regards to that area in particular, as it sounds like it's really, it's gone on for a bit now, which is not healthy for anyone. However, I think the question is legitimate, which is there was a question in an email recently that said, what are our plans for the city strategy regarding this? And that is something that this council needs to address. It was something that was up for a vote last December. We need to bring it back around and see where we land. Unfortunately, it's a big, complicated, complex conversation. And so it will be lengthy. It will be in depth. And if you have thoughts on it, please bring them to public comment or get a hold of us individually before we have our study sessions because we need to figure out what that response looks like. And just if you don't know already, if you are not currently aware, we do of course have our homeless navigators and we have doubled them in the last couple years. We went from two to four and I think even further now, five. And so from a compassionate response, we are doing absolutely everything we can. However, health and safety is important as well to our residents. And I just want to give a shout out to our historical society. This weekend, I visited the Bowles House Museum and met with former Mayor McNally and former counselor David DeMott. Councilor Johnson was there as well. And we got to see the old city hall, which is about the size of a shed. I think it's smaller, actually half the size of my shed, so it's pretty small. And we got to be there to celebrate the city's 115th birthday, which was pretty special. That is really neat. If you're not familiar with the Bowles House, go out there, take a tour, contact our Westminster Historical Society. Just a big shout out to our city and our Park, Rec and Libraries team who have done so much work in preserving that so that our posterity knows what that area looks like because it has been at risk in the past. And I want to give a shout out to our officers and everyone who hosted a National Night Out event throughout the city this week. That was a lot of fun. I saw Councilor Johnson at the downtown one, and I'm sure we had other folks attending, but it was a beautiful turnout. It was a lovely evening. It wasn't so hot for once, and so it was really nice. It was less... Populous this time last year. It was very very crowded So make sure to get out if it's not on your radar put it on your calendar for next year But we had such a great showing on the downtown area right outside Vatos tacos We now have such a beautiful area to host and so that was really fun Thank you for the officers who take the time and for all the city staff who put that together there were a lot of booths out there a lot of folks work to make that happen and And I also want to give a word to Bite into downtown Westminster. So today is the last day, so I'm sorry if you didn't take advantage of it yet, but we had our first ever restaurant week earlier this year, and then we just had our downtown Westminster restaurant week. And so it was called Bite into Westminster, and it ran for a whole week. and I think it's a great idea to really try to vitalize the downtown area, and I'm grateful for all the work our staff is doing in partnership with the Chamber there, and for the restaurants who continue to show up and show out for us. With that, I just want to give, we did get somewhat short notice on that, so if you didn't hear about it, I apologize, and we're going to make sure that that's on our calendars well ahead of time so we can all get out for next year. With that, I think that's all. Councillor Ireland.

I'm sorry, I wanted to follow up. I also went to National Night Out at Highlands Greens. All the people there seemed to enjoy it, and also they had favorable reviews of our city and their neighborhood, and I appreciate all the first responders that were there. I also went to the historic Westminster 115th birthday. It was great just seeing... Our Mayor McNally there, she made the cakes. She never quits, and I appreciate that. And our former city council member, Councillor David Mont, my grandkids, they took with me and they enjoyed it. I also took them to many parks this week in our city, and I have to say, I give a shout out to the parks, libraries, and rec. They all looked great, so my grandkids really enjoyed them, so thank you very much for all the work you do on those parks.

Thank you. And my apologies, I forgot to mention you. Councillor Ayalon, you had your whole family there. You had that adorable baby there. Very cute. So thank you. With that, we will move on. Are there any potential agenda items councillors would like to propose for discussion at a future meeting?

That's me. Oh, Councillor Ireland. So we had a lot of discussion on homelessness in the Irving Library area, and that's a library that we're doing a lot of upgrades on, so I want to have a discussion on solutions to the homeless problem down there. I think we should include the businesses down there that are affected, the library librarians, the police chief, probably our counties, our lobbyists for the state, because I think this is not just a city problem, this is a higher level problem, so I would like to see all these people there to a session on the homeless problem there, because we cannot let this continue, it's gonna destroy businesses, it's making it impossible for people to enjoy the library, And when there's crime being committed, we just cannot continue to let it go. So I hope that my colleagues will agree that we need to talk about it and find solutions.

Mayor Pro Tem. Am I just saying yes or no, or can I?

Please offer if you have an idea for something else or if you want to comment on that. Yes.

I was just going to say I'm open to hearing from staff how they would want to structure that. I think it's important topic and perhaps there's a combination of us having a study session discussion but also maybe there's some outreach that happens before that so I just maybe a town hall or something on it yeah something I want to defer to how counts how staff would want to structure it but I'd be open to the conversation

thank you councillor brahas yeah this is a discussion on that agenda item so just uh for a point of order this is uh like this is the moment to kind of ask for space on a future agenda city council like that i think should be like the parameter of what our discussion goes into i think these are all great ideas but i think these are great ideas that we should have during a discussion that's been agendized and that either people can comment on or if it's during a study session. So I guess I would just ask either that we clarify what the request is or I can make a request to just say, hey, can we have an agenda item at a study session on a future date, a pretty soon future date that we can have these discussions, I guess is my question or my comment.

Thank you. So I usually, and I hear you, I like to get through everyone so we can hear from each person first before I go ahead and make a suggestion, but it sounds like we might need one now. So I'm just going to go ahead and ask city staff if you could respond first as to whether we have an idea on a town hall or whether we think a study session would be more... amenable to this topic according to how many stakeholders we have And then I can go ahead and counselor Ireland.

Maybe you can clarify your ask and then we can take a poll perfect I would just say I wouldn't want to put staff on the spot on answering the format and I think That we could just have a short conversation to just touch base, get this agendized, touch base, gives time for staff to just have a moment, and then we can discuss what we want to see out of it. So when we bring things like this, it's hard to just... structure and say yes i want a full-blown study session so is it more that we agendize this for a conversation and we just chat about what those next steps could look like and not have a full-blown study session built out for that agendized item i think that question will have to go to counselor ireland

i think we can talk a lot but i think we need to come to find solutions because these businesses are not going to last the longer we take because it really affects their bottom line with a theft and people won't come to their business so i think this is almost an emergency situation that's been going on so long so i would hope that we could have some stakeholders at the table when we discuss and not just talk about it and move it down the pipe for six more months

I would just say, I mean, we could add it if it's a shorter conversation, like if it goes next week or, you know, very quickly comes to the table for us to be able to discuss, then we could tackle it and say, okay, yes, this is what we want to do. That's all I'm saying is just as we bring things up at the dais here instead of, so that we can have... better direction for staff and talk out the policy items as Attorney Frankel has told us not to do during this. Yes. That's all I was saying is like we could agendize it, have the conversation and then do something more robust and we can talk about timing as well during that.

Thank you for modifying that suggestion. So let's go ahead and take a poll. I just need a clear ask, counselor, from what that looks like from you.

Well, I would like to know how far out we can do this study session. I mean, is it... this year, next year, when is it happening?

And to the mayor's point, she's asking for a memo instead of a study session, if I understand correctly. Pardon me. Pardon me.

Obviously, I think there would be a combination that we'd obviously want to be able to put together some materials and bring that back to council as well. On a separate note, along those lines, we do have two IGAs that we will be bringing back that are associated with Jefferson County side. So some of the work that has been going on. So one is the cold weather sheltering and the other is the extension of the Navigator Program. Those two items are anticipated to come in September to City Council, but that's obviously not this discussion. What I would ask is if staff could put together kind of an outline and bring that back to Council as to potentially identifying those, recognizing the next two months are pretty packed with things that Council has to get done, but we want to make sure that we are responsive to that request and come back as quickly. In the meantime, staff is definitely working in the Irving Street area. The Rangers and the police officers are working with the individuals in that area as well as the businesses. So if the individual, I believe Ms. Fitch has her contact information, we'll make sure that we follow up with her as well.

Well, I would like to know the tools that we do not have to make a difference. If they're cleaning it up one day and it starts again another day, it's not working what we're doing. So we need answers and solutions.

Okay, I'm going to pull for a conversation regarding your request right here, Councillor, on recognizing the tools we have at play. Mayor Pro Tem. Yes. Yes.

Yes. Yes.

Thank you so much. And I have several other hands up here. Councillor Haught. Yes. Thank you so much. Councilor Barajas.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. And just as a follow-up, you know, in the meantime, myself, Director Otzelberger of our parks, rec, and library system, who is the kind of point person on some of this stuff, along with our park rangers have had multiple conversations please reach out to either myself or anyone at the city if you are kind of in this neighborhood you want to have continued conversation in the meantime i think a lot of these are great kind of stake holding opportunities but i do want to highlight that hours and hours of conversation that i myself have been a part of have been happening and continue to happen in the area so if you want to be part of those conversations in the meantime like please just don't hesitate to reach out uh anyone from the city can provide you my contact information or you can reach out to or come up to me and i can give you my card at any moment um but I just wanted to offer that as one final follow-up that I think this is you know We have our our business up here and the business up here will always be slow But there's always room for conversation in the midst of that and please don't hesitate to to kind of connect Any members of our community and those listening online to the work that's already happening Thank you, are there any further items

Moving on to our consent agenda. Items 9B and 9C have been removed from the consent agenda. Do I have a motion for the remaining items on the consent agenda? Councillor Johnson.

Thank you, Mayor. I move to approve consent agenda items 9A, 9D through 9G.

Thank you. Mayor Pro Tem. I second. Any further discussion? City Clerk? Councillor Barajas?

Yes.

Oh, I'm sorry. I just wanted to make sure I give Councillor Haught an explicit opportunity. Oh, sorry. Councillor Haught, did you have any further discussion? No. Okay.

Triple check. Thank you, City Clerk. Councillor Barajas?

Yes.

Mayor Carmelia? Yes. Councillor Haught? Yes. Councillor Ireland? Yes. Councillor Johnson?

Yes.

And Mayor Pro Tem Rumela? Yes. Thank you. The motion passes on a 6-0 vote.

Perfect. Do I have a motion for item 9B? Councillor Brahus.

Move to pass council bill number 30 on a second reading to authorize the city manager to execute an economic development agreement with Mi Pueblo Latin Market Incorporated, DBA, Mi Pueblo Market for the adaptive reuse of the building located at 7170 Federal Boulevard, commonly known as Northgate Shopping Center for the opening of a 45,000 square foot grocery store.

Mayor Pro Tem. Second. Any further discussion? Councillor Ireland.

I took this off the consent agenda because I've had a lot of pushback from businesses in the area that don't get the half of their sales tax removed and they're already a business there and it makes a fair playing field for them to make their business work when we're singling out a business to get half their sales tax removed basically for five years. So I'm listening to those people and so I'm gonna vote no on this. I don't think it is a level playing field. You can't do it for one and not for all the other businesses. So I'm gonna be a no.

Thank you. Mayor Pro Tem. I am voting in favor of this. I would say that grocery stores have a very small margin and so they do often need some additional assistance to get off the ground. I also would say if you know, business retention wise, you know, if there are businesses that are out there that are struggling, I'm sure that our economic development team would appreciate hearing and kind of understanding what the issues are because we do have grants, we do have things that can help. So, just a shout out for businesses that we want them here. So, thank you.

Councilor Haught, any thoughts?

No, thank you.

Okay, well then I will add my own. So thank you to the residents and the businesses who reached out and we appreciate the thoughts that go into making our decisions and we do take them into consideration. So I did pause and think about this. However, when I think back to one of the very first town halls that I attended several years ago, the topic was on the food desert that we have in South Westminster. and this has been an ongoing issue over the last several years that that council had not been able to solve, my prior council had not been able to solve, and now that we have the ability right now in front of us to be able to take action on, and this is not an uncommon action, it is, common for cities just like ours to provide incentives to help those businesses make it possible to be here. And we gave strong direction to our staff and economic development team to seek out a establishment that would best meet the needs of this community. which we believe that this one does. This is culturally relevant. It's more than a store. It's part of our community engagement, and it resolves the food desert issue that we are seeing in the area, and we want to make sure that food is accessible for everyone in our city and not just for those who can afford to get to where they're going or afford to have one near them. So for all of those reasons, I am really excited to say yes to this project, and I'm excited to welcome Mi Pueblo to our city. Hopefully. With that, City Clerk?

Mayor Carmelia? Yes. Councillor Haught? Yes. Councillor Ireland? No. Councillor Johnson?

Yes.

Mayor Pro Tem Nurmela? Yes. And Councillor Barajas?

Yes.

The motion passes on a 5-1 vote.

Thank you so much. Do I have a motion for Item 9C? Councillor Brawhouse.

I move to authorize an amendment to the agreement with Sustainability Recycling to reimburse staff wages at the Westminster Sustainability Center in an amount not to exceed $20,000 per month through December 31st, 2028 with reimbursement funds from the Colorado Extended Producer Responsibility Program administered through the Colorado Action Alliance.

Thank you. Mayor Pro Tem. Second. Any further discussion? I just have questions on this. Councillor Ireland.

Yeah, sorry. I have questions for staff. I don't know if there's anyone here to answer this, but are we guaranteed that we're going to get it paid for by the Colorado Action Alliance? Is there a possibility this will not happen?

Thank you, Councillor. Jen Prid will help us address those questions.

Good evening. Thank you for the question, Councilor Ireland. We heard from the Colorado Action Alliance last week. We are currently in negotiation. We do know that we are looking at about $140,000 in reimbursement this year. We're actively negotiating a service agreement. This year was a partial reimbursement. In 2027, we expect to receive 100% of that reimbursement. We're just negotiating the final details of that

So it's a pretty done deal, you think?

We haven't signed anything yet, but.

What happens if they don't? Are we stuck paying the entire amount?

We are very certain that that will come through. What we're told is that there is a pot of money that they have collected from the producers that are manufacturing the recycling materials. It's just a matter of executing those agreements.

Okay, thank you for the answer.

You're very welcome. Thank you, anyone else? Councilor Haught.

No, thank you. Okay, roll call please. Councilor Haught. Yes. Councilor Ireland? Yes. Councilor Johnson?

Yes.

Mayor Pro Tem Ramallah? Yes. Councilor Barajas? Yes. Mayor Camarilla? Yes. The motion passes on a 6-0 vote.

Thank you so much. That moves us to appointments. There are no appointments or resignations this evening. And now that brings us to our public hearing. We have one public hearing tonight regarding Mountain Range High School Nutrition Center. The time is now. and I will open the public hearing. Before we begin, I just want to acknowledge that for the record, I have been reached out to regarding this item via phone call and via a letter on email. And with that, I did receive very high level information and not very many details. And I am able to make a decision with the information proposed tonight and provided tonight, and my judgment is not already made up. I invite anyone else, Mayor Pro Tem.

I will say I did also receive a phone call to give me just a big picture understanding of what this hearing would be, but not any detail. So I am staying as neutral as possible with this hearing and I can, analyze all of the information and make a fair judgment. Thank you so much. Councilor Brawhouse.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. I was not popular. I've not received any sort of ex parte communication except for an email that this entire council got, which I have submitted to the record. The email was submitted on July 23rd in the afternoon, and it's a letter just pertaining to this. Since it was not part of the record for this public hearing, I have submitted that email just so it is part of now the public record.

Thank you for doing so. Councillor Johnson.

Thank you, Mayor. I did receive a phone call on the same email that Councillor Baraja submitted to the public record, but I am able to judge this appeal based on the evidence in the public hearing.

Thank you. Okay. I think that covers us all. So there was some outreach. Actually...

Yes. So I also received outreach, but as soon as I realized that it was quasi-judicial, I said that I was not able to have a discussion about it. So I can definitely look at this with fair judgment.

Thank you so much, Counselor. Okay, anything to add? Are we all clear?

Thank you.

Thank you, City Attorney. With that, staff, thank you so much for stepping up. Do we have a presentation?

Yes, we do. Good evening, Mayor, Mayor Pro Tem, and City Council. My name is Reb Batesel, Senior Planner, here to provide you with the staff presentation for this public hearing item. As part of bringing this project before you, a staff agenda memo has been created and tonight's public hearing has been properly noticed. The agenda memo, its associated attachments, tonight's PowerPoint presentation, the mailed notices and the posted notices are hereby entered into the public record at this time. The city has also posted the hearing date and time on its website. The project site is located at 12450 Delaware Street at the existing Mountain Range High School campus. The site plan is from sheet four of the ODP. Section 11-515 of the Westminster Municipal Code contains 17 criteria that are to be considered when reviewing an official development plan. Staff finds that the proposed official development plan does not comply with the criteria in section 11-515 of the Westminster Municipal Code and therefore exceptions are required. During the technical review process, staff identified three ODP exceptions and the city manager referred the ODP to the Planning Commission for consideration. On July 14th, 2026, the Planning Commission denied the ODP with the requested exceptions by a vote of five to two. The applicant then filed a timely appeal of the Planning Commission's decision to City Council. Tonight's City Council review is a de novo consideration of the ODP and the three exceptions. Those three exceptions are number one, the request to allow textured and architectural metal panels and textured integrally colored masonry block veneer as the predominant building material. Number two, the request to reduce the minimum number of required trees and shrubs in the landscaped areas. And number three, request to exceed the maximum four foot retaining wall height to allow for approximately 62% of the retaining walls to exceed the maximum.

So to exceed the maximum four foot height.

Staff recommends that City Council hold a public hearing and consider approval of the official development plan with the exceptions described herein related to architecture, landscaping quantity reductions, and retaining walls. Staff finds that the consideration of this application will meet the city's strategic plan priorities for opportunity to thrive and resilient infrastructure by ensuring that new development is built of a quality comparable to other development in Westminster. Thanks for your attention. That was my staff presentation. There are many staff members here tonight. We're happy to answer questions as they come up. And the applicant is here and has a presentation as well. Thank you, are there any questions for staff at this time?

Mayor Pro Tem. Thank you for the presentation. Can you just outline how many exceptions this ODP has, not including what's being asked here? It's just those three total. Okay, so, because architecturally, there's not? Architecturally is the- It's just the material?

Correct. Interesting, okay. So architecture, material, landscaping, and the retaining walls. Okay, thank you. Yes.

Councilor Ireland. I can stay up there.

So I know there's only three exceptions, but do we look at the road use because I know there's garbage trucks every day, there's heavy trucks and what it does to our roads. I saw the traffic assessment, but I didn't see a road assessment. And also this kind of kitchen uses atypical water, sanitary sewer, grease, drainage, and potentially high strength wastewater demands. Were those the infrastructure looked at that we have enough infrastructure? And I'm worried about the use of roads, especially on Delaware that we're using these heavy trucks every day.

Absolutely, the use of the trucks on the road specifically was not part of that traffic impact study. The utilities and drainage report, however, were reviewed by the development engineering team. Okay, thank you.

Councilor Johnson.

Thank you, Mary. I have two questions. The first one is around the specific percentage reduction for the landscaping and shrubs compared to the ODP, if you have that number.

I do. Let me grab it. Okay, so at one tree per 550 square feet is the requirement. There would be 83 trees required. The project proposes to provide 23 trees. In regard to shrubs, three per 550 square feet are required. That would be 249 shrubs required. The project provides 23 shrubs.

And then my second question is around the retaining wall height. For the areas, I think it was 62% above the threshold. How tall above the threshold is the request?

They're 10 feet tall.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. So I'm curious about the landscape request. Is it specifically just trees and shrubs or is there also like kind of permeable versus non-permeable surfaces like mulched versus not mulched or grass versus concrete? And is that part of the exception or is it just the number of tree and shrubs?

The exception is specific to the quantity of trees and shrubs provided.

Thank you. And can you speak to the purpose of retaining wall heights? I guess maybe just kind of in our land use and design 101 continual course that I'm asking for in these public hearings. What is the purpose of these retaining walls? Why do we have a maximum height of four? And are there any potential risks of retaining walls, specifically those that are higher than the average human height?

With Council's permission, could I call Principal Planner Jacob Kauza up to provide some historical background on retaining wealth?

Welcome.

Councilor Borjas, thank you for the question. Jacob Kaza, principal planner of the city. Specifically for retaining wall height, we have a maximum inside of our landscape regulations of four feet in height. That's for several reasons. One is when a structural wall of less than four feet or four feet fails, it's a lot less catastrophic than when a 10-foot wall would fail. That said, a 10-foot wall can be engineered and it can get approval with a building permit for that. The other is aesthetics. So we do like the preference of not having taller walls. It has a better visual impact in our community. And that's typically the character that we seek out in our community. And the other one is safety. So with a taller wall, you have a higher risk of falling off of it or an impact. At this location, we're not particularly concerned about that. Their facility will be fenced off. So it's predominantly mostly on the safety aspects of it from longevity and duration.

Thank you. And in this specific case, if the request for the exception was denied, what would the engineering require? So I imagine right now, if there's a rotating wall around 10 feet, it's because the earth is about 10 feet tall. So what would it be engineering required to kind of alleviate and hit the forefoot marker?

Yeah, so they would have to redesign their site effectively. They do have some room that they are not programming currently that they wish to program in the future, but they could push their building to the north and to the west. It would require some additional grading work and site engineering to make that work. But we do identify they do have room, but it would require them to change future programming of their site. And additionally, they'd have to go back and re-engineer that to make it work. Thank you.

Councilor Haught, did you have any questions for staff? No, thank you. Okay, with that, does the applicant have a presentation? Thank you so much.

Welcome. I am gonna move it down, even wear my heels. Thank you, Council, Mayor, for having us tonight. My name is Molly Brandt. I have the pleasure and honor of serving Adams 12 as our Chief Operating Officer. With me tonight, Superintendent Gidowski for his third appearance. And in the audience, we have a lot of our technical experts. So we have members and leaders from our Nutrition Services Team who will be operating the building, our Construction Facility Design Team, who have been partnering with the City Planners since October. We also have our design partner and our construction partner, MOA Architecture, and also JHL. JHL is very eager to break ground as we do have a building permit. So excited to be here tonight. Thank you for the invite. All right, with that, oh, I'm so sorry, Lori, and our Board of Education President, Lori Goldstein. So tonight we're here in a cooperative spirit. We would like the record to reflect that by attending, we are not subjecting the district to anything beyond the statute and we're affirming our rights under the CRS 2232-124. We have given the city ample time to review and comment and throughout the process, we have determined, as you've heard, the three city retail guidelines that we cannot be met for this project. We hope our presentation will improve your understanding of the infeasibility of certain design elements and the district can be issued our land disturbance permit and begin construction properly. With that, I always like to start everything in Adams 12 is about our students and this project is no different. This is our why. This building is another way in which we prepare our students for a future of their choosing. It's a way that we provide them an opportunity to thrive. I know that's a common goal we share between your strategic plan and ours. And we strive for every student to be healthy, safe, supported, engaged, and challenged. Our Nutrition Services Center is critical to achieve this. It's not just a building. It's a dream come true for us. It's an opportunity to do so many things for our students. We have the opportunity to stomp out the stigma of school lunch. This building is also the engine for us to store, prepare, and deliver chef inspired from scratch meals to more than 29,000 students across 47 schools, directly supporting their medical, cultural, religious food preferences, and most importantly, their academic success. So I, by trade, am a dietician, and I know one thing to be true after 15 years in K-12 nutrition services, and that is that hungry kids can't learn. And this is an ability to meet our students with access to food that meet their preferences. And as you know, every person has individual preferences and that has been a hard struggle for us in our menu development. So happy to have this project voted in in our 2024 bond by our voters and happy to be here to have this opportunity to change that for our students going forward. This investment in resilient infrastructure will also allow us to incorporate farm to table elements and connect with local farmers, producers and distributors right here in Adams County and beyond. The building truly allows us to be Colorado proud and invest locally. As I said before, we're not just constructing a warehouse in Central Kitchen, we're building a support system for our students daily success and building a thriving connected community. With that, I will show this again. I just zoomed it in. I wanna just take a couple details. On our site, it is located, our building, as you see in the red, is located on the southwest corner of 128th and I-25, if you kinda think of that. And I-25 borders our site on the east. So the street closest to us is Delaware. As you can see, that's not a main street. It's off Huron. It's an access road between 128th and Huron to get to the back parking lots of our Mountain Range High School facility, our Silver Hills facility, and our North Stadium facility. It also is important to note that through this site, Tanglewood Creek is also here that provides a lot of dense tree coverage that is between the road and our site. As you know, a lot of the exceptions are aesthetic in nature. And it's a highly wooded area just that kind of blocks the view of our site. These are the renderings to help you visualize and experience our site and our building. The top image is the front entrance of the Nutrition Services Center, we like to call it NSC. You will experience this view as you turn off Delaware and head up our south entrance as you head east towards I-25. You will enter the south parking lot of our stadium, our north stadium, and you will be greeted with this view. As you can see, a lot of the trees in the renderings below, I wanna share just a little bit about kind of what they are and why they're important to our exceptions. So the bottom left is a view looking southeast from Stadium South parking lot. As you enter this space, this is kind of after you go by the front door of our building, you will notice there's a very native landscape. Like the staff presentation said, our site is encompassed in an opaque fencing around and you will see the retaining wall in the back there. If you look just to the very back, it's a light white kind of tiered wall in the back. It is fully enclosed into the fence. I think that's important to note. You also note that in the center, this is the view looking southwest from Interstate 25. Again, a lot of native landscape, the fence is visible. As you go through our site, about halfway through the site, there is a wall that is already pre-existing on I-25 that does block the view of the building. And then looking northeast, the final picture on your bottom right is from Willowbrook Park. You can see the dense tree line of Tanglewood Creek, and you can see our building in the distance. I think it's important to note that on this, that distance from any apartments and the park is 150 yards, over 150 yards from the site, and that is one and a half football fields for your perspective. I also think it's important to show two other school districts here in the Denver Metro area that have built and or maintained nutrition centers in their fleet. And these Denver area school districts have similar or same functions as our proposed building. And as you can see, metal exteriors are a primary and industry standard as it relates to buildings of this use and type. I think it's also important to note that a nutrition services center is a unique building, it's one of a kind. There's not many built in the metro area and because of that we are following retail commercial guidelines and it is not a retail or a commercial building. All right, to explain a little bit further of the proposed design guidelines and our exception requests, the first is exterior materials. So the city standards states that the metal siding cannot be a predominant material. It is in our building and that is because again, it's not a retail building, it's not open to the public. It's not an Applebee's where someone will visit. This is used for preparing, distributing, receiving food around our district, including in your city. It's a pre-engineered metal building, it's safe, it's versatile, it's adaptable and offers exceptional durability and can adapt to heavy duty needs and uses. The design as we knew early on, the guideline from the city around the prominently metal building and the preference for masonry. We knew that, we did look into that. Financially, it was not something we could consider as the money really needs to be in the function of the building and the equipment inside. And as you know, with the bond program, there's limited funds and budget per project. And we need to be good stewards of our taxpayer dollars and deliver a project that will function the way we intend. I will say we did add articulated roof lines, canopies, variation of multiple textures on the panels, two-tone, and even a masonry base to create an overall visual interest in our design. With the landscaping, as you heard from staff, I won't repeat the data, but we did plan to install 23 trees and 23 shrubs focused in front facing locations and the rest to be native. As you can see from the renderings, those are taken from Google Earth. So those are what the site looks like now and how we intend to maintain it going forward. The mostly prairie design of the site also utilizes significantly less water and landscape of trees and brushes with a stage two drought. And we know this is the future of Colorado. We want to be responsible now and for future. And we truly believe that reducing number of trees and bushes and using a mostly native landscape will help with that and it preserves the current landscape that's there and has been there for many years. The second reason that we reduce the number of trees and bushes in our design is security. This building serves as critical infrastructure component for our entire district and therefore like our school buildings needs to be highly secured. That's why we have the fence and inside the fence there's really not an opportunity to provide or should we provide plantings. Our central kitchen again is not open to the public. It's seldom visited and from many angles largely hidden from view. So we do believe that our proposed landscaping will meet the needs aesthetically and it'll be sustainable for years to come. Finally, the retaining wall. The city guideline is a three-tiered wall that unfortunately would encroach into the required maneuvering clearances for our semi trucks and access of the building for even if our fire truck needed to have a turnaround radius. I will tell you that the the building location was intentionally selected. And that is because on its west side, it will hold an expansion area for an outdoor space that we would like to put on the building in future bonds or for two years. If we were to move it north, we would encroach into another guideline. We'd be here asking an exception for around grading. and there wasn't a way to move it east without encroaching into the turning radius, and it's just not physically possible. If we could have designed it to the guidelines, we would have, but it's just not possible or feasible in this design. We couldn't move the building south in any way because it would encroach in our drainage, our drainage swale, our fire access lane, et cetera. So that is why we couldn't move the building. All right, I think it's important to share that we have always taken a partnership stance. And these here listed in these bullets are all the practical compromises, the logical compromises that we have worked with the city on. We have completed pre-application meeting. We had five ODP submittals, which is more than usual between October and June. We submitted a land disturbance permit. in June hoping to move our project forward and along. We delayed the start of our project by four months to meet with Planning Commission to attend and to attend the City Council meeting at absorbing all those added costs. design-wise and the practical compromises and concessions we made there, many of that you've already heard. So just a reminder, the exterior designed partially masonry building instead of a full masonry building. As a compromise, we did a two-tone textured panel. We articulated the roof design because we wanted to avoid the big box look. We understand the reason for the guideline and we really hope that you feel that our concessions here on the exterior and our compromises make that something you can accept going forward. Landscaping, to meet the minimum area, we did meet the minimum evergreen requirements. We did reduce plantings for water conservation knowing the state of Colorado is going to have water concerns in years to come and we're currently in a stage two drought and the water or the landscape guidelines were from many years, they were enacted many years ago before those mitigation efforts were in place. We also replaced cobble with mulch per the city of Westminster's request and that was something we were able to concede on as well. The retaining wall, we did use a two-tier design versus a three-tier. It did increase the wall height. I do wanna be clear here that the wall is designed structurally sound. Engineers have designed it, it is on piers, it is safe, it is within our fenced-in area so that it is safer if someone were to happen to get on the backside of our property. And we do have a maintenance and grounds team in the district that can assess the wall and they can go out and do preventative maintenance checks on this wall annually. And again, the retaining wall, it is not possible. We need to preserve our access for fire truck and we need to preserve our turn radius for fire truck and semis. So that is important to us and not something we can change. Finally, financial impacts. I think it's important if we were to continue and let's say we were denied, we would face a $1.5 million deficit in our project. Again, being good stewards of taxpayer dollars, some of which are your constituents as well, and also delivering on our bond program that we promised, we cannot invest an additional 1.5 into this project. We have already, and just so you know, the number three or the third exception, which was around the or attainable, thank you, around the attainable is not here just because it's not possible. So it's not something we can do. But the bottom two bullets I think are important. These are concessions we've also made. We've already incurred over $450,000 in material escalation and construction delay to delay our project four months to attend planning commission and be here with you tonight. And we expect to incur an estimated over about $80,000 a month until construction commences. We, our schedule is delayed and every delay pushes back the benefit to our students that we spoke about at the beginning and to our community. Our next best case is that we could have a positive outcome here tonight and we could work with the city on the land disturbance permit, have that issued to us without further delay and start construction early September. There is a 14 month construction duration regardless of our start and three months operational ramp up in order to fill the warehouse, begin production of food. I think the important thing to note here is that it does affect a growing season and our partnership with local farmers if we delay too much further. Ideally, they would be planting for us next summer and harvesting to bring food into our facility. So our interest here tonight before we leave is we'd love to move forward with this project. I think we've shown that we have partnered, we've collaborated with the city, we came up with practical, logical solutions and we would hope that you would agree with us and we could get moving on our land disturbance permit being issued and we could begin construction. Chris, is there anything you'd like to share?

I'll just make a few final comments. One is in my subjective interpretation, but one that I would expect is shared by you all. What we're proposing is way prettier than what Cherry Creek and Boulder Valley have done, especially when you take into account that our neighbors bordering this site are I-25, a stadium, two school parking lots, and residences that are more than 150 yards away. Second thing I would submit is beyond the cost that Molly's identified here, we spend twice as much per every box of food that we have delivered to Adams Toll right now because we have those delivery trucks going to 50 plus different sites in the district and all that logistical burden for our food suppliers doubles the cost of our food. So not only is it a construction cost escalation, but the longer we wait, the more we pay for food of lesser quality, as opposed to more quickly getting farm to table kinds of options in front of our kids. A third thing I would share is early in my career as a brand new attorney, I worked for a firm that represented the North Metro Fire Rescue Authority. And then I went on to work for Adams 12 and private practice as an attorney as well. And both of those parties were involved in a big dispute that went all the way to the court of appeals about use of a part of a building and how it should be designed for evacuating students with disabilities. And as somebody who really wasn't on the inside of either one of those parties case and their analysis, just looking at it as something I was interested in, I feel like my reaction was similar to what the public typically expects in these cases, which is not to waste time and money in conflict and litigation with one another, but to find solutions that move us forward at the least possible expense. And we respectfully submit that's what we've proposed to do with the modifications we've made throughout this process. Thank you.

Thank you. Council, Councilor Brahas.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. I have a question on the site expansion. While that's not kind of the purview of this, I'm curious like what that is because who will be, I guess right now it's gonna just be employees, but will that site expansion offer different programming that would have different people attend the site?

Yes, thank you. So although it won't be open to the public, we do plan to have field trips to our site. We have a kind of a wall of windows where if we had a second grade class visit the nutrition center as part of their food science curriculum or curriculum for other, they could view into what we're doing. We could sit them in our test kitchen, which is on the right now, currently the west side of the building. And then we would hopefully have kind of a patio space where they could go outside We could do food taste tests, we could do food science things with food. So it's really for student use and staff use for wellness outside.

Okay, so will there be a opportunity for students to then walk by this retaining wall that is not then, like would that, this retaining wall, that would be an exception and part of the pathway for students?

Great question, no, not at all. That is encased in our fencing inside the service yard where is only access by trucks.

And then for this site expansion, is there an opportunity for, I guess I wanna be clear, while we are in extreme drought and we are considering what that entails, trees are not the enemy in drought planning. We as a city have a tree plan and this kind of flies directly in the face of that. It increases shade, it offers trees respirate, which allows more moisture into the atmosphere, which allows more precipitation. It's actually a solution towards drought. So I just wanna put that on the record that that's part of my consideration, but for this expansion, will there be opportunities for more kind of trees? And there's plenty of native variety trees that are not only water wise, but offer an added net benefit to the environment. So I guess in this expansion, will there be, I guess in future plans for the site, is there an opportunity for increased tree canopy?

I think anything is possible in the future. We would have this probably on a future bond issue. And in that case, we would have another budget to apply to that. So I think anything is possible in working with the city in that.

Thank you.

Mayor Pro Tem. I'm just curious why the initial design did not follow our standards. Why was something submitted that didn't follow our standards?

So when we started our bond program, before we voted and submitted the bond program to our board, we had an initial budget for this project. We completed a fit study with a contractor and a food service contractor that has built facilities like this in the past. At the time, we did not know City of Westminster would be our selected area during the fit study, but initially on in design after the bond passed our fit study, that budget was then put into our 2024 bond plan. We immediately started design here just even pre-October. So about a year ago and with that in our first look at the budget in our SD design, we did see that it would cost over a million dollars more and we were already over budget and the money needed to be focused on the function of the building. For example, we did not want to use our food kettles, our food production equipment or storage equipment for either food safety or what we could do with this building. to bruise food for kids. So we made a difficult decision to reduce or to not meet the design standards so that that was aesthetic and we needed the function to be inside the building and the money to go towards that. I hope you do see though that over the months as we worked with the city and with our design partner, MOA Architecture, we made it not a big box. It is partial masonry now, it's two-tone, it's articulated roof designs to help not have that metal building feel.

I do appreciate that partnership. I think part of being a partner though is also recognizing you're locating within a city and we do have specific standards and it's frustrating to see that the initiation of the project did not include adherence to those. And then we're playing the bad guy or playing catch up on trying to bring this up to the standards that we have. Can I speak with somebody with some expertise on the structural nature of the 10 foot retaining wall? Yes.

Ross.

Hi there, I'm Ross Eddy with Emory Architecture.

So question for you on this retaining wall. As I understand it, 10 feet, is it also, because you talked about it being in two tiers, so is it 10 feet and two sections of 10 foot wall in some places? I couldn't find a section that was really...

Yes, that is correct. From the lowest point of the site elevation on the northwest corner to the southeast, which is the highest, it's about a 20-foot grade change. And so in order to fit all of the turning radius versus first MIs, which is gray, we had to minimize the number of tiered walls. And so, yes, it's two at the maximum height because they slope is 10 feet each and they're seven foot apart in between them. It's gonna be two 10 foot sections with piers and foundations that go six to eight feet below grade.

And how does that compare to if we did a series of four foot retaining walls in terms of safety and prevention of, you know, if one of those walls should fail? I'm trying to get a, you know, our staff talked about three things, which was the visual impact, the safety of just having that high of a wall and then the structural integrity. So I'm focusing right now on the structural integrity and comparing it to the four foot, the series of four foot walls that we would otherwise require.

Yeah. So, I mean, naturally a taller wall is going to hold more earth back. There's going to be more forces from the, from earth on the walls. Um, but the retaining walls are structurally designed. They have to have a structural stamp on them. Structural design always takes in a safety factor. So even if you need to withhold 500 pounds, you have to design it to hold 700 pounds, because you have to have that safety factor in there. So no walls would get approved without a structural stamp from a professional engineer on them. So.

And what's the likelihood of that high of a wall failing in comparison to four-foot walls? I know there's, if you had a 10-foot wall in comparison to a four-foot wall, a structurally sound 10-foot wall in comparison to the four-foot wall, but now we're talking about a series of four-foot walls. I'm just trying to, again, just parse out what's the safer option for that.

I don't, I mean, I don't, I don't have the stats in front of me that would say having a taller wall would may or may not fail a certain percentage higher than a four foot wall. Um, but I do think typically the four foot walls don't really have a foundation structure underneath them because they're a lot shorter, um, where the taller walls do extend quite a bit into the earth below frost line. Um, to make sure that they don't overturn and they're tied back into the grade that helps hold them in place. They're not just a wall standing up that might tip. They actually have tiebacks into the grade that help stabilize them.

And if these walls should fail, it fails towards the building.

That's correct. It fails in towards the site, not out. on a public property.

Okay, and so visually these walls, you don't see the 10 foot sections of?

Yeah, so the opaque security fence around the yard is eight feet tall. And so from the one photo from the south parking lot, you'd be able to see, we estimated about the top four foot of the wall, of the second wall. So the lower 10 foot wall, you won't even see from outside of the parking lot. And then the second wall, you'd see about the top four feet of it.

Okay. Okay, I appreciate that. Thank you, Ross. You're welcome, Sarah. Let's see. And then for landscaping, I too have reservations over, it looks a little apocalyptic in some of these graphics and Prairie Dog Haven. So I'm just, I'm struggling on that one. I get that there are trees around there, around the site, but I'm, I don't know if I have a question around that or not. I guess the question I do have for you is just the calculation of the 400 some odd thousand dollars. Is that for the landscaping, is that literally just the differential of planting the trees and shrubs?

It is and does not include irrigation. That would be required. And so that is the $400,000 number on the slide that I showed.

Okay, thank you. And I have one, did you have another?

I was just gonna say, and we maintain native landscape all around our district. I think it's important to note where this is. And although you can't see the perspective, we share a south parking lot with this building and our stadium. And it is not off a main road. The only persons that would see this would be staff entering, which again, a prairie landscape is not unique. It is something that we're seeing more often in landscaping today. And it would be anybody visiting that a full event at our stadium that would use the south parking lot and that all events do.

Okay, yes, the location does save us from the building. The question I have is for staff, finally, one last question. When we look at these types of exceptions, this is, yes, more of an industrial building. Can you talk to me a little bit about just the precedent? any struggle that we might have with enforcing our standards for other developments? Maybe that's more of a policy-ish question.

Mayor Pro Tem, thank you for your question. So probably the challenge we'll have is with metal buildings, we've actually been approached with a lot of different metal buildings and the challenge there is our standard requires brick as a predominant building material. We have varied from that with some of our industrial buildings in the past. And so metal we're trying to keep towards a very high architectural standard if they're gonna implement metal as a primary material. With chaining walls, we try to take it as a site-by-site in a context-based solution. And so if we see that there is room, adequate room to make it happen, we'd like them to comply with that standard. Four feet, we do believe, as well as being aesthetically more pleasing, it is a safer wall overall, just the lower falling height that you have from it, as well as if the wall were to fail, you have a lot less catastrophic failure from it. So but that one we're not very concerned about from a precedent because each site is very unique in the context of where it is, what the grade is and what the site challenges are. With the materials we would be a little bit more concerned with the precedent setting and with the landscaping reductions that's where we have kind of a larger concern. One of the main concerns we have is our landscaping regulations from 2004 were developed specifically for the 2002 drought that we had. that was such an impactful drought here in the city. That's why we drafted the 2004 landscape regulations. They encouraged xeriscaping. It's a giant chapter and section on xeriscaping in there. Each applicant has the option for how they want to design their site. They could go entirely xeriscaping. One of our main concerns and challenges we have right now is a lot of people are actually doing xeriscaping, which is when you just rock everything and that leads to a high temperature. in the area and creates urban heat island effects. So that's one thing we're really challenged with in our community. You'll see it in a lot of turf conversions and front lawns. But I don't know necessarily that we'd get a lot of industrial users who would come and look at this nutrition facility and say, well, you let them do it. Why can't we do the same thing? But it could.

Okay, thank you so much. Councilor Ireland.

So I wanna understand how much is the retaining wall and why can't we use trees instead? Why are we using a wall instead of trees and bushes? What is the retaining wall supposed to do?

Do I have anyone from MOA? Okay, thank you.

I'm trying to understand the specific question.

I'm trying to understand why there's a retaining wall when there's a fence and why we can't substitute trees for the retaining wall.

So the retaining wall is holding back 20 feet of grade of earth from the site. The opaque, the eight foot tall opaque fence, which I think you could refer to as why don't we use greenery, shrubs, bushes as screening for that. And that would go back to a security issue. You could get through trees and bushes, but also with the district security protocols with cameras, trees tend to block views from the cameras. So security, I know there is homeless around there in the Tanglewood Creek area and having that food warehouse. So it's maintaining food safety to have a fence around those deliveries.

And how long is this retaining wall? Like how many feet long is it?

I think it is probably about 200 feet. So pretty substantial. Yep, and most, actually all of it that is above the four feet is within this fence. There are some sections at the end as it slopes down that go below four feet, but all of the tall portions are behind the fence.

Okay, I'm trying to understand how it's cheaper to take food to every school versus food to the school initially. Are you guys going to contract that out to these schools or are you buying trucks or... because you still have to take the food to the schools, whether it's coming to this kitchen or wherever it's coming from.

We do. I love this question. Thanks for asking. So school nutrition is complicated. It is governed under USDA guidelines and the federal guidelines and then state guidelines for healthy school meals for all. So in Colorado, every student has access to free breakfast and lunch, which is what a great benefit for our students here in Colorado. Knowing that, we get federal dollars per meal that we serve in reimbursement that is then utilized in our financial equation to purchase food. How we currently purchase food is we contract with a big box vendor like US Foods or Cisco, and they then distribute, we come up with a number of line items, they distribute school to school. With that comes an additional, I wanna say, Lisa, is it like? three or Tracy, like $3 per case. So you put a per case charge on top of the case cost. For again, their use in delivery, it is very high. We have done the calculations. We've had a food service consultant come in. The reason many districts are going to this is because you can reduce your food cost and have better quality food by producing and delivering yourself and adding that per case cost. The other thing that allows us to reduce costs is buying in bulk. We all know, that's why Costco exists, right? Buying in bulk will reduce. We can bring, let's say we choose a chicken vendor and we can have a whole truckload of chicken delivered to this warehouse at a much cheaper cost than case-to-case to US Foods and then off case-to-case. to case to our schools, because we incur two case fees in that example. And the final reason that we can save money is, again, with all the meals you serve at the end of the year, the USDA does a calculation, and we are able to have access to commodity product. And I know commodity product, just like the stigma school lunch can have a bad name, but really there is fresh fruit and vegetable dollars we can use for dairy milk, all the different products we use as whole ingredients. And we currently have to at times not utilize that for that full amounts because we don't have a warehouse to store it. because it comes in by the truckload. We can only bring in dry goods right now. And with that, just a couple of trucks a year. And so to be able to utilize our commodity dollars in a much better way for our ingredients and bring them into this kitchen will allow us to free up dollars in our menu to then, like you said, have a truck that we'll deliver out to schools. And we currently do have warehousing trucks in our central warehouse that isn't food related. And as we're decreasing that, we're increasing the food production. So it's really, we'll be using some of those trucks and those employees and just offsetting, moving from a decrease of warehousing centrally for pencils and pens and things like that because Amazon is here and that's doesn't have per case fees associated with it. And then allowing that staff and infrastructure to move into our delivery mechanism for this building.

So how long will it take to pay off the 32 million base? Because you're into a building 32 million before you even start the food. So that's a cost that I'm not hearing when the payback comes.

I do not have that calculation with me today, did not anticipate that question. Chris, did you have something to say? I heard you.

I was going to submit that we're the only district in the entire metro region doing it this way right now. Every other district in the region has a centralized warehouse where you get centralized deliveries. And the business case has been proven time and time and time again, that's more cost-effective to do that. Not just in terms of saving on delivery costs, but also improving the quality of food that you can serve your kids. Right now we're just doing warm and heat meals. for the most part and we'll be able to prepare food that's not just putting it in the microwave and heating it up but things that are more responsive to what parents and kids and families say they want to eat so i think the cost proposition from a business standpoint has been well demonstrated by all of our peers who've been doing this for decades in some cases but i think the benefits go well beyond just dollars and cents in terms of the quality of food we'd be serving too so you don't know how long it will take to pay for itself um

Is it going to charter schools too or just the main public schools?

We hope to expand it if they are interested in having our delivery and purchasing our foods to come up with agreements for them as well.

All right, thank you.

Councilor Johnson.

Thank you Mayor and thank you all for being here tonight. I appreciate the collaboration on this issue and I think we're going to be able to work with each other going forward. But one of the things I want to talk about is we received a letter on July 23rd that was entered into the public record. because we received it and because this is a public hearing. And in that letter, it outlined a couple of things, some of which we've talked to you tonight, which is cost increases and delays and the necessity of this project, all of which I appreciate and understand. But it asserted another thing that I think it needs to be discussed from the city side on the record, which they made an assertion that the school districts board of education and not the city has the ultimate authority to approve a site development. And that's really troubling to me as a representative of the city and having this be on the public record, it makes this a really challenging thing for me to address. And I wish it didn't have to be a part of the public record. You know, I read 2232-124, I read the West Adams Fire District case pretty thoroughly when I received that letter as a part of my examination of the state's liability. And to me, that assertion alone makes this a really kind of challenging case for me to vote on because I disagree with the assertion. that the school district can go around the city. Even though I agree with potentially the other ODP amendments, I understand the necessity, I'm willing to move forward there. But it's something that needs to be addressed and I'm wondering if you're willing to address it tonight to help me reconcile a vote where I can't accept giving the city's authority over or setting a precedent for giving the city's authority over while also wanting to support the school district and support changes to the ODP.

So I'll jump in there. So once upon a time, I was an attorney, no longer so, but my understanding is that the attorneys that have been supporting us in this case believe that there's a precedent directly on point out of the town of Parker and a district court case and a similar dispute in which the court held in favor of the school district and ruled that home rule municipality status does not trump the CRS 124 provision we're talking about today. We'd be happy to get that decision and other materials that our attorneys have been sharing with us to you if it's helpful in just analyzing that legal piece.

Councilor Haught did you have any questions?

I don't have any additional questions thank you.

Okay, it's time for me to think through. So I had some similar questions as the Mayor Pro Tem concentrated on. And I know you've talked about this already a few times, but I'm trying to really understand the retaining wall and its necessity and why, I guess why we need it. And it sounds like there is an inability to lower the retaining wall due to trucks. But it also sounds like that might just be on one side. And I believe that I read that there could be a tiered structure. Obviously, we'd prefer the four-foot no matter what, the city. But why do we need the 10-foot all around the building, just for my understanding?

A couple clarifies. I do not believe it's all around the building. Correct, Ross? It's just on the west or east side. The west side. The east side. So it's just one side. It's just in the east side, kind of between our building, our property line and I-25. There is already a tall wall off of I-25 kind of blocking its view. And it is, as Ross talked about, to hold up the grade there because of the grade changes from our on our site are massive. And so that is a wall to hold that in place and then allow, cause that is our service yard. Service yard is where the trucks will come in, enter through a gate. They will back into for delivery or receiving and pickup, and then they will head back out. And so they need to have a turn radius If we did the three tier versus the two tier, it would encroach further into our service yard. And I apologize, we didn't have in our presentation, but we did have planning commission. There are diagrams that MOA prepared that show shaded areas that show where if we did a three tier, how it would come out and then how a truck's radius is required to turn and that it could not be physically possible.

Okay, thank you for that. And then on the landscaping specifically, I want to echo Councillor Brawhouse's thoughts on that, as well as our city staff. Thank you for chiming in on that. This is an area, now I just wanna address first of all, I understand the desire to focus our funds where they're absolutely needed. And so I appreciate the fact that taxpayer dollars are going into this. And so we need to be efficient with our decisions here this evening, as well as in general. And so, Thank you for partnering with us and for making the amenities that you have to this plan. I do have some concerns with the shrubs and the landscaping, just in that setting that precedent going forward, of course, as well as the heat island effect that we're creating. We want to retain moisture. I'm wondering if there's some sort of middle ground we can come up with, which is just even if it's like a hundred trees, you know, can we get to something that is, you know, more desirable, at least on the outskirts that is not, I don't know if staff have talked about any middle grounds on this, but I will just for the record, most likely be supporting you just because I see the importance of the essential need for schools to have food. I'm someone who often did not have food when I went to school. And then when I did have it, I wouldn't, qualify it as food. A lot of times it was truly inedible. In the early 90s and late 80s, if you have any idea what the school food looked like, you can relate. I mean, it was truly rubber. So for that, I understand that we were trying to meet an absolute essential need. And so I'm also trying to figure out ways that we can work with you and safeguard our city when these plans come to us. And I also want to just address something that Councilor Johnson just brought up, which I have heard that conversation as well come up after I read the letter, is that our attorney, I'd love actually maybe your thoughts on this, if you don't mind coming on the record, as far as the home rule with our schools. And so my understanding, and you just gave this case that I'm not familiar with, so thank you for that, Chris. But my understanding is that our city ordinances do require we have to work with the schools, but that the schools do not supersede those city ordinances. And so I just wanna ask our attorney for any thoughts on that, just to guide my thoughts around this topic.

Thank you, Mayor. I think the staff perspective on this is that the project is in the correct process right now, that city council has the discretion to either approve or deny the request. and that it's a hearing de novo, so the council is not bound by the planning commission's determinations. So you have a fresh look at this proposal. I think it's fair to say that the city and the school districts have different interpretations of state law and the scope of the school district's authority to cite their schools and whether that applies to this project in the way that... has been suggested. So we disagree on that. The city would, staff would recommend that this is the process that the applicant has the right to ask for this project to be approved having been through the planning commission process and that tonight it is within city council's discretion to consider and choose to approve or deny obviously i'm always an advocate for applying the criteria in the code And so tonight's decision, I would recommend be based on those criteria. But before you deliberate, I'll just suggest, the clerk and I have been noting that we still need to invite public testimony before closing the hearing and deliberating.

Yes, but I want to be sure to get through all counselors' questions and comments on this because this is a... decision that's going to impact our relationship into the long-term future. And so we want to be mindful about how we approach it. Okay, so those are my thoughts around the shrubbers, the shrubberies. How about we say that? And then as far as the metal around the building, I do believe that you made your case around proving that this is somewhat an industry standard and I appreciate that you used examples from cities that I think that we would consider in general have a fairly high standard of aesthetic. So you use Cherry Creek, you use Boulder, and it seems that with some modifications that metal seems to be what they're using for this. And so to me, especially when I saw the $1.03 million figure, that seems like something that we can work with, in my opinion. So I just wanted to make sure that I addressed and hit on every point, which is just And of course, when we make our decisions, I'll echo these thoughts as well. But I appreciate to our planning committees in-depth analysis of this and their dedication to ensuring that our city's processes are followed and for mitigating future difficulties that we may come across. So just know that there is a lot that's gone into this for a reason. I hope that regardless of the decision and outcome tonight, from my perspective, that we can just take a deeper look at the landscaping and maybe come to some sort of compromise there and improve it just for the well-being of the direction we're trying to head as a whole in this city. With that, I'm going to call on Councilor Haught. Unless I did already. And Mayor Pro Tem, you have further comment?

More a question of just of our city attorney. If one of the, one or more of the exceptions we wouldn't, if we wanted to approve this with a different set of exceptions, reducing by a couple or whatever, and we wanted to make them, how would we do that? Is there a middle ground between yes to what we have on the paper and no?

And I'll just offer while he's coming up with that, we can, if we like, vote on each of these exceptions one at a time to see where we stand and we can break this motion up. Or of course we could offer a motion in the middle, but I think that that might be the cleanest way to do it. So city attorney.

Thank you for the question. So my understanding is that the project as designed would require these three exceptions to be built. So if council wants a different project and the applicant is willing to change their design, I think only then would the modified conditions result in a project being built. So it seems that these three exceptions are tied to the plans that are before you tonight. So unless there's some kind of an agreement to change the project such that these three exceptions aren't needed, I don't know that approving different exceptions will resolve this issue tonight.

Okay, good point. I know that we do have later on in the agenda discussion about the agreement with the school district. And I would say if an element of that changes, if we discuss that, I know we can't predetermine that, so this is difficult, but would you be able to, I think some of the, what I'm hearing is a lot of concern about the landscaping and could there be improvements on landscaping? And... you know, is that something that you could address? We understand the limitations on the budget. So if there were, I suppose, some change in the financial outlook further down our agenda, would you be able to address landscaping?

So I'll just jump in here. I think that we'd be better positioned if otherwise adding landscaping is feasible with the design out there. And I don't know the answer to that. I'm looking a little bit at our design team, but we'd be better positioned just given our financial constraints. If the amount of the rebate was larger from use tax and permitting fees that we can invest that additional money into making some landscaping improvements.

Thank you.

All right, before we close this for public comment, are there any last questions? Okay, well with that, then I will close the hearing and well, I was closing it before that, I apologize. I welcome public testimony to begin and we will call up our first speaker.

We have no one signed up to speak for this item.

Thought I saw people get up, but is there no ability to do that last minute either? Okay. Okay, well, in that case, then I do close this hearing. It is 8.47 and we will close the public portion of the hearing. And do I have a motion? Councilor Johnson.

Thank you, Mayor. I move to approve the official development plan with the following exceptions. One, request to allow textured architectural metal panels and textured and really colored masonry block veneers as the predominant building materials. Two, request to reduce the minimum number of required trees and shrubs in the landscape area. And three, request to exceed the maximum four foot retaining wall height to allow for approximately 62% of the retaining walls to exceed the maximum.

Do I have a second? Councilor Abrahas? Second. Thank you. Any further discussion? Councilor Johnson?

Thank you, Mayor. After reviewing this project, I agree with council that I would like to see the number of trees and shrubs increased. But given the current restraint of the district's financials, I think the standards for the official development plan exceptions meet our criteria in Westminster Municipal Code 11-515. And because it meets those standards, I'm gonna be a yes tonight, but that yes is caveated with what our city attorney said is, I think that we need to assert that our city does have the final say over these development plans, and that this process is the way it's supposed to go, and that when we do it the right way, we get the right outcome. So for those reasons, I'll be a yes.

Thank you. Councilor Brawhaus.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. I wanna qualify, I will be, after reading through the standards for approval 11-5-15, I find that the exceptions, given these exceptions that this, we can kind of approve these exceptions and they can fall within the proposed ODP. However, I'm very reluctant to kind of do this without caveating that around process. Mayor Pro Tem's question at the very beginning, just asking why this was initially designed and submitted. in light of the email that Councilor Johnson brought up, and that is part of the public record, it seems that there's a little bit different of a color to the answer of that question. While I can appreciate maybe some insight, I think there also might be some bullheadedness that meant that this process is a sham, and I wanna reiterate that it's not, and I appreciate our planning department for being so diligent and looking through this for finding the evidence to support the areas for meeting in the middle. And I think that a lot of what we've heard tonight is we wanna be great partners. And I think that great partnership goes in line through the entire process. And maybe it means us stepping forward and being vulnerable first and saying, hey, we're okay taking these kind of hits on the chin in terms of our design and ordinance exceptions. But I just want to like, excuse me, I would like to reiterate that this is, us moving forward saying, hey, as leaders, we appreciate this and we can say thank you. And this is what good partnership looks like. And moving forward, earlier in this meeting outside of the public hearing, I mentioned the city often being straddled with the issues and being the final backstop that our residents go to. urban tree canopy being, I guess, another point where the city is alone in trying to fight for good shade and fighting against heat island effect. And it'd be incredible to have partners budget and prioritize in a similar way. But if that's something that we then need to start prioritizing ourselves, and that's something that we need to start prioritizing ourselves. But given all of that caveat, I will be a yes to all of these exceptions because I do believe that they can, they do fall within our standards and can make for an effective program for feeding the youth in our community.

Mayor Pro Tem.

I do struggle with this one. I have kids in Adams 12 and Ms. Brant, like your description of them actually having farm fresh foods is exciting to hear and I love what we're doing for the kids. I love the way that you're thinking about it and how you're engaging them as well in the learning process with this. So I love this project overall. I am just frustrated on the design side. And so it's not about what you're doing. And I just want that. I really appreciate what Adams 12 is doing. So I... Like Councilor Barajas, I am disappointed in the process. I mean, we often run into this with schools and traffic and not being able to really get good design that is responsive to our community. And so I wish that this had been approached differently. I understand the constraints that you have. I'd still like to see more landscape come in on this project. And I don't know, maybe I'll talk about that later again. When I look at the criteria, the first criteria on here is the plan is in conformance with all of our city codes, ordinances and policies. I mean, it's not, it wasn't when it was submitted to us. I think that the exceptions are generally reasonable for the type of project, the architecture. I'm not in love. I'm glad there's a walls and things that I can't see it. but I understand the use behind it. I already mentioned the landscaping and the structural integrity of the retaining walls. Honestly, I mean, I know we have to have a structural engineer sign off on this. I don't love that we'd be going higher than the four feet, but the risk is on the school district if they should fail. I would say, I do feel that in terms of safety that it will hopefully be addressed enough. So, you know, I'm, yeah, I'll probably be a yes on this, but man, I wish it had been a little bit different.

Thanks. Councilor Hott.

Yes. So I judge every quasi-judicial hearing the same exact way. And that is, do the amendments requested legally fit our amendment criteria? And in this case, it does. And so in that case, I feel that I need to vote yes.

Thank you. Counselor Ireland? I just have one more question of our attorney. What if one of these walls fails and it was our ordinance not to have 10-feet walls? Does it come back to the city at all? Or is it all in the school district?

Thank you, counselor. As I believe was testified to, an engineer will be stamping the plans for these walls. So that engineer, I believe, would be expressing their professional opinion that they are appropriately designed and that they are safe. So I don't see that the liability for the walls would come to the city. I think it would be up to the engineer to defend the plan that led to the stamping.

Thank you. Thank you. As far as my own thoughts, this has been a difficult one, especially hearing staff come to us. And I just want to say there is a process for appeals, which is why we're here. And so if we didn't agree with it, you could bring it here. And so I just want to say that this is strongly not a precedent for us being bullied into a decision. Because if I were not very much in compassion for the vision of this project, I would gladly take it to court with our city attorney. So I just wanna say that for this case and for future cases, that is not what this is. I also want to say, however, I am grateful for the vision of the school system to work on delivering better meals for kids because it is such a need and we don't pay enough attention to the nutrition of our children And it is a gap that is strongly linked to all the other problems that we see in our society, such as our education, our economy, et cetera. All of that can be rooted if you look at the way we treat young children and their families. And I think that I'm a living example, I could go into my long list of health complications, but poverty and kids, it will affect them for life and it affects When they don't have nutrition, it'll affect the rate that taxpayers pay for them when they go to the hospital instead of the doctor for their constant issues, right? In a billion different ways, it affects our economy and, of course, their livelihood. And then as far as the exceptions, I think that they can be reasonably made, especially under item six. I would say it's difficult because they don't fall under item one. It's conformance with all city codes, ordinance and policies. But I do believe they fall under item six, which is it provides for the protection of the development for potentially adverse surrounding influences. You're ensuring it's safe and for the protection of the surrounding areas from potentially adverse influence from within the development, And to your point about the area in general, as far as being somewhat industrial, I would agree with that as well. It's on Huron and it's within an area that's right next to I-25. And so for that, I understand the environmental surroundings of it as well. With that, I think we're ready for roll call.

Councilor Ireland? Yes. Councilor Johnson?

Yes.

Mayor Pro Tem Ramallah? Yes. Councilor Barajas? Yes. Mayor Carmelian? Yes. And Councilor Haught? Yes.

The motion passes on a 6-0 vote. Thank you so much. With that, our council is asking for a break, so we will be back in 10 minutes.

Thank you.

Welcome back. We will now resume our business. We have moved on to new business and we will start with Councilor Bill number 26. Do we have a motion? Councilor Johnson.

Thank you, Mayor. I have a couple of motions. The first motion is to move to remove Councilor's Bill 26 from the table.

Thank you. Do we have a second Mayor Pro Tem? Sure, I'll second that. Thank you. Any further discussion on this? All right, roll call please.

Councilor Johnson. Yes. Mayor Pro Tem Nurmela. Yes. Councilor Barajas.

Yes.

Mayor Carmelia. Yes. Councilor Hop. Yes. And Councilor Ireland. Yes. The motion passes on a six zero vote.

Thank you so much. And before we move on further, city attorney, do we have an overview of what changes are being made to the code?

Thank you, Mayor. Assistant City Attorney Mark Hoff is here this evening and would be available to describe what's before you tonight for your consideration.

Good evening. You can actually, there's a button at the bottom right so you can raise the podium back up.

Okay, well, it might take a minute. All right, so my name is Mark Hoff. I'm one of the Assistant City Attorneys. Tonight before you is the updates to Title VI of the Westminster Municipal Code. Those are in regard to criminal charges that are brought in the Westminster Municipal Court. These changes are being made in an effort to align with the city's criminal and traffic penalty structures so that they align with Colorado law after the Supreme Court case of People v. Camp. So part of that effort is to refine some of the ordinances who had broad language in the past and did not have different classifications of sentences, and to make them appear more like what they do in the state law. And so there are some changes that would look structural in nature and that is part of what you would see there is that we are trying to align the language to what the state law is Since this was last discussed with council, we have had some discussions with the Office of Alternative Defense Council and incorporated some of the feedback that they included with us. We've also had some meetings with Councillor Johnson. The main change to what was originally before this council, I think four weeks ago and what's before it today. There was an extra subsection in section 625, which is the assault section. It was in regard to first responders. After discussing with Councilor Johnson, that subsection was removed from the ordinance. we don't believe that it would likely have had a lot of additional cases being generated. And Councilor Johnson had some concerns about that subsection in general. And after discussing it with the presiding judge and our lead prosecutor, we made the determination that we would remove it at this point. And it's not something that we have been prosecuting in Westminster, so it's not something that we It would just be maintaining things as they are. There are also some changes to Section 181. Those changes would be to include a classification system, and that classification system would be similar to what you would see in the state courts. They have misdemeanor one, misdemeanor two, and petty offenses. We have different names for them because they're in the municipal court instead, but they do follow the same classification system. And we do believe that adding the classifications would help to make things easier for people to understand in the municipal court. It also is something that there would be some additional cues to people. It would appear on their summons of what classification it is. It also would be easier for the judges to be able to read it and not make a mistake as to which classification something falls into because it would appear on the computer system when they are doing their advisements. So just in total, we thought that this would be more transparent and more clear for the public and for our law enforcement entities.

Thank you so much. Councillor Johnson.

Yes, thank you for all the work you did Mark and Dave and Judge Lentine and the rest of our city attorney staff. I just have one question as it relates to excluding the fines imposed for violations and traffic related offenses. I know we've talked about this, but if you could just help us lay on the public record the basis for having our fine structure be different from the state's fine structure as it relates to those traffic offenses and the exclusion there and the camp decision.

Sure. There is a footnote in the camp decision which relates to whether or not this is applicable to traffic. I don't have that to be able to repeat it to you. But essentially, it does suggest that this is not related to traffic offenses. And so we believe that that is a pretty persuasive piece for us to rely upon that camp was not meant to rely on traffic. Also, there is a state statute in regard to traffic penalties that specifically says that municipalities do not have to or do not look to the state penalty structure. So it specifically says that the state penalty statute for traffic offenses does not apply to municipalities. And so, uh, it's our belief that the state is not, uh, trying to preempt the city from, uh, having their own traffic, uh, penalty structure. Uh, with that being said, uh, we did adopt the same, uh, jail penalties for traffic offenses that the state has. The only difference is we do have a higher fine limit than the state included in our traffic offenses. And those fines are in line with what is currently happening in the municipal court. And so there really is not a change in the policy to how the court is running. It's just maintaining the fine structure that the court has.

Thank you so much. Do we have any other questions? Councilor Brawhaus.

I just wanted to highlight, it's not a question, but I just wanted to highlight the expedient work that has been done. We're doing a comb through on a lot of ordinances and I really appreciate the thorough work. This is when people talk about the effective use of taxpayer funds and being really good stewards of the budget. Part of that is by doing this very intentional work to avoid and miss a lot of things And so this is the kind of like the goal of this is to align with state statutes and we're doing so in a way that is not done kind of after violation, after violation, after violation, we're doing the work preemptively. And so I just wanna say a big thank you to our city attorney's office, the alternate Council, I forget the name of all the collaborators who have done the great effort on this. This is saving taxpayer dollars and it's doing it just intelligently and effectively. So thank you.

All right, I'll take that as a no and we will move on. Do I have a motion for first reading? Councilor Johnson.

Thank you, Mayor. I move to pass Counselor's Bill Number 26 on first reading to amend various sections of Title I, Title VI, and Title X of the Westminster Municipal Code concerning police regulations, offense classifications, and penalties to align with Colorado statutes in the Colorado Supreme Court decision and people be camp with an amendment to the bill in Westminster Municipal Code 181 Section A on where it reads the section, any person convicted of, and in the bill it says an unclassified criminal violation, reverting back to the original statute so that it would read any person convicted of a criminal violation. And that's it, thank you.

Do we have a second? Councilor Brahus?

Second.

Any further discussion? Councilor Haught, did you want to add anything?

No, I'm sorry. I didn't realize I wasn't muted earlier, but no, I don't have any discussion to have.

No worries. Well, then I will add my comment, which is just thank you very much. I know that this has taken a lot of your time and a lot of the attorney department's time to work on these ordinances. And I know that there are a whole slew of them coming throughout the year. And this is because our council has taken a strong direction on the fact that we need to really better align our ordinances with the states. Now, to be fair, This is coming from the camp decision and I do think that the camp decision made it clear that perhaps we need to be coordinating with the zeitgeist of the atmosphere of our neighbors and friends and neighboring cities as well as the state, shall we put it that way. But I also just think that from a human rights perspective, it's the right thing to do. And I also think that we have got to where we've got in this city because we've been so clear and we've had a lot of clarity about where we stand on things and we have been decisive. And then sometimes there's just a time for updates to be made. And so now we're doing them, all of them. So thank you for your thorough work on this. I know there's a lot and thank you, Councilor Johnson for leading the way on this. I know that you've been up late in many, many nights working on these ordinances to make sure absolutely every word is the way that we think it best should be. And I know that you just made one more verbal word correction there in that motion. So as long as council caught that and they're okay with that, then I believe that we can move on, which I trust our judgment on that. So, With that, roll call, please.

Mayor Pro Tem Nurmela. Yes. Councilor Barajas. Yes. Mayor Carmelia. Yes. Councilor Hott. Yes. Councilor Ireland. Yes. And Councilor Johnson.

Yes.

The motion passes on the six zero vote. Thank you. We will now move on to first reading of Councilor Bill number 32. Councilor Barajas. Yes.

I move to pass Councilor Bill number 32 on first reading to authorize the city manager to execute an economic development agreement with the Digentara for the location of its US headquarters and expansion operations to 7237 Church Ranch Boulevard, suite 410.

Thank you. Mayor Pro Tem. Second. Excellent. Any further discussion? Councilor Haag, anything to add? No. Okay, I will add that I'm really excited about this. This is exactly the type of economic development that we are trying to bring to our city. We're doing all the right things. So big shout out to our staff sitting there in the back. Thank you. Roll call, please. Councilor Barajas.

Yes.

Mayor Carmelia. Yes. Councilor Haught. Yes. Councillor Ireland? Yes. Councillor Johnson?

Yes.

And Mayor Pro Tem Nurmela? Yes. The motion passes on a 7-0 vote.

Thank you. We will now move on to Councillor's Bill number 33, first reading. Do I have a motion? Councillor Johnson?

Thank you, Mayor. I move to pass Counselor's Bill Number 33 on first reading to authorize the City Manager to execute an intergovernmental agreement with the Adams 12 Five Star School District to provide rebates in fees and use taxes not to exceed $317,438 contingent upon City Council approval of an official development plan and ongoing compliance by Adams 12 Five Star School District with the approved official development plan.

Thank you. Mayor Pro Tem? Second. Any further discussion?

Councillor Ireland? I will be voting no on this. I've thought about it and reading about garbage trucks going in and out of there and heavy trucks all day. Isn't it cost us our taxpayers a lot for roads and maintaining them along there? So we'll need the money for that. So I'm a no.

Thank you so much. Any further thought? Councillor Haught, did you wanna add anything? No, thank you. Okay, well, I heard the clear ask for more dollars to this rebate. We are settling at 50%. I realized in the past we've done 100. So thank you for that reminder and the context. We are in perhaps the tightest fiscal budget year we have ever been in as a city, as well as many of our neighbors. We're fortunate enough to be here in still a growing economy, slightly. But it is the first year, you know, that we don't have that carryover that we normally do. We have not been hiring our staff regularly. have been working their cross training, shall we say, but multiple jobs and we have high acute awareness around this for we're going on three years now with not hiring because of how tight things are. And so I just wanted to add a little bit of perspective on where we're at and the decisions that we're trying to make. I do want to support the partnership going forward. And so I hope that we will continue to collaborate and continue to bring you in when we speak to the public, especially with our ongoing events, such as the state of the city, and getting information before it goes to the public, because I think that we make better decisions that way, right? Because then we understand what might be coming our way, and we know how to answer our constituents better when that happens. With that, roll call, please.

Mayor Carmelia. Yes. Councillor Hop. Yes. Councillor Ireland? No. Councillor Johnson?

Yes.

Mayor Pro Tem Nurmela? Yes. And Councillor Robert Haas?

Yes.

The motion passes on a 5-1 vote. Thank you so much.

Sorry, just grabbing my place real quick. Okay, we will now move on to Old Business with the second reading of Councilor Bill number 31. I just wanted to make sure I was correct on that. Councilor Brajas.

I move to pass Councilor's Bill number 31 on second reading to amend Title IX of Chapter 8 of the Westminster Municipal Code relating to the modification of the fee structure for non-residential users for the roadway improvement fee.

Thank you, Mayor Pro Tem? Second. Any further discussion?

Councilor Ireland? I already said I was gonna vote for no for this and I really don't understand how we're figuring out how many trips businesses make but it seems like a complicated process and it's a big huge jump from what they were paying so I'm a no.

Thank you. Councilor Haught, did you have anything to add? No, thank you. Perfect. Well, I will say, oh, Councillor Brahus.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. I didn't mean to preempt your comments, but maybe they'll be similar. I'm just really grateful. You know, we talk about the use and impact of various entities on our roads. We heard that just earlier this meeting, and I think this is a great way to try to engage and claw back some of that. So that way the residents aren't the ones who are overburdened, but the people who are using the roads are, and it's a great way to ensure equity and justice in all of our infrastructure. And this is a great first step.

Thank you, counselor. I will second those thoughts. And this is us as a city pursuing equity in our roadways and its infrastructure and the way that we pay for those fees that we are all using and enjoying. However, that many of our larger businesses have a much heavier impact than our single residential users. So I'm very happy to bring this forward and making sure that we are doing our due diligence to our city and our constituents by ensuring we have our income widely resourced and going across all branches as it should be. So thank you.

Roll call, please. Councillor Haught. Yes. Councillor Ireland. No. Councillor Johnson.

Yes.

Mayor Pro Tem Nurmela. Yes. Councillor Barajas.

Yes.

And Mayor Carmelia. Yes. The motion passes on a 5-1 vote.

Thank you so much. With that, the time is now 9.30 on the dot and the August 10th, 2026 meeting is adjourned.