 All right, thank you very much. The mayor will be joining us momentarily. So at this time, I would now like to call the October 20th, 2020, Longmont City Council study session to order. Could we please start with the roll call? Mayor Bagley, Council Member Christensen. Here. Council Member Adalgo-Fairing. Here. Council Member Martin. Here. Council Member Peck. Here. Mayor Pro Tem Rodriguez. Here. Council Member Waters. Here. Mayor Pro Tem, you have a quorum. Thank you very much. Just as a reminder, meetings are being held remotely due to the ongoing novel coronavirus pandemic. At this time, we will do the Pledge of Allegiance. Let's see, I think I'll just go ahead and do it myself instead of calling on somebody. All right. I pledge allegiance. Yes. To the flag of the United States of America. And to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. All righty, thank you very much. Just as a reminder, anyone wishing to provide public comment during public invited to be heard must watch the live stream of the meeting and call in only when I open the meeting for public comment or when Mayor Bagley does, if he gets on prior to this agenda item. Callers are not able to access the meeting at any other time. I believe the screen is up. Yep. Yes, it is. All righty. The toll-free call number as seen. Watch for the instructions to be displayed and write down the meeting ID. When it is displayed at the beginning of the meeting. You'll wait for the mayor or myself to open public comment and direct callers to call in. When the prompt is given to call in, dial the toll-free number, enter the meeting ID, and when asked for your participant ID, press the pound sign. Please mute the live stream and listen for instructions on the phone because there is a delay between the stream versus what's going on in real time. Callers will hear confirmation. They have entered the meeting and will be told how many others are already participating in the meeting. This includes staff and council and will be placed in a virtual waiting room until admitted into the meeting. Once admitted to the meeting, callers will be called upon by the last three digits of their phone number and allowed to unmute to provide their comments. Comments are limited at three minutes, please. Each speaker will be asked to state their name and address for the record prior to proceeding with their comments. Once done speaking, callers please hang up. At this time, motions to direct the city manager and add agenda items to future agendas. Seeing none, I guess let's move on to public invited to be heard. We will take a brief break to allow people to call in. All right, folks, if you're joining us for public invited to be heard, just to reiterate, make sure you mute your live stream and listen for the instructions on your telephone. We'll begin admitting you into the meeting and when it is your turn, we will call you by the last three digits of your telephone number. All right, folks, thanks again for joining us. This is just a reminder that as we go through public invited to be heard, we will call you by the last three digits of your telephone number, at which time you will, by the last three digits of your telephone number, at which time you'll have to state your name and your address for the record and you'll have three minutes. And we will get started here again in just a few minutes. All right, let's give it another minute or so. All right, Mayor Pro Tem, give me just a few moments and let the live stream catch up to us and we'll get started here. All right, thank you, folks, for joining us. All right, everybody, we're gonna get started with the public invited to be heard. Just a reminder is three minutes per speaker and please give us your name and address prior to your comments. Thank you very much. Let's start with the first caller. All right, so this is caller 347. Caller 347, you should be able to unmute yourself and state your name and address for the record and you have three minutes. Hello. Hello, welcome. Hi, my name is Mary Lynn and I've lived in Longmont for going on seven years, seven 44 outlets. I set the city system ability board where I see the city struggle to balance state and environmental goals with the funding available. For example, for funding of a hardwired smart meters in lieu of the microwave emitting ones which are more costly as Marsha Martin has mentioned in a recent reading. Tonight I'm calling to ask you to consider a new old idea that sleeping the nation that can be leveraged to meet our sustainability needs that of public banking. So I'm wondering how much money the city of Longmont lays out every year to pay interest on its debts. And what is, I don't know if that is, it's a million dollars, is it two million? And that is money that could be recouped and not have to be spent if the city of Longmont had a public bank. With public banking, those precious resources could be available to spend on sustainability projects. Public banks are owned by the people of the city or state or other community or nation. North Dakota, the first and only public bank is the only state that didn't suffer economically from the 2008, 2009 recession. Public banks serve as a depository for local government funds like taxes and fees. Save state and local governments millions or even billions of dollars by cutting up middlemen and private shareholders and financing projects at much lower interest rates. Prophets are reinvested into the community for infrastructure, renewable energy and affordable housing. Public banks create new jobs and spur economic growth by supporting small businesses. And they partner with and support rather than compete with local community banks. In short, they are lenders during a time of stress and crisis to build a healthy local economy. And right now 30 of our 50 states have public banks on city and state level projects that are being developed. And we have founders here in Golder County who could be tapped, welcome to one of them today who will be willing to help the city to create and put in place this important jewel in our necklace of groundbreaking innovations that make Longmont such an extraordinary place to call home. And more information is at publicbankinginstitute.org and I'd be happy to share any information that I have, I'm called to do so. Thank you. All right, thank you very much. Next caller please. All right, let's see the caller ending in 488. You should be able to unmute yourself and state your name and address for the record. And then you have three minutes. All right, my name is Scott Cunningham. My address is 3771 South Narcissus Way in Denver and I practice integrative internal medicine. I'm calling to provide a contrasting opinion to Dr. Bruce Cooper's statement from 2011 that was included in your study packet stating his assessment of the then current scientific literature on potential adverse health effects of the radio frequency fields emitted by wireless smart meters such as the AMI smart meter under consideration in this study session. Dr. Cooper's review focused on then recent assessments by mostly government agencies and included review of only one actual scientific study. My own assessment of the potential adverse health effects of the radio frequency fields emitted by these smart meters in contrast is based on direct examination of the peer reviewed scientific literature on this subject. For example, ChatterVeddy's group detected DNA strand breaks in brain cells, loss of spatial memory and increases in red and white blood cell counts in mice. ChatterVeddy's group found multiple pathologies in rat, kidney and bladder tissue. Among the human studies that we have, Avendano's group found sperm DNA fragmentation and Korana's group observed an increased prevalence of adverse neurobehavioral symptoms or cancer in populations living in distances less than 500 meters from cell towers. Thus, while Dr. Cooper concluded in 2011 that quote, no adverse health effects have been established from exposure to low level radio frequency end quote that obviously is not true in 2020. I'll leave you with this. Wireless radiation has been deemed uninsurable by Lloyds of London and every other specialty insurer. As a result, when reports of injuries from wireless devices inevitably, such as the AMI meter start rolling in, if they have Longmont's name stamped on them, it could become a costly ordeal for the city. And I respectfully recommend that now is the time to choose wisely. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Next caller, please. All right, the caller ending in 499, you should be able to unmute yourself and state your name and address for the record. Can you hear me? We can, let's go ahead. Okay, this is Doe Kelly of Barbary Drive in Longmont. I first wish to thank you for being responsive to the voices of the citizenry by holding this wireless smart meter study session. So thank you. I have a couple of questions for you. I read in the meeting packet and also in yesterday's Longmont Leader article about this meeting that the equipment the city was going to use only puts out radio frequency, aka microwaves in bursts and data packets approximately 15 minutes apart. Can you tell me and the public what specific type of meters you're planning to use and will they be utilizing a mesh network or a point to point system? As I understand, there's a big difference between the two in the amount of actual radio frequency emitted. Next, in reference to the 30,000 defective wireless smart meters that had to be replaced in Fort Collins, mentioned last week on the call, had you factored into your budget the cost to we the people should Longmont suffer a similar fate or a planned obsolescence of this equipment with a subsequent early replacement of its wireless meters under this proposed program. Current wired meters last decades. How about wireless smart meters? Has the city made any projections based on these very real possibilities of replacement when thinking about this plan? And if either of the above scenarios were to transpire, have you accounted for the extra carbon footprint each would cause the city? Can you compare this against whatever the cost would be, including the carbon impact, were we to remain with wired utility metering in Longmont? I've told you some of my personal story of being a canary in the coal mine and of having become electrosensitive when overexposed to pulsed microwave radiation from two wireless routers running concurrently in our house, one of them, the next light. What I did not tell you was that I had been receiving sessions in a type of energetic brain mapping at the time. With a local therapist who after my injury was able to quantify it via a before and after brain map comparison. The map done afterwards within two weeks of this injury was totally different from the one done with her approximately a week before the injury. And as interpreted by her, showed distinct and clear evidence of a trauma to the brain. In today's online news, I note an article about the mystery Havana syndrome where multiple US diplomatic and other agents were apparently targeted with something that here too for had received much speculation as to how multiple personnel in multiple locations in the world received dramatically similar neurological injuries. So much so that US personnel were evacuated and offices closed in certain countries. My time is up and I will bring you part two of this commentary next time. Tune in next week. And again, thank you for your time and service. Thank you very much. All right, caller ending in three, seven, eight. You should be able to unmute yourself and state your name and address for the record. Hello, can you hear me? You're a little quiet, but we can hear you. Okay. Can you hear me now? Better? A bit better, yes. Thank you. Thanks. My name is Carolyn Bedinsky and I live in Boulder on 16th Street. And, you know, unfortunately here in Boulder, they do have smart meters on home. You know, I never really was able to understand the reason for these things. We were originally told that, you know, people would look at their smart meter to figure out how much energy they're using. I don't think that has really ever happened. I do want to say that the wireless radiation from my reading is about a million times background. So that means we are supposed to a million times the amount of wireless radiation on a regular basis than that which we evolved with. Most people don't know about the dangers of wireless radiation because it's really not covered by the media. Of course, the media gets a lot of money and advertising from the big telecom companies. So they're not gonna expose the dangers caused by these companies. So most people aren't complaining. That's probably why you're not hearing about it. They don't know. And they don't connect their injuries or illnesses to ENFs. Because how can you connect something that you don't know about? People who do know often trying to minimize their exposure, they limit their cell phone use, they wire their homes, and they take other steps to avoid experiencing ENFs. And I happen to be sensitive and I see those things. But when you put a smart meter on a person's home, they don't really have any choice. And so, you know, I'll just quote a bit from a study from EMF scientists. This is International Appeal. They say we're scientists engaged in the study of biological and health effects of non-ionizing electromagnetic field. And they talk about we have serious concerns regarding the ubiquitous and increasing exposure to EMF. It's rated by wireless devices and they mentioned smart meters in there is one of those wireless devices. And then they say numerous recent scientific publications have shown that EMFs affect living organisms at all levels, well below most international and national standards. So in effect, we are exposing people to higher and higher levels of radiation. And these effects include cancer, cellulose breath, increase in harmful free radicals, genetic damage, structural and functional changes of the reproductive system, learning and memory deficits, neurological disorders, and negative impacts on general well-being. All right, thank you very much. That is three minutes. Thank you very much for your thoughts on the subject. Next caller, please. All right, give me just a moment. Caller 418, you should be able to unmute yourself and state your name and address for the record. Caller 418, all right, we will move on to caller 084. Caller 084, you should be able to unmute yourself and state your name and address for the record. Am I on? You are. Thank you. Hi, my name is David Goldberg. My address is 200 East 23rd Street in Loveland. I don't live in Longmont, obviously, but I am definitely concerned about EMF everywhere, all over the planet. I think when we wake up in the morning till when we go to bed at night and even beyond then, we are being exposed to electromagnetic fields from so many different sources, from our cell phones, from our wireless, from our light bulbs, to just the wiring in our houses, to smart meters, everywhere we go, a constant barrage of these EMFs. And that's not good. Numerous studies, many of them cited by people on the phone calls and already have shown that EMFs can have definite negative effects on people and their health even though there are big arguments on the other side that they don't cause any harm because they're non-ionizing peer-reviewed studies as we've heard show otherwise. And there's a tremendous amount of sickness that is being caused by EMFs everywhere. I think if you as a council and we, all of us are really serious about addressing COVID, we would wanna do everything possible to ensure the health of all of our citizens. I think all of the steps that are being taken by government and that are being recommended like face masks and vaccines and social distancing, those are great. But I really think the number one weapon tool that we have to fight disease is to create healthy people that can fight off these diseases. And if we keep exposing ourselves to all kinds of environmental toxins, including EMFs and smart meters, it's just adding another layer upon layer of things that our body has to fight off and leaves us vulnerable to disease like COVID. Finally, I think it's kind of a no-brainer for the city of Longmont. I just heard recently about your amazing award-winning, I guess, fiber optic network. And I'm not sure how the architecture would work, but if there were any way that the fiber optic network could be used in lieu of wireless smart meters, I think that would be, again, such a no-brainer to avoid another level of wireless radiation and go the smart safe way, which is a wired technology wherever possible. So thank you for letting me speak and I really do appreciate you listening to the public and doing what you can to support our health, thank you. Thank you very much for your call. Next caller, please. All right, this is our final caller. This is not a telephone number, this is call in user underscore one. You should be able to unmute yourself and state your name and address for the record. Call in user underscore one. Are you able to unmute yourself and state your name and address for the record? Can you hear me? We can, welcome. I'm Laurie Stanley and I live at 1015 Longs Peak Avenue. Thank you, Mayor Bagley and the Longmont City Council for the opportunity to speak. I would like to talk regarding accessory dwelling units or the ADU and more specifically the permitting process and five foot side yard setback. I think most of you are aware of the ADU at 630 Gay Street. This particular ADU sits five feet from our back fence and directly is adjacent to five yards and kitty corner to two other properties. This ADU was built without neighbor input in the permit process. It has pushed every limit of size and height. If any city council people are not aware of the situation please contact me and I'm happy to show you through our backyard. I've lived in our house since 1999 and this is the only undesirable situation I am aware of in that 21 years in our wonderful neighborhood of Old Town Longmont. I love living here. I can walk almost anywhere I would like to go. There's wonderful neighbors and the neighborhood shops and restaurants. I would like to speak specifically to the five foot setback not requiring neighbor input. As an example we wanted to replace the front porch of our house that was removed in the 1950s. We had to go through the variance process due to the front yard setback. We did not find this process cumbersome and we're glad to ask for neighbor input. I respectfully ask that the members of the council and city staff please consider requiring a variance if there is to continue to be a five foot setback. This not only encourages neighbors to be aware of what is happening in their neighborhood but also allows them to voice their opinion especially when it directly affects their property. It allows good neighbors to be good neighbors and have dialogue and discourages bad neighbors from going around the rules. If someone had objected to our porch we would have gladly worked to find another solution. We had several objections to the ADU at 630 Gay Street but due to the new permit process that allows five foot side yard setbacks in Old Town objections were not allowed. I remember a comment by one of the council members a few weeks ago that stated that residents should be aware of the rules that are being passed and pay attention at council meetings. I wholeheartedly agree with this and I should pay more attention. However, had I been listening to this discussion about the five foot setback I may have thought it was a reasonable idea. However, after seeing the after effects of this decision and such a huge ADU being allowed five feet from fences of three neighbors I see now how much of a horrible decision this has been. Old Town is a single family residence neighborhood with irreplaceable charm for the town of Longmont. Why do we want to create more landlord properties in Old Town? In our experience the people who want to build ADUs are contractors or realtors buying properties and trying to make money but do not care about the character of the neighborhood. If you want to preserve the character of Old Town Longmont please stop allowing the building of ADUs that are five feet from their neighbors. Thank you. Thank you very much. That concludes public invited to be heard for this evening apparently. At this time we'll move on to special reports and presentations which would be the update on COVID-19 by Harold. Harold, it's all yours. Mayor Council, good evening. I'm gonna present some slides that we received from Boulder County in a few minutes but I did want to let you all know that I did reach out to Jeff Zayak and his staff and as we're getting close to the end of the week or end of the month, it's been a long month thus far but as we get to the end of the month I did ask him what his recommendation was for November in terms of council meetings and board and commission meetings. And he did indicate that they are going to get an email out to us but based on what they're seeing in terms of the caseloads in the county surrounding us and where the numbers are the recommendation is for November to continue staying in the remote meetings for both boards and city council meetings. So I wanted to provide you all with that information and see if you all concur with continuing to stay remote during the month of November. Councilmember Christensen. Thank you, Harold. I think we'd all just love to be back in council chambers and see the public and be normal but I do think that this is such a very tricky time. We're seeing in various places COVID coming back again. We've been doing very well in Boulder County and most of us have been, we have a higher population on the front range so that's one reason why we're seeing a greater rate but anyway, I'm in support of us toughing it out and continuing to zoom along here. It requires a lot of patience on everybody's part but we just have to stay steady and it won't last forever. I just wanted to say, obviously we're allowed to revisit these decisions almost at any time but I thought at one time we had informally agreed to not holding any in-person meetings until the new year. I don't know if I'm incorrect in remembering that. You know, I couldn't remember that. I just know we were gonna update you based on what we were hearing from Boulder County Health and on that and so I just wanted to make sure that you all are in agreement with the recommendations that we're receiving from them because you did all say that. I just wanted to have that conversation with you. Yeah, I feel there's no reason that continuing to exercise caution is a bad idea by any standards. I think that we've gotten used to it to the point that we're fairly functional so I don't see a problem with continuing forward and I don't think I see any disagreement among council members so. Okay, so now I'm gonna share my screen with you really talking about numbers. So if you tell me, do you all see the one with the little COVID and the Boulder County update? Yes. So, and I think to that point, I'll start off with this slide. If you remember when Rachel presented this information in terms of, you know, this is the base data in terms of what goes into the COVID dial. So on the COVID dial, we are still in safer level two. I think what's interesting when you look at the two week cumulative incident rate, we were obviously earlier on one of the counties that was in the orange and red. Now you're seeing that continuing to spread to Jeff's point about they're seeing the spread of cases in other counties surrounding us. When you then go in the two week testing positivity rate, the current Boulder County rate is 3.1%, which you can see is up. But you can still see many of those communities are starting to move up into the higher categories. And then finally the hospitalization status. I think this is the first time I've seen one in red in terms of what's going into the dial. So our current Boulder County status is nine days of decreasing or stable admissions in terms of what we're seeing. So we're still in safer at home level two, but you can obviously see the various counties are experiencing different pieces on the data. I'm not gonna talk a lot about this because this is really more of what they're dealing with, but you can see the different levels that they've put in place in terms of adult gathering, young adult gathering in the metrics that they're using at the county level to deal with the situation. And then as we start getting in the numbers, the reason I wanted to use this is because they actually have 10, 19 on this versus what's on the website. And so you can obviously see, again, much better than we were, but you can start seeing the movement up and down with the high point a few days ago, 48 cases. When you get to that number of 48, most of those cases were actually not where Boulder County residents not necessarily see you students, you only see one there. So the numbers look different as we continue to move out in time. Again, when you look at this in terms of associated with long-term care facilities, again, it is good that we're not seeing a lot of the orange, although it still is in some of the cases. And then you can see the five day average of the number of new cases. So you saw the peak, we dropped a spike and it's still a slight trend upward, again, to the point of what we heard from Jeff in terms of how we move forward. The other reason I wanted to use this is you're seeing very similar, the same information you saw from Rachel last week. So this is when you normalize on 100,000 population. Again, this graph still looks consistent with what we saw last year or last week. Now, this is basically what the cases look like in terms of the dark blues, Boulder, the light blues, Longmont, yellows, Lafayette, Lewisville, and Superior, and the green is other municipalities. So you can obviously see that while we were a larger component and last week, when we look at this week, we're still a fairly significant component, but not as much in terms of the overall numbers. Again, still seeing a lot of cases in the 10 to 19 and 20 to 29. And this was a slide that I thought was really interesting when you look at cases among children, zero to 17 years. In the last two weeks, 10, five to 10, 18, zero to four, there were five cases. The previous two weeks, there were seven, five to nine, 10 in the last two weeks, 11. So again, somewhat stable, 10 to 14, 17 within the last two weeks versus 12, and then 15 to 17 is 16 and 16. So I know you all have asked for kind of what's happening in that demographic. So I thought this was some good information. Again, you're seeing the trend and so it continues to move down, but you're seeing that leveling off and then everything's coming together when you look at it. And again, they're looking at it per 100,000. So this isn't actual cases, but you can see the movement in the different age groups when they're normalizing for 100,000 population. And then again, as a county, this was actually down in the 27 range and now it's back up to 28.3. And I'm gonna talk a little bit about, they're definitely focusing on that and increasing testing throughout the county. And then again, when you see the numbers like non-Hispanic, Hispanic and then other race, again, you can see there's a significant component of cases and so they are continuing to focus on the Latinx population. And then as you remember, the numbers in Longmont were a little bit different. Again, the five day average percent of tests that were positives 3.7 on September 1st, it was 2.4. So we're seeing that go up, which is really matching what you heard the governor say in terms of this positivity rate. And again, you can see how many tests they're performing in the county versus how many are positive. Finally, here's what the five day rolling average on the percent positive looks like. And you can see where we were around the 2% mark, but again, trending up in terms of the cases. And when you look at the hospitalizations, again, not hospitalized versus hospitalized really not in this range, but you see it, it's too hard to tell based on the scale in this graph and then in terms of where the hospital set and the resources. If you remember last time, they were in a different spot. So the hospital resources are continuing to remain stable. So at this point, that is a review of the data. You can see that we are seeing similar movement in the number of cases, but not to the level of other counties. I think it's important to just remind folks to again, this is something that I've seemed to have been saying a lot recently, especially as I've had internal meetings. We still need to pay a lot of attention to the protocols that have been in place because we are seeing those numbers and to echo what the county health officials and CDPHE and the governor are saying. As we move into the fall, we need to be diligent in this because as that starts coming together with flu season that does present different issues for our hospital systems as we continue to move forward. At this point, I'll be happy to answer any questions. Well, I don't see any questions, Harold. So I guess we'll move on to study session items. 6A, CIP ELE 099, Advanced Metering Infrastructure Discussion. Do we have a presentation? We do, give me just a moment. Very good, thank you. Excellent. Well, good evening, Mayor Begley, Mayor Pro Tem Rodriguez and members of City Council. I'm Dave Hornbacher, the Executive Director for Longland Power and Communications. Council has heard earlier tonight and other times from members of the community and Council has also expressed an interest in additional information on this very important project which is the Advanced Metering Infrastructure. During tonight's work session, Council will hear perspectives from three different speakers. So before we get started, first Mayor Pro Tem Rodriguez, the speakers can present each of their presentations fully with questions and answers held following the entire presentation or do you prefer questions fielded throughout the presentations? Due to the Zoom format where it's hard to see all members in the discussion, I would prefer to hold the questions until after the presentations are completed. Okay, thank you. And that's how we'll proceed. And then also lastly, I'm pleased to announce that we recently have hired Mike Villaponda as our new AMI manager. He started with LPC last week. He is an engineer by training and he has experience from Excel Energy, Colorado Springs Utilities, City of Fountain and most recently as a consultant. And so I wanted to welcome Mike. I don't know if Mike is out there to turn on his camera for a moment. Pause here. Mike. This is Mike. Can you hear me? There we go. Yes. So Mike, do you want to just say hi to your new City Council? Good evening. I'm glad to be here. I came from a number of the utilities. I have worked with some AMI systems in the past. I welcome any questions you guys have for us. And let me know if you need anything from me. Thank you. All right, thank you very much and welcome for joining along my powered communications. Thank you so much. So with that, probably the next question is why AMI? So next slide, please. So AMI is really, it's one of the seven integrated electric resources that will work together to help achieve the City's goal of 100% renewable by 2030. AMI is a key that unlocks, it informs, it supports and it advances many of these resources. Click, please. Yep. And so of these seven elements, the AMI smart grid is what we're chatting about tonight. So slide three, please. This is tonight's agenda. We will have a health discussion. We've invited Bill Hayes with Boulder County Public Health Department. It'll be followed up by a discussion on intelligent energy from Dr. Shockley. And then we will finish off the presentations with AMI State of the Industry with Rick Schmidt. Next slide, please. So I'd first like to introduce Bill Hayes. So Bill, can you unmute and turn on your video? Yeah, hello, everyone. Great, so Bill is the Air Quality Coordinator for Boulder County Public Health for his work for the past 17 years. He has a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and a master's in environmental engineering and is a licensed professional engineer. As part of his air quality work, Bill has supported energy efficiency measures for residential and commercial buildings. And prior to joining the County, Bill spent a decade working with Rocky Plats the cleanup project there. So again, from Boulder County Health, we welcome Bill. You have the floor. Thank you, Dave. And first I'd like to thank Harold for his presentation on the COVID data. That's something I've been working on a lot for the last eight, nine months. And I'm happy to be here to talk about something other than fires and COVID tonight. And I certainly applaud the Longmont City Council's decision to continue meeting remotely. Answer one question I get a lot. Yes, I am absolutely crushing my office's COVID beard pool. So with that said, let's get into a discussion of radio frequency radio frequency radiation. So there are two basic types of radiation, non-ionizing and ionizing. And it's basically a difference between the energy level of the radiation. And so non-ionizing radiation is a lower energy level so that it doesn't have the potential to disrupt the structure of an atom releasing electrons. And so the release of electrons is what distinguishes ionizing radiation. And that release of electrons causes excited particles that can directly physically damage DNA. And it also creates in the body free radicals that are oxidizing agents that can also cause tissue damage in the body. So non-ionizing radiation has a much lower energy potential and yes, it can cause tissue damage in humans, but that's through very direct and intense exposure to RF radiation. And the typical effect of that is essentially burning of the tissue. The energy excites the atoms in our body and causes the tissue to burn. So that's kind of the difference between non-ionizing and ionizing radiation. And what we need to keep in mind and I think one of your callers said it earlier, every second of every day, we are constantly exposed to radiation from a number of different sources, both natural and man-made. Just by fact that we chose to live here in the front range of Colorado puts us at higher radiation exposures, the higher altitude that you live at, the more solar radiation you receive. And also because of the Rocky Mountains that we love, that decomposing granite emits radiation that we're exposed to. So there's a number of natural sources that we're exposed to every day. And then there's also a number of man-made sources that we may either consciously choose to expose ourselves to or unknowingly be exposed to. And so if we can go to the next slide, we'll talk about some of those sources of man-made radiation. And so this graphic shows the frequency of radiation, which as I said, you can kind of think of as the energy potential of the radiation. And so the non-ionizing over to the left is lower frequency, lower energy radiation. All of our power lines give that off, all the time, the TVs and radios in our houses, all of our cell phones give off radio frequency, radiation, microwave ovens. And then as you move up into that higher frequency radiation, you get the ultraviolet radiation and we know that that can lead to skin-caused cancers. Then x-ray and then what we often think of as radiation of plutonium, uranium, things that are used in nuclear weapons, nuclear medicine that we know have a very direct and severe potential to cause damage to the human body. So this gives you kind of an idea of both the devices that we choose or maybe do not choose, but are still exposed to radiation from and kind of the frequency and the energy potential of those devices. So if we go to the next slide. So this, I really like this graphic because it shows the relative amount of radio frequency radiation that we receive from these various devices. And so as you can see, cell phones, which many of us, if not most of us, are carrying around on our person all the time has in this graphic, the highest level of radio frequency radiation than microwaves or modems in our house. But what I think is interesting here is that the human body actually puts off RF radiation. Essentially any object that has thermal mass and is shedding heat, so human bodies, plants, animals, all of that thermal heat that you give off is a form of radiation. And it is radio frequency, electromagnetic frequency radiation, the earth itself gives off RF radiation. And so then at the far right is the amount of radiation that a smart meter gives off. And so you can see by comparison, it's significantly many, many, many orders of magnitude less than our cell phones and our microwave ovens. As additionally, as somebody pointed out earlier, it's not constantly emitting. It's emitting on about an every 15 minutes schedule and it's in our homes. And I know that now with COVID, most of us are spending a lot more time in our homes, but during normal times, we're not in our home all the time every day. And so that relatively small amount of radiation given off by a smart meter often happens when no one's there to be exposed to it. So with pretty much everything we deal with in public health, we look at it from a relative risk category. And so I will not say, and I wouldn't trust anybody that would say absolutely a smart meter poses zero risk of any adverse health effect to humans. We can't say that. So I look to the trusted experts in this field that I rely on, not just on this matter, but what we rely on for COVID, what we rely on for vaccinations. And so starting with the American Cancer Society, they have a lot of really good information on their website about RF radiation. And I apologize if you're hearing a bunch of bloops. I am also on fire response and we're getting a lot of traffic on that right now. But so the American Cancer Society has a lot of good information on the radio frequency but they actually define to take a position on it. They will not say whether they think RF radiation poses a significant adverse health effect to humans or not. Instead, they defer to other agencies that really are looking at radio frequency radiation specifically. And so one of those agencies that they look at is the International Agency for Research on Cancer. That is an organization within the World Health Organization. They list RF radiation as possibly carcinogenic to humans. The American Cancer Society also refers to the US Food and Drug Administration. And the FDA says that based on a number of reports that they have examined and studies they've funded themselves, they conclude that there is insufficient evidence to support a causal association between radio frequency radiation and tumor formation. So you've got two well-respected organizations that again, aren't saying there's no risk but there's... And strongly from our age. But when I look at those, put things in relative risk with all of the other sources of radiation that were exposed to each day, I feel that the smart meters are an acceptable level of risk. And as Dave started out this presentation, they're a very critical component to getting to 100% renewable energy. And getting to 100% renewable energy has unquestionable health benefits for our community, for our country, and for the world. So thank you for your time. And I think that is everything that I was hoping to cover with you this evening. All right, thank you very much. Could we exit the shared screen to entertain any questions from council? Council Member Martin. Thank you, Mayor Pro Tem. Actually, I am a supporter of AMI and I just wanna get that out of the way. But in that last spectrum of devices and there are F emissions, I think I'd like to clarify something. Putting a smart meter on the very lowest RF emission end of that spectrum of different devices must refer only to the metrology electronics under the glass inside the meter. Because depending on the AMI network that is chosen, there can either be no communicating radio under the glass, or there could be a cellular transceiver under the glass, or there could be a 900 megahertz transceiver which would be equivalent to a cordless phone, or there could be, or and there could be a wifi transceiver under the phone. And obviously if any of those devices is in the meter, then the emissions of the meter move up along the spectrum. So I just wanna be clear about what we're saying when we put that meter on the one end. Thank you, Council Member Martin. That was a question. I would like Mr. Hayes to confirm or correct me on that. Well, I'm not an expert on these devices themselves, but yes, what you say certainly makes sense that as we add essentially additional electronics, there is going to be additional emissions. But still falling into the range of, as I've said, the devices that we've invited into our homes already. And of course, the meter is outside your home and most of those radios don't penetrate the walls and insulation of your phone. So it's still not the same as having a cellular phone on your pillow. But I just wanted to clarify that. Yeah, and that is, that's a very good point. Thank you. At this time, I'd like to officially recognize that Mayor Bagley has joined the meeting. Mayor Bagley, I'd like to turn the meeting over to you. That's great, I appreciate it. You wanna finish up this issue? Why don't you go ahead and finish up the issue if you could, Erin. And then, I mean, I could, but you're doing great. So why don't you just, I'll start with 6B. But yes, I am back, thank you. Okay. All right, well, first hand I saw was Council Member Waters. Thanks, Mayor Pro Tem, Mr. Hayes. Two things, two questions really. You indicated you're not an expert on the devices themselves. So this may not be a fair question for you. But I am curious whether or not the, a wired system emits any more or less RF radiation than a wireless number one. And if that's not a fair question for Mr. Hayes, if somebody else could just clarify, is it the same whether it's wired or wireless system number one, number two. We heard from a physician in Denver tonight, we've heard from him before, Dr. Scott Cunningham, who I don't know, just other than a name that has come, shows up in public invited to be heard. But he referenced several studies. I don't know how current those are. I did note that the data, the studies we saw in the attachments, the most current one is from 2014. And whether or not what we have from the FCC, from FDA, from CDC, how current are those data in relationship to what we, even I think the American Cancer Society was 2011, the study from the California Science Technology Group was like 2012. So is what we have from CDC, from the FCC and from FDA, state of the art, the most current data available on health risks as relative as they are. I mean, you were very clear that you got to weigh, nothing's without risk, got to weigh the risk against the benefit. So I'm just curious if we're dealing with the most current data on health risks and whether or not there's a difference in radio in radiation frequencies between wired and wireless. I'll stop and listen. Yeah, it is my understanding that a hardwired meter, it still gives off some RF radiation, but less than a wireless device. But I actually think the next presenter is probably in a much better position to answer that. So hopefully we'll get that next. And then as far as, you know, state of the art research on this issue from a health standpoint, I really think that 2011, 2012 studies are, you know, the most recent that we rely on. And I think part of that is due to, it had been studied enough by that point that no one really had an appetite to study it further. You know, I won't say it was conclusive and put to bed and there's nothing more to learn, but I think it was studied to the point that, you know, you have to get funding and people think you're not gonna find something new, it gets tough. So 2011, 2012 research on that probably is the most recent. And as far as, you know, reports showing that there are health impacts, I get sent studies reports every day telling me that mask wearing is dangerous for us and does nothing to prevent the spread of COVID. So, you know, I think we all know that you can always find a report that takes the contrary view. Thank you. Council Member Christensen. Thank you. I don't know, Mr. Hayes, if this is something appropriate to ask you. We've mostly been talking about the health effects, which of course are important. But as a municipal official, I am also concerned with two things that opponents to ANM and I have talked about. And I haven't seen any evidence one way, the other about this. One is fires started by them, the other is their longevity. They specifically cite the 30,000, well, their hardiness and their longevity, 30,000 that had to be recalled in Fort Collins. And I don't want us to be spending money to buy something that will last for five years and then has to be replaced in every single house every five years or something like that. So, could you address those two issues? And I think, again, the next speaker is going to address both of those. So, I will defer. Yes, we've got two more speakers after Bill and so Dr. Shockley as well as Rick Schmidt should be able to address those questions more fully Council Member Christensen. All right, it appears that there are no further questions from Mr. Hayes. Thank you, Mr. Hayes for your time and your expertise. Yeah, thank you for having me. Thank you. Thank you, Bill. And so I'd like to introduce the next speaker. So, if we could go to the slide show again, please. Okay, we'll pause there. And again, I want to thank all the three speakers for tonight. They have provided their time here. They have different presentation information and they've actually worked really diligently to try and at least have the presentation to five to 10 minutes so that there's more time for Q&A. And so with that, our next speaker is Dr. Tim Shockley and just a little bit of overview on Dr. Shockley is he is an international consultant in computer and communications engineering and in technical standards development. He presently serves as the secretary of the ISO IEC SC 25 work group, which is the international standards committee for home electronic systems. And he's also a technical co-editor of several new international standards related to smart buildings. So he also is an entrepreneur and he's engineered the development of the electric utility premise gateways and energy management system for over 25 years and has played a major role in the development of technical standards for smart meters in advanced metering infrastructure. He is a former faculty member of the University of Colorado, a college of engineering and applied science. He holds an MS in telecommunications engineering and a PhD in communication policy from the University of Boulder. So again, I'd like to welcome Dr. Timothy Shockley and Tim, if you can come on the line and take over your slide presentation, please. Okay, thank you. Thank you, David. Yes, and I would like to thank you for, thank you all for the opportunity to contribute to your study session on this interesting topic. The title of my presentation is intelligent energy, a long months energy future. I'd like to reference a paper that is in your packet that is by that same title, intelligent energy operating system for the solar homes and micro grids of the future. This is published in the latest issue of Solar Today Magazine, the fall issue. And it's about a project that I'm working on now in the International Electro-Technical Commission, the Standards Committee. As David mentioned, I was involved in developing the original smart meters back in the 1990 timeframe and worked on the technical standards that were published as ANSI C.12 or C12, later named AMI or Advanced Metering Architecture. In those days, it was advanced. And that was, but that was a 20 to 30 years ago. The next generation is what I'm describing in my paper that you have in your packet on page 94 to 99. That is what I envision as the next generation AMI smart meter, if you want to use the term AMI. I wouldn't use call anything advanced anymore. That would be a, that would soon be out of date. Going to the next slide, what I like to talk about is getting Longmont to 100%. Let's look at my paper as being a path to do that, one of a couple of paths both of which need to be taken. The goal is getting to renewable, sustainable and resilient energy. Longmont's resilience and reliability has put a high priority on resilience and reliability and sustainability. We will need the grid as it is today, plus we will need distributed generation and storage within the city to get to that goal. Most cities lack the infrastructure to enable this. However, Longmont has a head start. The next light fiber network has become basically a exemplar of the one of the best fiber networks, municipal fiber network in the entire country in the latest. Longmont is uniquely positioned to take a leadership role, levering this next light fiber, the model for the nation. Longmont has a history of technical innovation. If you recall a number of years ago, Longmont was levering IBM's data storage market that spawned a large number of companies in Boulder County and Longmont became basically known for data storage, the data storage industry for a long time. I think the same thing could happen in the energy industry. So we're gonna need both grid scale, renewable energy and distributed. The next slide is meeting the challenge of climate change. The items that were identified in your excellent climate action task force report in June identified on page 18 and 19 certain key technologies, the metering home energy management systems, demand response, controlling supply and demand, carbon signaling, distributed energy resources, which is kind of a generic term and then it's transactive energy, which is my interpretation of some of the text done in that section. The system described in my paper is called EMA. EMA means energy management and metering architecture. The project being developed right now in the ISO and IEC standards committees. We've got basically people all over the world working on that right now. And that's one of my main activities. But together with that, that is a home and building control system that orchestrates the use of energy inside of a building, a home or a building premises, along with solar energy from the roof and battery storage and control of the consumption of electricity. We combine that with the idea of microgrids, which are the key to the community resilience. Resilience is the ability to use the solar on your roof when the grid is down. That's my definition of resilience, the most practical purpose. And then the microgrid is an ability to isolate a section of the electric power grid to operate independently or semi independently, like a community, a campus or a neighborhood when the rest of the grid has failed or for some reason or other. That's another form of resilience. Beyond the building, the resilience begins with the building or home itself and then expands to the neighborhood and then into the entire city. The next slide, please. What is a home and building energy management system? It's in this case described in the paper as a key platform for distributed solar plus storage. It's my belief that all solar should be paired with storage, not just putting solar panels on your roof, but also combine that with batteries backup or battery storage for management of that energy on the premises and coordinate it with the local grid or microgrid using some kind of communication, preferably optical fiber. The basis of resilience is this control system for each building. And what is needed is a premises energy platform that also does metering. And that's what's described in the paper. If you look in the paper, which is on page 98 of your packet and figure three, you'll see a description of what that looks like inside of a building, what the architecture actually looks like. And you'll notice there's a lot of metering going on. It's not just metering the whole house. It's metering circuits and devices within the house, including the use generation and storage devices. Fiber is the path to that communication. What we need is not a meter that only does metering, but a control system to use that metering data. That's how we originally started when we developed the first smart meters. They were used primarily for that purpose, for controlling energy on the premises. And then as another benefit, sending that to the utility for billing purposes. The smart meters of today, even the AMI meters do not do that. They are not a platform that can be used for that purpose. What this platform I'm calling for enables, would enable a lot of different rate structures. What we need, we hear a lot about time of use pricing. But I feel that what we really need is time of renewables pricing and transactive energy, which is a real time control and pricing of electricity. It also enables demand response and community sharing of electricity. And there's the basic principles involved are that energy is best managed at the premises where it's used. And it is best to generate and store electronic energy as close as possible to where it is used. The next slide is basically a little more thinking about home and building energy management systems. Thinking about a premises as a meter is really a throwback to the old 56 kilobit modems of 20 years ago. And that's about the speed that the AMI meters operate at in the mesh network. They don't even compare to what you can do with fiber. They may not be the right technology for long mod. I think the conventional AMI meters are basically obsolete. It's 20, 30 year old technology and it won't do the job you think it will or that people are pitching. It's not a platform, the kind of energy premises platform that we are going to be needing to control energy, to really control and implement integrate solar energy. The Emma platform I'm talking about is the premises energy platform that also includes metering of premises based use and generation and storage of energy. It's linked with the rest of the community with the fiber network. The guiding principles I mentioned a moment ago, energy is best managed at the premises where it is used and we should generate and store energy as close as possible to where it's used. The next is a little laundry list here of what I consider the risks of investment in conventional AMI meters. You have a risk of obsolescence, the useful life is limited. There is a high failure rate. There are manufacturers now typically whereas the old meters would last up to 50 years, the old analog meters, the new ones last about, we're lucky if five year warranty if you can get that out of it, you're doing well. The radio networks are too slow to meet the platform needs of today. They're not really two-way networks. They will not, you will end up having to use the fiber anyway and install something else in addition if you go forward with these radio networks. My feeling is you should, if you're going to implement AMI meters, you need to do it with the fiber and there are interfaces available to do that. But as I said before, time of use rates are no longer appropriate. Time of use rates were developed to support baseload, coal generation and peak shifting. Now what we need is time of renewables. We need to dynamic rate structures or at least rate structures that can deal with supply as well as demand. There is also a risk of fire. I think that the question was asked earlier. You can ask me a little more about it. That's not, I've given testimony to various public utilities commissions on that topic. There is a risk of consumer privacy. I've written papers on that topic too for the University of Colorado, which I'd be happy to share with you. It's a big issue. And there's also this risk of triggering public concerns over health and safety. I don't want to get into that topic right now, but because others have addressed it, but this may, I think it could radio, excessive radio use in our society may turn out to be the next, as best as our lead paint or tobacco situation. There's a possibility of that. And there's research being done even at the University of Colorado in Boulder on this, what's called weak field effects of electromagnetic fields. I have written a testimony to the Federal Communications Commission on that topic. So the final slide is, I think the Climate Action Task Force did a great job. They got the goals right. And now the technology to do it is on the horizon. In the system I'm working on, Emma plus AMI metering is levering the fiber infrastructure. It's based on international standards, the International Standards Organization and the International Electrotechnical Commission. Emma is essentially AMI 2.0. That's what I call it informally. Complementary to the existing grid, it doesn't compete with the grid, it just adds to it. So we can, and that's what's depicted in the cover of my paper in your packet on page 94. There's a couple of artist renderings of electric, complete electric power system from the old centralized grid to the new micro grids of the future. And I think there's a, in closing, I wanna say there's an opportunity for Longmont to lead once again in technical innovation using your optical fiber network, which is, as I said, the best in the nation right now. And I've written a lot of papers on that topic as well. There's a business opportunity in sustainable energy technology using the fiber network and intelligent energy. There's this kind of technology could be kind of an open source incubator thing for all kinds of business opportunities for startup companies developing energy management. It's a path to community sustainability and resilience. You'll likely hear from the meter vendors that their meters are key to renewable energy integration, same as hundreds of other utilities are hearing. But my question is, are you going to lever your unique advantage? Your fiber system, fiber interface for AMI meters is commercially available. We should take a look at that. So thank you very much for your attention. Thank you, Dr. Shockley. We do have one more speaker tonight, but we will pause for questions like we also did for Bill Hayes. All right, thank you very much. Council Member Peck. Thank you, Mayor Pro Tem. Mr. Shockley, thank you for that presentation. It's very informative. Can you tell us of any municipalities that are already using Emma and fiber that we could get some information from? Well, the Emma is not... Well, actually it's in prototype form right now. The prototypes that I'm working other researchers on right now are actually in Canada, in British Columbia. But those are test sites and it's not a commercially available project yet. And it's not a specific product. It's a set of standards that manufacturers can put in to create energy management systems for homes and buildings. What's described in your climate task force report as a HEMS, Home Energy Management System. Those are... There are some examples on the market today, but they're proprietary. They're not open like what Emma would be is a completely open system that would allow any manufacturer, anybody, entrepreneurs or manufacturers to build these devices. The stuff that's available today is Elon Musk has the Tesla Powerwall system. There's a European system that's being sold here called Sonin Battery that's now owned by Shell Oil. Those are good systems, but they're proprietary and they're not open. So when do you think the testing would be complete in Canada? Well, we hope to be able to have more test sites going on testing this right now. I mean, in the next few months, the next year, we'll have, we're publishing the key standards. There's like 20 or 30 standards that's going to be involved in this. And some of those are already published and some are being published this year. There's a section, what for example, one is this Panasonic is a manufacturing home batteries. And that is, they've proposed that we standardize that aspect of the Emma system. And that's actually being published this year. Thank you. That's an example. Okay, thank you very much. Council Member Martin. First, I'd like to say, does anybody else have a short question? Cause I have a long series of questions. So if anybody else has a question first, let's let me go last. Is that okay with you, Mayor Protan? Absolutely. If you'd like to defer, we'll go to Council Member Christensen then. I have Professor Schochli. I have a couple of short questions. The questions I asked the previous speaker who advised me to ask them to you. One has to do with, could you speak a little bit about the fire danger you see? And also I believe you were the one who mentioned that there were 30,000 smart meters recalled in Fort Collins. And that concerns me as a municipal official having to have a device that will only last a fairly short amount of time and then asked to be replaced and then replaced and then replaced all over town. So could you speak a little bit to the fire issue and also the Fort Collins issue? Well, I wasn't a source of that information on the Fort Collins. I think that was someone that called in on the phone, but I happen to know about it anyway. At least my understanding is that was a manufacturing defect and part of the cost of fixing that was covered by a warranty, but it was a big deal anyway. In terms of fire, the problem is that the smart meter is a pretty sophisticated computer. It's a bunch of circuit boards with the computer components in it and it's sitting on the outside of the house and it's installed on the wrong side of the power of the fuse box or the breaker panel. It's connected directly to the 300 or 200 amp service drop without any protection. And most appliances, you wouldn't think of putting that kind of an appliance in a house on a circuit that was not protected by a circuit breaker or a fuse, but that's one thing that they do. They just, and it's very susceptible to surges on the power line and I know that it's something that the insurance companies will not cover and every time there's a fire, the utility removes the evidence right away. I mean, there's lots of, you can find lots of reports on that sort of thing where there is a, these things are like a high voltage line falls down on a lower voltage line. It puts a power surge on the meters. The meters blow out and they catch fire. Because they're just not protected. And then once they start burning, they keep burning because they're being fed the only way to cut them off is to have somebody come up and climb up on the pole or pull the circuit from the pole because it keeps feeding power into this burning piece of electronic equipment. So it's really, I think a bad idea to hang something like that on that's not protected by the normal things you use for circuit protection. All right, I believe the council member Waters was next. Thanks, Mayor Protam and Dr. Shockley, thanks for your contributions to this study session. I have three questions. I hope they're quick and just to kind of frame for this first one, in my professional life, I ran a research and development organization where we talked about ourselves at times as kind of doing work where the rubber meets the sky. And our mission was to get that to where the rubber meets the road. And I'm trying to listen carefully as you've described kind of the state of the art whether how close is the system you've described where the rubber meets the road versus where the rubber meets the sky? That's the first question. Second question, in the figure three, there was a route you've got in the figure three, you've got a gateway platform. So the question is, is that a concept or is that a product or a collection of technology that becomes a platform? And the third question is, if one of the premises is that this works when we generate power locally, what, how close are we or how close is any community to generating sufficient power to run the city and what would have to happen if we're not there? And I suspect we're not. You know, what's it take to get the deployment of micro grids or the various kinds of energy sources that would allow that this concept to a hunt or to work in the municipality this size? So I hope those are three quick questions and I'll listen. Well, there's a whole lot there, you know, I'll try to remember and please cue me on that. First of all, I don't represent that Emma is that's described in the solar today article as something available today, but I think that initial versions of that should be available in the next two or three years. So I, as I said, prototypes are already working and have been working for about a year up in British Columbia. There is a group up there that's sponsoring that in housing development to test it out using integrated energy management on the multi-family apartment, basically a condominium project that is using it for energy management and metering. They've been able to interface it to AMI meters and also to have their own metering built into the system. But that's just a test at this point. We expect to see another one later this year in a different part of British Columbia. And then I'd like to get some projects going around here. I think that Longmont ought to consider looking at test site. I did a project for the city of Boulder three years ago called the solar plus storage demonstration project that was funded by the city. And I have a report, a final report on that that I'd be happy to share with you. But basically we built a very early version of this concept and tested it out in three houses in Boulder with rooftop solar batteries and a control system. And that project was concluded and it's ready for the next step if somebody wants to step up and do it. That wasn't very expensive either. We spent a $60,000 grant from the city to do that. It was a two-year project. Any follow-ups on that, Council Member Waters? Did I answer your questions? Yeah, I think probably the two follow-on questions you probably answered with the response about prototyping and needing further testing. There's a lot of R&D that still has to occur. I'll conclude to see a deployment or the organization of the technologies necessary to make functional platforms. Yeah, the goal is to make it a mass market product. So unlike the products I cited before that are highly specialized and proprietary, the idea is here to spawn a mass market for these control systems that would then allow mass deployment of solar and storage. There are companies in Denver that make lithium ion batteries for homes. Very practical thing to do right now. But you have to combine the solar, the storage, and the controller. That's a key element to it. So it's the equivalent of creating an open source approach. Exactly. Yeah, this kind of approach. Yeah, we foresee the international standards. They're open standards available to anybody and those then are basically cookbook for people to build right software and build systems and the offshore shelf hardware that can be used available today and make products and somebody will make a lot of money in doing that. Yeah, thank you. Council Member Martin. Thank you, Mayor Pro Tem. First, I can clarify, I think, more directly one of Dr. Watter's questions, which is that an Emma-style energy management system does not have to be able to island itself to be useful. It can be used just for energy management and balancing supply and demand and that it is not a requirement that the city generate all of its own power. So the whole model can exist in the context of a principal power source being a central generation like we have with PRPA and the reliability principles of the thing still apply. I think that was your question that didn't quite get addressed. Am I correct? Yeah, that is exactly right. Exactly right. This is an add-on to the existing grid system you have. There's two basic ways to go to get renewable energy into your grid and get down to 100%. And that is buy it or make it inside the city or buy it from outside the city. You can go buy power from wind farms and solar farms. You could put solar gardens in the city. You can put solar panels on people's roofs and on the roofs, all commercial buildings and battery systems. You need to do all of the above. And I think that's the way to get there. And you can do it really quickly because building a solar farm is a big deal now. You've got to get, there's a lot of approvals and time involved where people can put a system on their roof and with about a two month lead time they can have a complete system up and running. Okay. And thank you for your presentation Dr. Shockley and thank you for the compliment by the way. I am the principal author of the Renewable Energy Recommendation from Longmont's Climate Action Task Force. And I would also like to acknowledge the very excellent work of Ms. Amy Schmidt who was the author of the Time of Renewables Signaling Recommendations. And I think you'll agree that that's a really essential piece and we both wholeheartedly agree with you that time of use is obsolete and we should skip that and go directly to balancing supply and demand if we can do it. So a question for clarification that I have for you Dr. Shockley is that from reading what was in the packet that you authored, I did not get the idea that you were thinking about not having any kind of smart meter. You just didn't want it to have a radio but some of the things that you said today in your presentation made me wonder if you are because this is a proposal as well that you're thinking about not having smart meters at all. Where are you on that? I mean, ultimately, I think the smart meter gets built into the energy controller, the EMMA system, which is some electronic equipment inside your house. It's connected maybe various places inside your building because it's controlling things inside as well as metering. And how do you get around the regulatory requirements to have a certified sealed meter? Well, I think it would be possible to put some kind of a box on the house. I mean, that's what was there before and it was an old analog meter. You could have some kind of a device that was doing that that would meet the regulatory requirement. I know that I've had that discussion before that I think that's entirely possible. I just think that most of the smarts need to be inside the house, not hanging on the expected to hang in a box on the outside of your house. That's an interface that is like the telephone network where you have a network interface device and that's where the power company interface was and that's what an old analog meter did. But you could have a very simple device that would meet that regulatory requirement. The sensor is the main thing. So energy management systems today, which are, as you pointed out, proprietary, although they are moving in the direction of open systems do exist inside the house and don't actually require communications with the electric meter outside the house at all. There are reasons why they can do better if they do have communications with the metrology. Well, that's, yeah. But you have this dichotomy between out of band, which is essentially over the internet and in band, which is what the meter measures and sends somewhere, correct? Yeah, the box on the outside of the house should be the one that just reads the, that's the sensor or the interface. And there's just not, it doesn't make sense to put all the sophisticated control electronics that you're gonna need outside the box connected directly to the power drop. You can have both. You can have the smarts installed inside the building in a proper manner that would, because most of the sensing is gonna be done inside the building, but you could also have it connected to a part of it that's hanging outside the building that's something directly accessible to the power company. What they do in Europe is a good example. In Germany, the system is, there's a requirement that you can't have a smart meter connected directly to a power company. They have to go through a gateway just like I've depicted in the Emma diagram because, and the reason is privacy reasons. They do not want any external party to be able to gain access to that data. And it's a serious issue, particularly in Germany because there's a history of abuse of people's personal information. And they're very sensitive about it. So they have standards that require a gateway and the consumer has some control over what data goes in and out of the house. The way these EMI meters work today, you have no privacy whatsoever. Everything you do and all your behavior is sent to a third party, to the power company, and then to the third party. Well, I'd like to question that. First of all, I also was working on smart meters when they were being developed, not quite as long ago as you were, I think, but a decade ago. And at that time, it is true that the meter data that was collected was not encrypted and that it could be hacked and somebody could learn an awful lot about what was going on inside your house. However, the next generation of smart meters do encrypt their data. In fact, even the wired ones, even with stupid networks like 900 megahertz mesh, still have the ability to encode data as IPv6 packets and they are strongly encrypted. So I'm not even sure you can still buy a meter that does not encrypt what it transmits, but I won't swear that you can't. I just wouldn't recommend that Lamont would buy one like that. But there are simpler ways of making sure that you have data privacy than going to a whole new architecture that is unproven at this point. Could I address that issue? Yeah, I'd like to finish the question though. Oh, okay. Which is some of the other things that don't always happen are that you have an energy manager that goes on off to some service site and manages your meter data. In fact, right now, and this is something that I've been objecting to for, well, since I found out about it, which was about 18 months ago, I think, right now we send a lot of our household metering data up to our transmission and generation provider. And the meter data in billing is handled up there. And I don't like that. And in fact, the city is working on installing a customer information and meter data management system that will be here in-house. So we will stop doing that and get rid of that privacy risk. My point being just that those are not inherent risks in the AMI architecture. Well, what I would say is that the issue is not hacking. The issue is not, you know, certainly the data can be encrypted and that's fine, but that's not what the problem is. The problem is where the data ends up. And this is a, you know, and I think that's part of the, you notice that Google just got challenged on that today by the Department of Justice. It's the same issue. The data is exposed or it gets to the, it's where the data ends up. That data can be collected and once it's collected, it gets a life of its own. And that's the problem. And that's the problem with the German, the reason that they said that they adopted those rules about requiring a gateway and limiting the data that was flow out of the house is because, and I was told this personally by one of the regulatory agency in Germany in Bonn, that if you, with a present day smart meter, you could not hide a Jew in your house. And that was a basic principle that they were following when they adopted that rule. Marcia, you're opinionated. Ah, sorry. What you're saying, Dr. Schachli, is that with the transactive energy model, personal data never leaves the house at all. That's correct. There's no need for it to leave the house. The data isn't needed in the network. Data is used within the premises to control energy. The utility only needs it for billing purposes and planning possibly, but they can get that. That's, they don't need it. The interval, you know, five minute, 10 minute, 15 minute interval data in order to bill people or the transactive energy or dynamic rates would operate independently and that data would never be exposed. I think some of it has to be because you are still required to manage the demand from your large scale energy provider. So some of it has to go up. It may not be per household demand, but I'm kind of feeling like that is a TBD and the reason why transactive energy models are some years in the future. Yeah, that hasn't been all worked out. You're right. But I think the potential is there. See, rates have two purposes. One is revenue for the utility. The other purpose is control of the flow of energy. That's the real reason. That's what time of use pricing is theoretically all about was the idea that we can shift the peak by getting people to change their behavior. Well, of course that doesn't work without automated premises equipment, but it could work. But now we need something a little more sophisticated because we have to control, we're dealing with an energy source. It's not a fixed output coal plant or nuclear reactor. It's a highly variable wind and solar. So we need something more dynamic. Yes, and to be fair, I agree with you on about 80% of everything that you are saying. Longmont has an aspirational set of goals for energy management and we need to get there a pace, I guess. I have been because many of the documents in our packet this week were five to 10 years old on smart meters, spent the last three days checking out the state of the art with the next generation of smart meters as well as energy management systems. And what I have found out, and this is actually an answer to several questions that have been brought up by the public and by other council members, the expected life of an AMI system is now about 15 years. You don't expect them because they're electronic to last 50 years anymore. And that will be true with most of the renewable grid infrastructure. That's just life in the fast lane or at least during a transitional period. But the new generation of meters are in fact exactly what Dr. Shockley describes only outside the house. They contain computational platforms with a built-in AI and they are software-upgradable. So for example, Longmont could deploy these meters as standard AMI smart meters. And then in three years when Emma is ready for a US pilot, the same meter without any physical upgrades could host new home energy management software. And they're designed that way. And that would probably extend the life of the smart meter system for, it's hard to predict that stuff. But I would estimate 20 years and again, they can upgrade, you can upgrade your system from one generation of technology to another using the same metrology platform. And I think that's important. I think smart meters are important because it's not just building and it's not just use and balancing the supply and demand but the renewable distribution grid itself is so much more complicated that to manage it, you actually have to monitor the stresses and strains of power. I don't wanna get into the geeky stuff but you have to manage the, you have to tune up the grid the way you used to have to tune up a car. And you need to know what's going on in terms of demand of devices on that grid. So I'm really reluctant to let go of the idea of meters. And I'm also really reluctant to accept the idea that we should put our greenhouse gas reduction agenda on hold waiting for technology to mature. Let me give you a quick. Just a second, just a second, please. I'm sorry, Dr. Shockley, as much as I enjoy this, this is specifically a question and answer time. And unless I did not hear a question there, Council Member Martin, and so are you finished with your questions? Yeah. We do have another presentation still. Another presentation, correct. So I'm just, my question for Dr. Shockley is your recommendation that the initiative be put on hold for several years? No, and in fact, I wanted to say that we, in the prototype system in British Columbia, we're doing exactly what you described. We're actually using existing AMI meters and reading them from inside the building the Emma system is using that data to manage energy in the building right now. That's a proposal that seems like it could be entertained. Thank you. Using the Zigbee interface on the meter. Thank you very much. So besides Mayor Bagley, Council Member Edalgo Ferring and myself, everyone else has asked a question. I don't see any other further questions at this time. So let's move on with the next presentation, please. Thank you, Dr. Shockley. Our third and final speaker for tonight is Rick Schmidt. And Rick is the General Manager versus Schmidt Utility Advisors. Rick has been providing automation and communication services for municipal and electric co-ops for over 20 years. He has led over 150 engagements that involve AMI, SCADA, OMS, CIS, communications infrastructure and other automation technology. While Rick was recently with Black and Veatch, his team performed a AMI assessment for the City of Longmont. He normally performs as either the Project Manager or Lead Consultant. And he has an MBA from the Cardinal Strict University of Milwaukee in over 35 years of industry experience. So thank you, Rick, for joining us tonight and you have the floor. Okay. Thank you, Dave. Move to the next slide. I'm going to ask to talk today a little bit about where is the industry at now? What is the real state of the industry? What are the use cases and applications beyond metering that are being readily deployed in masks today? And where is the state of industry in the home automation area? And next slide. And where my experience is coming from is really on the business side of technology. I'm not a doctor. I'm not an engineer. I'm an MBA. And in my experience over the last 20 years, it's been helping utilities like you create your requirements for technology and what is practical, what is valuable, what has the strongest value proposition in doing a lot of procurement of technology and selecting vendors. This slide here we're really showing over the last 30 or so years of how we went from mechanical meters that are read by employees and contractors walking by to the generation of wireless devices that you could drive by in vans and collect meters once a month, basically a meter reader in a van versus on foot to the next generation of metering. You started to see mechanical to solid state in the 1990s. And then from around 2007, 2010 timeframe especially with the smart grid funding that came from the first Obama administration, there were, I'm gonna guess a little bit at the numbers, 30 or 40 million meters deployed with the smart grid funding. And a lot of the studies that we saw on fires, some of the studies we saw on RF concerns for health, a lot of them were done when we started to see a massive rollout of AMI. You're no longer an early adopter of AMI. I believe on electric utility basis where we have exceeded I think 65 that pushing in higher percent of the homes with some form of smart metering. So you had a lot of deployments occurring around 2012 and 10 in that timeframe that often took two to three years to deploy. So a lot of the research was done prior. There was a question on fires. I'll address it right now. I had a client municipal with a lot of your size. I had a concern of what they were hearing with fires. My previous team, we did web searches, we talked to vendors, we talked to what we could. We found examples of maybe eight, nine, 10 fires that did occur and it typically has occurred at the time of putting the smart meter in and the wiring inside the home. So sure, yes, there's fires, but statistically a very small. I don't want to mitigate the impact, but it was a small size that we were able to find in the industry. We're at a point now in our development where, well, there's been incremental steps every year with improvement, but we still have proprietary infrastructure. Well, vendors will talk about open protocols like Zigbee and others. While they're open, they're frankly not easy and they're not widely interoperable. So you typically have a solution that's very much tied to a given AMI vendor. And the emphasis is really on use cases. I'm going to talk about them just a minute that are operational improvement for the utility. I use the term meter to cash efficiencies and they're gaining efficiencies for the utility and they're complimenting programs like demand response or complimenting renewable energy programs and so on. Once you go to the next slide, Dave, just in this short 10 minute overview, there's really three common, primarily two common types of AMI technology that's being deployed in mass today. We talked about a mesh-based AMI where meters talk to meters and meters talk to other wireless devices. There's probably across the country, I would say it's at least 65, 70% of the meters deployed in AMI are mesh-based. The next category in the middle is tower-based where a city like Longmont would probably have four or five base station radials with a licensed spectrum like 900 or 450 megahertz, possibly 220 megahertz. The leading vendor by far is Census. Way, way well behind that is Aclara and Tantalus and you're operating in a point-to-multi-point mode, much like your mobile radio systems have operated going from a base station to a meter. And you typically would design those systems where they overlap coverage. The third technology that we see sometimes is cellular-based but highly, I haven't seen, I think more than probably five that you can count across the country with Verizon where you're doing 100% cellular-based AMI. We're seeing cellular being used by a lot of the vendors but typically to fill in a coverage hole very optimally by being able to have less private infrastructure and fill a coverage gap with cellular. We do see cellular heavily used as a backhaul technology if you don't have fiber optics. So very uncommon to use cellular-based for AMI primarily because of the way the vendors have priced it, it has not been affordable. Next slide. Just wanted to very quickly show the architecture of mesh technology. Some of this is probably reviewed to you but meters talk to meters, meters as you can see, both can route to an AMI collector. Most of the vendors have a second piece of architecture you can see on the right called a repeater. The mesh vendors are operating in that ISM band, 902 to 928. It's the same band that you see with garage tour openers, baby monitors, telephones inside the house and a lot of other spectrum. Some of the vendors are using the 2.4 gigahertz band which you'll also see with Wi-Fi. When you're writing a bid for an AMI system you would typically define what the number of hops that would be a maximum number to be able to have more latency with your systems. It was stated that the throughput is somewhere in the 56 kilobit range. It ranges typically from 56 kilobits to about 500 kilobits per second. And in today's applications, in today's use cases and how the AMI is being used, that level of throughput and that level of latency has been able to meet today's requirements. Next slide. Just a quick snapshot on the Tuller-based AMI. It's not uncommon to have 50 to 100% overlap where if one theoretical base station is down it could sense base station is down and then you could have the signal being able to be able to receive at a second base station much like there is cellular coverage overlap and the landmobile radio systems also have overlap and you would design that into your system. And probably for a city like you you would design it with 100% overlap if you went with a Tuller-based AMI. Again, census, an AMI vendor, an AMI metering vendor a water AMI metering vendor they're dominating the Tuller-based vendor pool of vendors. Next slide. Well, everyone loves fiber optics. I absolutely, you can't compare it really to anything wireless from performance standpoint but unfortunately the vendor community when you talk about the end aspects of AMI there's only one vendor that has a fiber optic solution and it's the smallest vendor in our industry named Tannilis. I believe seven, maybe eight municipals primarily in the Tennessee Valley city of Chattanooga is one of them that has fiber to the home. They have used Tannilis in their areas where they've had fiber optics and when evaluating it even with some cities that have fiber they have found other solutions in many cases to be superior. Well, I think just listening today there were some very good points and some future technology that I think is gonna be pretty exciting but what we're seeing and how you could take advantage of your fiber is as these other technologies develop I don't believe you would need or wanna be able to afford to having fiber going to every premise to take advantage of the metrology and the future advancements that we're seeing you could probably sample it and not go to every premise with your fiber optics. You clearly could use your fiber optics in the backhaul of an AMI system to have it much more distributed but I wish we would have a vendor pool that would have fiber optics as the key technology especially in the electric cooperative mode where we're seeing a large amount of co-ops and municipals building fiber to the home but we're not seeing breakthroughs by the vendor community and at the end of the day when you evaluate sometimes as many as a thousand requirements the different vendors, the costs, the capabilities, the risks, there's so many factors that go into selecting a given vendor over the other the fiber capability has been basically a non-player even for the municipals and co-ops that have fiber optics. Next slide. The AMI business cases, I've done, I don't know, 30, 40 of them, 50 I can't keep track over the years and you're hardly doing them anymore it's basically a proven technology from a benefit standpoint, you're using it heavy for operations, outage restoration, you're using it for programs like your distribution automation over AMI, you're bringing back voltage data on select meters down your feeders to making sure that you don't have power quality issues. Heavy operation engineering analytics as well as customer analytics and for programs like that have been very popular at prepaid metering for people who wanna pay energy in advance, very successful programs, there's especially in the cooperative space, very successful, high customer satisfaction of those programs, smart street lights and on a demand response basis, very mature technology in AMI to load, to talk to water heaters, pool pumps, AC and we haven't seen the breakthroughs with interfacing with inverters and other renewable energies but what we are seeing that hasn't been talked about really at all this evening is the amount of analytics that are coming from the intervals of smart meters and we're seeing being able to predict the times to do demand response based on the renewable statistical samplings that are occurring and the algorithms and the households surveys and the samples are ways where you're complimenting not having real time every one minute pulled energy data or demand data, you're using analytics to the extent you possibly can to predict the energy demand the power supply and other areas that will compliment a DR program and some of the points were right is the technology to operate even the grid of the future that has 100% or 50% or 80% renewal some of the technology isn't there yet but I think a key lesson learned is one of the commissioners said it correctly is 15 years is about what we're seeing on a useful life of an AMI system and what I've seen personally, hands on some business cases that I did 12, 13 years ago I had failure rates in those business cases about starting out at about 0.2%, a quarter percent and then maybe by the year seven maybe going up to a half percent I am starting to see failure rates in the 1% range by year 10, year 11 but it's been more dominant in certain parts of the country coastal areas, heavy salt, salt water impacted but we're not seeing 4%, 5%, 7% annual failure rates it's in that percent, percent and a half and it does vary but that is higher than what we predicted 12, 13 years ago when we're initially doing a lot of AMI work but I think what we wanna learn is as some of these newer platforms do develop and do mature we're in the same situation now the utilities have put AMI in 15 years ago I've been helping them and our different consultants are on the country how do you migrate? How do you migrate from what you put in 13, 14 years ago to what you would put in now? And you typically are not doing a mass replacement you are picking where you have certain premises and customers and you or you have a strategy where you replace upon failure or growth or you have a real sophisticated replacement strategy but it's not to rip out and replace and you then are gonna work at some point with two generations and we're seeing that now for the utilities that did put their AMIs in 13, 14, 15 years ago but really today's AMI is all about operational improvement and then your customers start seeing the value by being able to see day over day, hour over hour being able to take a conservation approach with their energy management but we still are in a pretty much a proprietary mode some of the vendors will say they're open protocol but they're painfully open and not in far, far from plug and play. Next slide, just a little bit with home automation we are seeing, I would say I'm gonna guess when I say this maybe 70% of the AMI systems across the country that went in in the last 12 months, I would say the software is cloud-based, highly secure in data centers typically with the vendors cloud, the vendors managed cloud the meter data management systems are cloud-based is then becoming much more typical. Yes, every message is encrypted, 250-bit encryption every message, the keys change daily and they are the National Institute of Standards to define security. I would say across the country if you pull every utility that has AMI the most probably common scenario is to, I call it record your intervals every 15 minutes probably the most common time to reporting them is once every three hours, once every four hours we're starting, you often design the system to be able to send the data upstream to the head end every 15 minutes but that's probably 30% of the utilities with a strong fiber optic network with a distributed architecture you might wanna bring that data back every 15 minutes but what we're seeing is an approach where your accounts that you might have demand response the accounts where you know they have solar and inverters on the premise accounts where you may have a critical peak pricing program a peak time rebate program bring those accounts back every 15 minutes bring some of them, bring your commercial back every five minutes but the other residential accounts that are not subscribing or on a flat rated bring them back once an hour, once every three hours so you've kind of been using common sense on when to bring the data back but we are seeing of course the common if your objective is to shift your power supply peak is it adjusting your renewable energy demand that you're producing you're gonna really leverage that interval data you're gonna really use the analytics I can't stress that enough there are some third party vendors that really specialize in that and some of them are not AMI vendors they're not the MDM vendors there's some analytic vendors would be glad to coordinate some webinars and those kinds of things just last slide next slide and that was that is the end of our presentation tonight and so are there questions for Rick? Thanks, Mayor Peruzza. I don't have questions for Rick I have a couple of questions I just have one question for staff and that is I don't want to sound like a smart alec but this AMI presentation this is a topic that was requested by council I guess I'm just having a hard time digesting it all and so my question is what are we supposed to do with this? Meaning we're presented with it I get it I hear it but I'm having a hard time understanding how the city is gonna pay for all of our I mean, is this something that we're supposed to be thinking okay, is it new construction? Is it replacing current instruction? I mean, how do we do this? I heard from one presenter that AMI is obsolete and it kind of sounded like he was selling Emma and then this person is this presenter is a consultant I mean, are they selling their services? I guess I'm having a hard time digesting what are we supposed to do? So my understanding is, is not being an expert we're supposed to direct staff to say, hey staff I want you guys to go forward with some type of AMI-Emma-ish thing tell us how it works in the budget so we can fight to get 100% renewable energy and then give us a plan but I'm sitting here looking at a bunch of non-experts with maybe the exception being Marsha Martin knows a little bit more about this than the rest of us but what do you need from us? How am I supposed to digest all this stuff? Is my head hurts? Yes sir. Thank you for that Mayor Bagley. So you're absolutely right the questions that had come about were coming from City Council about interest in knowing more about the health and really a bit about the technology. The question before council is is this is part of the current budget in that budget is a capital improvement project for AMI and council decision is with the budget as to approve funding to continue work towards AMI. Tonight we are not trying to choose a technology. But what's that number? What's that number? Cause I'm assuming 30,000 times I mean I can say is what is the budget? If it's 50,000 to continue researching it go ahead, let's move on. If it's 30,000 homes times 10,000 per home Harold tell me how we pay for this so what's the budget number? So very specifically is that the budget discussed with council last year was an estimate of 16 million for the overall project. Which would do what? The overall project if we have a number we are gonna do something. So what is it? So that number was to secure and build and implement an AMI system. So that would be AMI meters at the different household premises the communication system to connect those meters and to bring that data also back to the utilities. It will have tools for customers to use and access their data. And it is really that base that we talk about providing the information technology to move us forward on renewable energy. Last year you approved a two year rate structure to help fund this project. So tonight we are not deciding what technology to use and the specificity to do that this was more for council awareness and it will be a followup by staff and discussions with council that later lead to the specific technology that is selected and a contract for that. So how I'm so what we're just taking away it's 60 million in the budget. It's gonna go into all homes. It's getting some type 16 million it's gonna be some type of AMI technology which you will decide and bring back to us to get approval on. And it's just council. Hey, heads up. This is where we're at. That's it. I think that's a good summary. Okay. Great. That's all I needed. I know. Thanks. All right. And I would say not only was this presentation for the edification of council concerning many of calls that we've gotten through Republican by being to be heard but also to provide some more information to the general public about the program that we've been talking about as was clarified by staff. I believe that this budget cycle they're saying 2.5 million and then I think it was 7.5 million the year after that. For 2021. Correct. Right and 6 million the year after that. Correct. Bring us to 16 million. So this is specifically I would say motivated by the calls that we've gotten and to make sure that we have the best information possible to go forward. That's my understanding as such a council member Martin had her hand up the next time. And don't worry. I'm not going to do that again. But as director Hornbacker already said we approved a rate structure that is intended to pay for this some time ago. I can't remember what month it was, but it was last year. And we originally had a timeline and of course we've had kind of a pandemic here. And so we may not be precisely on pace. But we were looking at essentially rolling out at least an initial deployment early next year. It kind of looks like we're not there yet. But maybe architecturally now that the public has seen an overview of the different architectures that are out there in terms of moving forward from the household to the utility and to the control systems that we have, it would be good to maybe talk about where we are in terms of selecting a network architecture. There are interesting questions like is the best meter going to be compatible with the fiber backhaul from the smallest network vendor, stuff like that. Could we get sort of a very light overview in terms of where we are in that evaluation process? And is Mr. Schmidt a consultant in that selection process? Because I didn't quite catch whether he's just another specialist that we brought in to talk to different things or whether he's helping with the selection process because, honest to God, he sounds like he could. So. Thank you, Council Member Barton. So very briefly is, Rick Schmidt had been brought in as a consultant here recently to help the City of Longmont assess the Colorado Springs Utilities bid and whether it might be applicable and a benefit to the City of Longmont. Additionally, he and his team put together basically a functionality list, something that is really key regardless of which technology that we do. We've also recently hired an AMI manager to help leave this project forward. And our next steps are to take our functionality analysis and to explore how that can be met by these different types of architecture and technology. And then from there, we can develop the RFP and move forward with a, I should say, come back to Council with our recommendations on architecture and then move forward with a bidding process. Okay, that sounds good. And a quick question for Mr. Schmidt. Have you looked at the Landis and Gear, or is it Eitron? Anyway, the Revello architecture, which is a platform smart meter. Yeah, it's mostly in the, I've been researching the technology you know, it was kind of launched last, earlier in this year, January, February. It was, if there's been papers on it, they've been labbed. I don't think it's been deployed anywhere. When we've been writing bids, we've been asking questions. Show us your roadmap. Where's it going? I think it's really interesting. And I think if, if that kind of technology, you would start piloting it. You would, you would, once you decide to move, you would start saying, what's it, what's this going to do for us? What problem is this solving? And then, and then over time, I think there's going to be some nuggets in there. That's going to be a value, but it's, it's early. It's early. It's, it's making a lot of sense, but it's early. Get them to give us the meters. We'll do that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's. It's, it's something that you got to keep your eyes on. Yeah. Just real quickly. And I know council, you've spent quite a bit of time on this issue, but. I think it's also important to note that the city is also underway with a. Renewal of our customer information system. These are two very large. Platforms and technology that we are absolutely focused on looking at the best alternatives to serve this city. And I think David and his staff, along with the consultants that we have been bringing in, and we'll continue to bring in. We'll, we'll get us there. They will get us to that point and. And also council. As you know, we are trying to do this. As most efficiently and expeditiously as we can. Again, keeping our eye on the ball. Of getting towards our 100% renewable goal. And so frankly, we've got a lot of variables here. We got a lot of issues and. Any engineer will tell you that when you've got too many unknowns and. It becomes very difficult to solve those equations. I think, I think we've got the right team to get there. I appreciate the discussion. I like the future looking on things. Longmont has been. And we'll continue to be a leader. On any number of issues. Again, counselors, you're aware. And certainly to the extent that we have. We can leverage and utilize our next light system. Of course we're going to be looking at that. And so I do look forward to moving this thing forward. And getting us. Down the road from. From a vision to. Implementation. Thank you. Council member Peck, I saw you had your hand up. Nope, you're good. All right. Any, anybody else. Seeing nothing else at this time, I guess I'll turn it out. The meeting over to you, Mayor Bagley. All right, great. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor Pro Tem. Thank you very much for those reports. And just keep us posted. You guys doing okay. Do you need a break? All right. Why don't we go ahead and. Take a three to five minute break. And we'll go back. We'll, we'll, we'll keep going with six B the discussion on 80 use. I'm going to sign off. Thank you, everyone. Thanks, Rick. See for. Well, back. Am I just not seeing this, Joan. Harold. And Dr. Water. Thank you. Thank you very much for those reports and just keep us posted. You guys doing okay. Do you need a break? All right. Why don't we go ahead and take a three to five minute break. And we'll go back. We'll, we'll, we'll keep going with six B the discussion on. And Dr. Water's. All right. We got everybody. All right. So let's go ahead and move on to discussion and direction on accelerated dwelling units. Could you not see me? Could you hear me? All right. Good enough. Nobody wants to see me anyway. All right. So let's go ahead and go on with 80 us, Harold. Very good. There's Aaron. Can you all hear me? Good evening, Mayor Bagley, members of council. I'm Aaron. Principal planner with the planning division and I'm joined by Eva. Also a principal planner. And tonight we'd like to walk through some slides to give you an overview on accessory dwelling units. And what we'll be seeking is direction from council on what, if any changes we should pursue to the land development code regarding ADUs. Next slide, please. So we'll start out with a definition. We included a lot of information in your council communication, but we'll walk through some of that tonight to make sure everyone's on the same page. Accessory dwelling units are often referred to as ADUs. And that's what Eva and I will likely be using throughout tonight's presentation. You may also have heard these referred to as carriage houses or granny flats or myriad other terms. We'll be calling them ADUs tonight. Really the important items to note are that these are accessory to single family detached homes. They can be permitted in multiple zoning districts, but are really an accessory use to a single family detached home. ADUs have been part of Longmont's housing strategy since we first included them in our comp plan in 1995. Today they also support several housing goals in our comp plan around mix of housing types, affordability and aging in place. So if you won't have any questions about that, we're happy to answer it. But what we're really going to focus on is what's in the land development code. ADUs can take many forms. You can see some pictures of ADUs in Longmont. These are all local examples. They can be in detached separate units. Typically you'll see these above a detached garage. They can also be separate accessory structures like this red home on Plateau Road in Longmont. Oftentimes they can also be integrated into a main home. You can see an example here where they've kind of built an ADU onto the back of the house. They can also be a basement unit and we've seen some interest in that recently. But they are always a separate dwelling unit. And they also have the characteristic of being completely independent from the main house. So this is not a situation where it's a room for rent or it's a basement that still has, that still basically talks to the principal unit. They're completely separate independent living facility with provisions for cooking, eating, sanitation and sleeping. Next slide please. So we included a map in your packet. And this is a screenshot of the map. You can see where accessory dwelling units have been permitted in Longmont over the past 20 years or so. Generally you can see that they're concentrated in the original square mile of Longmont in the Mill Village neighborhood out towards Countyline Road and East Kemprat Boulevard. And in prospect. You'll look at, if you look at the permit numbers, you can see there's not a huge amount of ADUs, especially when you compare it to the overall number of residential permits that we issue, but there has been an increasing interest in the past several years. Interestingly, we should note that there has been a general rise in residential permit numbers in these same years. So it's not surprising that we've seen an increasing number in ADUs. I also want to point out that you can see from the table here, the majority of our ADUs are constructed in prospect. And obviously you can see that on the map as well. And you've probably been there and seen the ADUs there. These were really contemplated as part of the overall development plan that was approved for prospect. And nearly every detached residential lot there permits an ADU by right. And so those follow a slightly different process, but obviously a lot of what we're seeing in terms of our permit numbers are down in prospect. Next slide, please. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Ava. She's going to cover some of the code requirements as well as the development review process that ADUs go through. Thanks, Erin. Again, Ava Pajajewski with planning and development services, mayor and council. So what I'll do with this slide is I'll walk you through what our current code standards are. So you get a sense of, you know, what the average homeowner needs to comply with if they wanted to do an ADU. So starting with location in size, you know, and this picture here, this graphic on the right, this is just sort of a typical, like a standard site plan that we would receive for an ADU. And I'll kind of walk you through how a plot plan like this is showing how it meets standards. So, you know, in general, our ADU standards say, you know, it's got to be in the rear of the property. It can't be in front of the principal dwelling. So if you see here, this is an example of something on Bross Street on the right, you'll see a label for Bross Street. So for example, a front yard setback is 20 feet. I don't, this isn't depicting what the house front setback is, but nevertheless, in this, in this scenario, as you can see the ADU is in the back of the property. And so generally speaking, ADUs have to be in the rear of the property. If they are pushed forward, they can't be in front of the main house, nor can they encroach into the front yard setback of 20 feet. So there's that. In addition, they have to be secondary in size to the principal dwelling, meaning that what we are looking for is on this site plan. We would look at the footprint. And so obviously we don't want an ADU that's bigger than the main house. And so we're looking at the square footages. And going with that in our zoning code, it says that an ADU cannot exceed 50% of the finished floor area of the main house. So if you look on this plot plan, you'll see there's that square box. I'm sorry, I don't have mouse control here. So bear with me, but there's the box at the bottom center. You can't read that. It's really blurry. I apologize. Can't blow it up. But what it's showing there, what we ask a homeowner to show us is what is your finished floor area on the first floor, on your second floor, your basement, what's the finished floor area? And then what is the floor area of your ADU? And then we do the math and the ADU can exceed 50% of that amount. There's a limit of one ADU per residential lot. RVs, mobile homes and travel trailers are not permitted as ADUs. They need to be on a permanent foundation. They need to be on a permanent foundation. They need to be on a permanent foundation. The size. So I went over that. And then the setbacks. So it goes, the, the side yards have to be minimum of five feet on an internal side yard. And rear yards have to be a minimum of 10 feet from the property line and 20 feet. From the street frontage. And if you're on a street corner lot, you can get a 20 foot setback and we have seen variances come in in the past, I think, with, you know, situations like that in the past. The height cannot exceed the height of the main house. And so we don't have it here, but we would ask for an elevation sheet and we'd ask them to draw out the main house and label and dimension the height of the main house and then label and dimension the height of their ADU to prove up to the planning department that the ADU is not taller. And that even includes if you've got, say you've got an existing garage and you'd like to build above it. Well, our standard is you can do that only if you're shorter than the main house. So for example, this wouldn't work in a scenario where you've got a ranch house and you've got a garage in the back and you want to add, you want to pop the top and add a second story. So something like that wouldn't work for a property owner with a ranch house that wants to build above a garage. And then lastly, the standard for property owners is to live in one of the units. It can either be in the ADU or in the main house, but the property owner needs to live on the property. And the ADU cannot be sold as a separate unit. So it's the lot that the house is on and the ADU is on it, but it cannot be a separate lot or a separately sold unit. And lastly, so compatibility, the ADU standards say that we have to review it against neighborhood compatibility in terms of architecture colors and materials. And so we take all of that into context. We look at the design of what they're proposing. We go out and inspect, take a look at the neighborhood and determine if that's got any compatibility issues. Next slide. And so next I'll walk you through the development review process. The ADU standards currently in the land development code say that ADUs will go through a site plan waiver process. And this process is a little more, it's typical of, it's similar to a site plan review, but it's a little more streamlined in that what makes it different from a site plan say for a big development is that they wouldn't have to do, you know, big drainage reports, big traffic studies, things of that nature. It's a little more streamlined, but our DRC development review committee reviews the applications. They look at it for electric capacity, utility needs, drainage impacts, parking. If you add an ADU, you need to add extra parking for each bedroom. Again, building compatibility and architectural design. We check the setbacks and the height. And in our zoning code, currently it does not require noticing, but staff does mail notice and post a sign on the property. We do send notices to all property owners on the block. Next slide. Erin, you want to take it away. Sorry, I was trying to find my unmute button, even though it's in the same place every single time. So what we wanted to kind of end with is some of the things that we've heard and that we know council has heard from the community. And this is sort of on both ends of the spectrum. And so we'll go through these items one by one. Next slide, please. One of the big items that we've heard from a few residents is that, and I know council has gotten feedback as well, is with regard to compatibility or potentially lack of compatibility within neighborhoods. As Eva mentioned, we do have compatibility requirements, but as we noted in the communication, this can be somewhat challenging because compatibility is somewhat subjective. So as Eva mentioned, we do look at the neighborhood context. We do look at building materials, roof and building design, but obviously compatibility can mean different things to different people. And depending on the types of structures, you can see two pretty different structures here in the same neighborhood. But I think we would all agree that prospect is a little bit different of a case. And so most of the issues that are being raised have really related to the historic districts within the city. So we've also had concerns kind of in that compatibility arena related to density. And really what that has been related to is some of the potential impacts that increased density could have. So those would really be around increased traffic and reduction in available on street parking. However, as Eva mentioned, we do require parking for accessory dwelling units. And so we haven't really seen this be an issue. I think it is, it's potentially more of a perceived issue that if there were to be a lot of accessory units, for example, on a single block and there was, you know, a doubling of density, it could have some impacts to a neighborhood. As I mentioned, a lot of these concerns have really related to some of the historic districts. There's also been concerns expressed that, especially for properties that haven't been designated, there's the potential to have alterations or even demolitions to structures that may contribute to a character, but may not be designated properties. And so there's some concern about how we're looking at ADUs in those specific areas. Next slide, please. As Eva mentioned, the height requirements for ADUs are really related to the height of the principal structure. So ADUs that are located in accessory structures, in other words, not part of the principal unit, cannot be taller than the main home. And so as Eva said, a one-story home cannot have an ADU built over their garage. That being said, there have been some concerns related to height in that some people feel the style of the structure and the roof design can make an ADU feel taller than the principal home. So you might have a historic home that's maybe a story and a half that has a highly pitched roof. An ADU comes in and they're the same height, but it really looks like a two-story home. And I think we've heard from some folks that this feels like it's out of character and it's not necessarily compatible. You can see this picture here is a recently completed ADU at Ninth and Alta. You can see that although it's a two-story ADU that has some bulk to it, it is not taller than the principal home. And so as Eva mentioned, that's something that we take a look at as we're reviewing these with the Development Review Committee. Next slide, please. So I think Eva did a pretty good job of walking through the setback standards and those are here for your information. We do obviously look at different setbacks for existing structures and new structures. We're not going to necessarily ask people to move an existing garage, for example, if they want to put an ADU on top of it. And so in those cases, we don't have new setbacks for the detached structures. Obviously if they're proposing an accessory dwelling unit that's within their main house, then we would just look at the main house setbacks. But for folks that are constructing a new detached structure, either in conjunction with a new garage or just a standalone accessory dwelling unit, we do have specific setback standards and you can see those here. The side in front setbacks are the same setbacks that we have for a principal dwelling unit in a residential single family zoning district. The rear setback is slightly different because in our residential single family, we have different setbacks for a principal structure depending on if it's alley loaded or not. But these are generally consistent with the setbacks for a principal dwelling unit. Next slide, please. I should mention on the setbacks, as you heard from the caller that called in during public invited to be heard, some of the concerns that are being expressed is that although setback standards are being met, some people still feel like ADUs are being built too close to the rear or side property line. And we have some pictures if council's interested to kind of see what some of the ADUs that have been constructed recently look like. One of the other issues that we've noted concerns with and that I think council has also received comments on relate to that ownership and residency standard that Ava talked about. As she mentioned, we require that the property owner live in one of the units. It can be the main house or it can be the accessory dwelling unit. But what we found is that this is difficult to enforce. We've gotten calls that there may be properties where this is not happening and it's a difficult standard for code enforcement to enforce. And as we noted in the communication, this is a challenge with any of these residency requirement standards. We do get calls in the planning division of folks that want to use the property. And we do advise them that that's not permissible. So it's something that we're honest about, but there is an interest in that. So we definitely let people know that's not allowed and that the owner needs to reside in one of the units. That's also a reason why they can't be subdivided from each other. Ava mentioned they need to be on the same lot. We've also gotten feedback on the other side of this requirement. Some folks feel we don't have a requirement for the principal unit that the owner must live there. You can rent out your home. And that this standard is onerous and not reasonable that a property owner should be able to use their home or homes the way that they see fit. So we've gotten we've gotten comments on both side of the issue on this one. Next slide please. And finally, the other thing that we'll discuss in terms of comments that we've gotten really relate to the cost of permitting an ADU and building an ADU. And the development process itself. As Ava mentioned, we go through a site plan waiver process with folks before they get to building permit. We've gotten some feedback from people that our process is a little bit onerous. As we noted in the communication. Oftentimes, in fact, most times these are individual homeowners, single family homeowners that are going through this process. It's not a developer. It's not a professional consultant. And so they're going through this process and it feels to them like there's a lot of requirements. There's obviously a timeline associated with noticing the property, conducting the review. You know, getting revisions going through that site plan waiver process before they can even go to permit. And so we've gotten feedback from some folks that they feel like this is onerous and they feel like it takes a little bit too long. And in some cases, you know, they're trying to construct a building permit for a family member or for income property so they can stay in their home. And this is something that they feel is a little too much. We've also gotten feedback about the cost of an accessory dwelling unit permitting an accessory dwelling unit. Obviously there are certain permit fees that are paid with every building permit. For example, a plan review fee, but there's additional fees that are associated with creating an accessory dwelling unit because it is a new residential unit. And so we do charge impact fees. So for example, the park improvement fee, transportation fee, school fee, those all have to be paid when a building permit for an ADU is applied for. And then the last thing I'll mention is, and this I think is particularly applicable for accessory dwelling units that are integrated into a main structure. The picture that we showed of the ADU kind of in the back of the house or in the basement, there's a number of building code requirements that need to be met in order to physically separate that unit. And those are requirements to address life safety issues. And so I don't think we're suggesting that those should change, but they do add cost and process for folks. And so we've gotten feedback on that as well. Next slide, please. So that's really what we have for you in terms of the overview of our code requirements, some of the concerns that we've heard. What we're asking for counsel tonight is to make changes to the land development code. Obviously we'll answer any of your questions. We'd like to know if you want to direct staff to make changes to the land development code, either with regard to the regulations or with regard to the process, or if we should leave the code as is. If you do direct us to make changes to come back to you with some options for changes, we'd like to know specifically what sections you'd like us to look into more. Next slide, please. So we're asking for any change to the land development code and what sort of input you need in order to make a decision. Obviously we've heard from a small number of. Of passionate individuals that have been impacted. By ADUs. But we're wondering if there's broader input that council needs. And if so, what kind of community engagement effort would you like to see around this? So with that, I mentioned, we do have some pictures. In the presentation, but with that, we'd like to open it up to questions and comments. Throw up the pictures first. Please. Yeah, we'll just go through those real quick. If you could go to the next slide. So this is an example of a detached structure. It's under construction. It's in the back. You can see it. It's small. And this is one of the other comments that we've heard some people, especially in the older parts of town. They have a smaller principal unit. And so their ADU needs to be in the back. So that's probably something we should have put in as a concern, but you can see this under construction. Next slide, please. This is a picture of what we showed in the beginning. This is a view from the front of the house. And then you can see the accessory dwelling unit in the back here. With a separate entrance. This is down off a second, I believe. Next slide. This is the ADU that I mentioned was recently constructed on 9th and Alta. So you can see this one here on the corner. So you can see the accessory dwelling unit just to the north of this. So you can see that off the alley as well. So there's two side by side here. Next slide, please. This is an accessory dwelling unit on Gay street. You can see the white unit is the accessory unit. It's a little bit challenging to see from the sidewalk, but obviously we did not want to trespass on anyone's property to get pictures. This one has had some concerns raised. I believe this may be because it was referencing in terms of the setback. So you can see that it is, it is built relatively close to the fence line. And you can see that, you know, it's, it's over a garage here. Next slide, please. This is another accessory unit in Old town. It's interesting as we went out to take pictures, you oftentimes can't see accessory dwelling units very well. Sometimes you can see them better, but sometimes they are behind fences or behind homes as our regulations are requiring that. So you don't always have the best view. I think we might have one more. This is another one that's in Old town constructed. Behind a home and then one more final one. This is an example. If you go to the next slide, the last slide. This is an example of an ADU that's attached to the main house. So you can see the main home there. And then this gated area is where the accessory dwelling unit is located. Not super easy to see, but it is attached. And it looks like people access it through that gate right there. And that's, that's the pictures that we have. So that concludes the presentation. We'd be happy to take questions. So I can ask you a quick question like fellow council members before we get going. So I don't want to waste any time here. I understand why we did the ADU changes because we want to have a better understanding of the housing as affordable as possible and increased supply of long-term rental units. My question is, so I live in prospect. I have an ADU behind my house, a carriage house behind my, my house. And it's over the garage and most of my neighbors have them. And it is very much the mode of prospect to have an ADU either rent out or use. So it's part of the characteristics of the neighborhood. My question would be for, for like council member Christianson, you have a beautiful home in downtown. It's little, yes, but it's beautiful. It's cool. So my question is, if everybody downtown starts. Doubling the size of their housing. Do you guys want to put. You know, basically clone the main house. Yes. It has to be a little smaller. But if you take into account the basement. And you say it's 50%. You saw from those, those pictures that there are basically people squeezing in twice the home onto a lot in old town, which will change the character of old town. So I don't want to waste any time on this. If council is thinking, oh, that's great. That's what we intended. We want it. If that's the case, let's move on. If we don't, if we acted and need to reassess, let's address it. So my question is, is it currently acting the way when you saw those pictures, if that's old town from now on where we have no yards and we're just full of double housing. Is that what we want? Council member Christianson. Um, You know, a while ago, I gave everybody a copy of this. From ARP and the National Builders Association. And it has lots of good suggestions among them, ADUs. And I, I think all of us. We talked about this with the, uh, in vision, Longmont. We've talked about this extension. We've talked about this extension. And how we can, in many different ways, increase affordable housing. And that's a good idea. But everything has to be balanced. Currently, I have. Uh, three. So I'll just bring this down to my neighborhood because you talked about this. Um, I. Designed and built a garage and it took me two years to get it past the waiver board. Cause it was a, you know, I have a very small house. And so the garage was pretty much the same size as the house. Um, when I did that. Uh, there was something in our code that we had to, we could not impinge upon the size of the house. Um, But the assumption is that you'll actually have a backyard. Small front yard, but, you know, about 15 feet. But a backyard where you'll be able to sit out in the sunshine. Maybe grow some plants. Maybe grow some plants. Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, I don't think that's what people in this town want. I know it is the, I think we can make some changes to the ADU to encourage people to build these. But I think we need to remember that originally, ADUs were called grandma or mother-in-law flats because it was a cottage or a living space that you had a guest come stay, whether it was your mother-in-law or somebody who needed some help. It was free. It was not something you made money off of and people used to live in their homes and not expect to make money off of them. Now we've monetized everything. There's nothing in these ADUs that would incentivize people making them cheaper. In fact, they give nothing into the Affordable Housing Fund for affordability. And because we don't have any rental licenses in lawnmower. So our landlords have no licensing. They have nothing that they pay into the city in terms of a license. And therefore they have no accountability. So that puts bad landlords at the disadvantage against bad landlords. We also have no yearly inspections. So we have no idea what's going on. We need to make a few changes like that. We also, I'll tell you, we have three accessory dwelling units that have been put in to my neighborhood. On the end of the street, there were five waivers on that. No one received any notification. One day, a bulldozer showed up and dug a big hole. And the guy who lived next door went, what's going on here? There was no notification, no posting of anything, nobody got a letter. The woman across the street, who I'm fond of, kind of, but she also built an accessory dwelling unit on top of her garage in the back. She has almost no yard left now. Her house is a one-story house. And while it is okay to build 35 feet in a residential area, that's what she built on top of her garage. Her house is one-story. It got approved by planning and zoning. There was no notification, no letters were sent to anybody. There were no signs of the guy next door to me. Same thing. He started tearing his house apart to fix it. And pretty soon he was down to the studs because everything was kind of, he had to basically rebuild his house. So he built an ADU. That's good. He's an architect, he did a good job. But once again, there were no signs posted, none of the neighbors were notified. Now we have an extra four people in the neighborhood. Well, actually six because people down the street had a family. So we have six extra parking spaces we have to find on the street. This is how the reality of how this is actually working is that we're not being notified either by signs or in the mail. We have no say in any of this. And although I don't particularly object to all these, I object to the fact that we have no idea what's gonna hit us next. And it is changing the nature of the neighborhood if you start adding more and more and more. So instead of being a place where most of the people, where we have a nice mix of people who own their homes and people who rent their homes and between smaller places and larger places, we have very, very dense things. In Los Angeles, they started allowing places to be built in the back. They were the same size as the house in the front. And then there was no parking available. So then they started paving over the front of the house. So there was no front lawn anymore. It was all just parking. After a while, you have no neighborhood left. This is what's happened in the Highland District in Denver. This is what's happened in San Francisco. This is the way it goes. We're not any of those places, but I'm saying without clarifying the regulations, this is the way it goes. So I would like us to start having rental licenses so that we know what's going on in town and yearly rental inspections and better notification. I think those things would go a long way. I also think that we really need to clarify in the law that you cannot build something that towers over your neighbor's yard, essentially taking all the sunlight from the yard that they bought so they could actually sit in the sun in their backyard. I really would like to see that part restored. I also think that five feet is from the fence line is pretty small in the backyard because when these neighborhoods were built, it was assumed that nobody would be in the backyard except the dogs, the kids, people sitting in their lawn chairs. But now we have people living there, turning on the radio, getting extra pets, having their cars, it's doubling everything. So we need to reexamine whether five feet is enough. All right, great, thanks, Pauli. I guess I was gonna throw out, go ahead, Councilor Peck. Thank you, Mayor Bagley. I would like to direct staff to look into the possibility in Old Town, East and West, that this goes to the Historic Preservation Board, that the ADU is compatible with the neighborhood and with the historic value, I guess, is what I would say of the neighborhood. We don't destroy the historic part of our east side, because we're building ADUs that don't even look like the house, they're not compatible. And in order to, and so that's just one thing, and this is just a suggestion to throw out for Council. What do you think the impact of allowing ADUs to only be one story? If you have a three or four-story house, but you wanna build an ADU, that ADU can be pretty darn tall, which would address some of the things that Councilwoman Christensen was talking about. And if it is just an extra space to rent, or I don't see any problem with having it be only one story, couple of bedrooms, bath and a half, living room, garage, it's not a permanent structure, it's a rental. So those are two things I would like you to look at. My other problem with all of this, because I agree that notices are not going out. They probably should, but they are not. And I look at this as probably a resource problem. We, you know, Joni Marsh has got an incredible job right now with being the planning director of the assistant city manager working on the affordable, I'm sorry, LHA. And is there any way we can beef up, getting more resources into this department to hopefully being able to do what we need to do to control a situation that can get out of hand? And the one more point is that people are renting out both structures, their main house and their ADU, which is changing basically the zoning of that. I don't think we want our neighborhoods to become commercial in that, with that, because these would both be commercial properties at that point where people are using them for income totally. We have to have a way to control that. I don't know, I don't have any ideas on how to do that other than rental licensing so that we know which areas in our town are actually being rented. That's just a suggestion, but that's it. That's what I've got. But thank you, Councilor Peck. Councilor Martin. Thank you, Mayor Bagley. I'm not sure where to go with this. I feel like, well, first of all, I'd like some clarification. We don't actually require noticing for an ADU right now, do we? I mean, the code does not require it, does it, Erin? Mayor Bagley, Council Member Martin, the code does not require it, but as Ava mentioned, we have been noticing. And so I think the instances that Council Member Christensen and Council Member Peck are referring to were older than what our current process is. Ava, I don't know if you want to elaborate on when that process started. I don't recall exactly when that was, but I know it's recent. And I know we have been noticing and posting. I mean, obviously you saw the picture of the unit on BROS that had the sign up in front of it. Yeah, so just to elaborate on that, yes, the site plan waiver process is meant to be a more streamlined process. ADUs were put in that category specifically many years ago because we know that these aren't professional land developers building these, they're just homeowners. And so they were put in the site plan waiver process, which does not require public notification because they're relatively small, easy projects. Nevertheless, we did get some complaints. I believe it was in 2019 from neighbors who were unhappy because these were going up and they weren't being notified. And so at that time, our planning director, Joni, directed staff to start doing our own notification where we get a property ownership list of all property owners on the whole block face, both sides, the same faces, the subject property and across the street. And I believe also all parcels behind the subject property that could be impacted. And we send out notices to all of them, letting them know that there's a proposed ADU at that property, send them copies of the site plan or the elevations if they wish to see them. And we also post a sign on the property for anyone who lives in the neighborhood but isn't on that block face that would like more information, they can get our contact info from the sign and reach out to us. And so we do have a public process now with the ADUs, I believe since about summer of 2019 is when we initiated that. So and it's completely voluntary. I mean, you guys are just doing it out of the goodness of your hearts. But we are requiring it, Council Member Martin. Yeah, so anybody who gets a permit, so does the homeowner, the permitting have to do the noticing? You get a little- City staff are doing it right now. I believe I'd have to check with our planner tech that we may have the homeowners help us acquire the property ownership info from Boulder County Assessor Property Records. But either we do it or if the owner's having trouble, we'll do it. But if their owner is able to, we get the info from them. The letters themselves come from our office. We write the notification letter. We have the applicant provide envelopes that are stamped and labeled for all the neighbors. And then we stuff them all and we put them in the mail. So it's a cooperative effort. That's really pretty nice. My question is, can you build an ADU in Southmore Park? Yes. Has anybody done that? I'd refer to Aaron's map. I don't know off the top of my head. Because it seems like that'd be a really good place. They have big backyards and you could put them there without changing the character of the neighborhood. Yeah, Council Member Martin, accessory dwelling units are permitted in all residential zones in the city as well as the mixed use downtown zone. As far as I can tell from the map, we don't have any permitted in Southmore Park. That certainly doesn't mean there couldn't be one there but we just haven't seen that yet. And does that permitting is do, can HOAs prohibit it? Yes. We don't prohibit it. Yes. Okay, that's a question I have. Thank you. Dr. Waters? I would, one of my questions, actually I've got a couple, but I'll just start with kind of building on Council Member Martin's last question. How many ADUs have been constructed in neighborhoods with HOAs? I'll do the prospect. Council Member Waters, I don't have that information readily available. I know there's been at least a few because they're constructed in newer neighborhoods. We could get that information to you, but I don't know that for sure. Covenants are something that, we don't control that that the neighborhood does. Would it be safe to say that very few have been constructed in neighborhoods with HOAs? I think with the exception of prospect who has a very active HOA, and again, that's where the majority of the ADUs are and Mill Village as well. I think that's a fair statement. Yeah, it seems to me that for neighborhoods that don't have HOAs, like the East and West Side historic neighborhoods, we owe them, the council owes those neighborhoods some role in tighter controls of what can or cannot be constructed as an ADU. In response to your questionnaire and about concerns, or maybe it's in response to the mayor's question, I do have concerns about setbacks. I had concerns about notification, but it sounds like maybe I shouldn't have concerns about notification. But the fundamental question for me is, why would we pass any ordinance that we can't enforce? What I heard you say is you got enforcement concerns. It may be the last of the enforcement concerns is whether or not they're occupied by the owner, right? And how do you prove that? But honestly, I can't imagine why we would adopt any ordinance that's unenforceable. And then the question is, what would have to happen in the current ordinance to make it enforceable? That's what I'd like to see you bring back. Here are the things where we need to tighten this up. It's not unlike the short-term rental ordinance where we got passed and it's not unenforceable. Why would we do that? So what has to happen to make this an enforceable ordinance and protect neighborhood character and those people who are having ADUs constructed next to them, even if it's a five-foot setback, we've all gone and visited some of these that are just so out of scale and so intrusive on the neighborhood that they should never have been approved if they were approved. And if they were approved and they're not complying with the approval, then it's not complying it with code, but it's unenforceable. I mean, I've been through that conversation. None of that makes sense to me. So I'm just gonna make my comment and then we go to you, Kate, Paulie. I guess my thoughts are just like what Dr. Water said, basically HOAs protect everywhere else except that downtown Longmont without the HOA, it's just like, ah, we can do whatever we want. You've got landowners who I think are now taking advantage of the ADU regulations we passed a few years ago and they're just squeezing on property. And while I think council's original intent was to create as council member Christiansen said, carriage houses and mother-in-law apartments in order to facilitate more affordable housing, like my ADU, I don't rent it out. I use it for my family. And so allowing somebody to build an ADU and increase their square footage on essentially what is, you know, not having to purchase more land at the expense of your neighbors, I think is unfair and unwise planning. And so, I mean, other things that I've been talking to some of the people down your neighbors, council member Christiansen and they complain about the extra story. They complain that because there's no HOA once you build the ADU, they come in and pour gravel for parking lots. The, I mean, even if you swear on your life that it's gonna be owner occupied, okay, what if you don't? It's unenforceable as we've already discussed. And when you sell it, what happens if I move in and I don't want to rent it and I just want to live in all the buildings, you know, it's just, I think it's not what we envisioned. So, my proposal is we either need to do away with the ADU ordinance altogether or what we need to do are things like, it has to be 50% of the main building, but you can't take into account the basement. And it also has to be 50% of any other primary dwelling unit that is touching the property line. Because it's not, oh, well, it needs to be smaller than my main house. It should be smaller than my neighbor's house. Some of those pictures we saw are huge. And if you have a small little house and my phone blew up and there are several houses that they're not 40 feet wide, they're 20 feet wide, right? And so if you have a 39 foot wide ADU and you happen to own a 20 foot wide house in Old Town, that's pretty big. So I think A, if we don't do away with it, which I'm not advocating, I think we should A, make it so that 50% of the total square footage is half the primary unit, but not including the basement finished square footage. And it also should apply to those main buildings or main residences touching on the property. That would assure that they are small. I also think that the setbacks on the side of the homes, nobody wants a five foot behemoth next to them. And they also, I think that those setbacks should be 10 feet, at least from the property line, side and rear, probably even more. But then again, here's the kicker. I'm not a builder. I'm not a city planner, neither or any of us. So I would propose, I move that we direct city staff to bring back recommendations to solve this problem. That's what I was hoping to see tonight, or not. Okay, Council Member Christensen. All right, it's been seconded, thank you. Council Member Christensen. Neighbors of mine, have you been talking to? No, no, no, I mean, when I say neighbors, I'm not talking about your neighbors. I'm talking about people who live in Old Town. As long as they're not complaining about me. No, no, no, they all love you, Paulie. They all love you. Oh, no, they don't. Some of them do. Yeah, well, I very much agree with Councilman Waters, and I've said this for years too. We can't, there's no point passing an ordinance that we can't enforce. The reason we can't enforce it is because we have no rental licensing. And also because we do not have yearly inspections. These are two things that most other municipalities do. We talked about this apparently, City Council talked about it a decade ago and then decided, yeah, but we were a much smaller town then. And that makes a difference, but we've become a much, you mean the size of the town really makes a difference. And I do think that we really have to do those because that's the only way we can actually assure that the people who live in this town have safe and decent housing and that good landlords don't have to be in competition with bad landlords. And so that's why we need yearly leases. The other thing I wanted to point out is the person across the street who I'm fond of, she's recently moved. So she's renting out both those places even though she doesn't live there. And when she sells it, this is how it actually affects to my mind has a potential negative effect on a neighborhood. I bought my home because I could afford it, barely. Nobody else will be able to afford that house because she'll be able to sell it for twice what she bought it because it's now double the size of everything and or substantially Aaron shaking his head. So I want to hear from him but she'll be able to, in my mind, she'll be able to sell it for more and that makes the whole neighborhood less affordable. The guy next door will be able to sell his house for a lot more than he bought it for. Well, all of us are able to sell our houses but this means it doubles the cost of buying a home in my neighborhood. Not doubles maybe, but makes it substantially more expensive and therefore it sort of makes things less affordable in the long run. The people down the street who just sent out a bulldozer one day is an interesting thing. There's a little tiny house there and they lost their house. They've lived there for probably 40 years and they lost it in the meltdown. So whoever bought it made that the accessory dwelling unit which is also against code but they build a really nice place in front of it and it works out fine. The whole thing is that it's not that I object to these at all. It's that when you get too many of them it changes the character of the neighborhood. It makes it more expensive. It adds to the noise, the pets, the people. It changes everything and it also makes much less sunshine. But when you sell it as the mayor pointed out then what? Is it still an accessory dwelling unit? How will we know? Or is it just much bigger? I mean, there are people doing these sorts of things converting their garages surreptitiously into accessory dwelling units all over town illegally and they've been doing it for a long time and they're gonna keep doing it. We have to be able to reinforce the ordinances that we have. We have to clean them up, clarify them and enforce them. I actually think we've got some very careful work has gone into the accessory dwelling unit ordinance as it is. So I'm very, I just think we need to work on this a little more. All right, so just to remind everybody there's a motion on the floor that would direct staff to bring back and Mayor Pro Tem, you're going next. To direct staff to listen to our suggestions and bring back a solution to this that it sounds like preserve the character of Old Town, Southmore and other areas that don't have HOAs and come back with a solution. So Mayor Pro Tem. Thank you, Mayor Bagley. First, a couple of clarifying questions. I've heard it a couple of times now about the square footage of ADUs. Is that based upon the above grade square footage recognized by county assessor or is it a gross building area where you're including the basement, whether finished or unfinished in the calculation? Hey, Council Member Rodriguez, we do take the finished floor area as corroborated by the Boulder County Assessor and that may include basement area as well because our current ordinance does not distinguish or say specifically that basement floor area cannot count. So it's based on finished area. So let's say a house has a full basement but it's unfinished that would not count for them. Correct. Okay, that's interesting. My other question, which comes up a lot actually is about density and I've heard different answers when I've asked this question myself. For instance, in the residential single family, I believe it's eight units per acre and do ADUs count towards or against the dwelling units per acre? Council Member Rodriguez, ADUs do not count, we do not do a density check on those. Okay, those are the two questions I wanted answered. A quick statement I want to make as the liaison for Planning and Zoning Commission as well as the Historic Preservation Commission is that we have been seeing more ADU related issues coming before both commissions and they're a little bit different in nature based on which commission is. As you can imagine, Historic Preservation is having more conversations regarding compatibility for the neighborhood as design standards. And that's something they may actually bring toward to council is talking about incorporating design standards, not just for ADUs but also for remodels and things of that nature in the historic neighborhoods. And then with Planning and Zoning, we're seeing more of the common issues that were outlined today. I don't necessarily agree with all of the mayor's characterizations, but his motion I think is appropriate and I'll be supporting the motion. And as such, I would like to say that I don't think that the ordinance in and of itself is too bad, I do see tweaks that need to be made such as relating to the questions I asked, but I will be supporting the mayor's motion and looking forward to actually making the sausage at a later time. All right, we're gonna go with council member Suzy Doggle-Faring only because we haven't heard from her yet tonight, okay? Council member Martin, then you can go next. It'll be short. So I am in support of the mayor's motion, but I wanted to add or make sure that it is added to the recommendations for the enforceability issues, issues around anything you're finding that is unenforceable. What kinds of recommendations do you bring, do you recommend that we add to language? And the other one was around, I forgot it. I didn't write it down. So yeah, if you have those recommendations, that would be nice to see that. And I completely, I failed to write out what the second one was, but it'll come back to me in the middle of council member Martin's. And I will call on you when you raise your hand and go, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, just write it down. So council member Martin and council member Peck. So I also support the mayor's motion. I would like to understand when we are gonna make the sausage, I have just based on the questions that others have asked a couple of things to consider of my own. One is I kind of am feeling probably with Mayor Pro Tem Rodriguez that it ought to be above ground space because that's what would determine whether the proportions are right for the ADU. And I'm also thinking that the other issue ought to be there ought to be some space left on the lot and that we could, that also feeds into the proportion of what kind of ADU is there. So somehow, whether it's just planners, you've heard this from the council or whether we need to formalize that more with separate direction, but I think those things should be taken into consideration. But I'd like to vote on the mayor's motion and then have a little more discussion about licensing. Before I call on you, council member Peck, I did tell council member Douglas Faring, as soon as you remember what she was gonna say, we call on her. This should better be good, Susie. Hurry and call me. This is above the full front page tomorrow statement. What is it? I can't do that. It's gonna be very anti-climactic. Just the notices to the neighbors. You said that this is something you do, but I don't think that it is written into policy. So I'm thinking long-term. So after you all have gone and moved on and other people are coming into your place, is that gonna be embedded in the culture or is this something we need to have written in language, stipulated in language to make sure that it does happen? So I would recommend that be put in there as well. And I'd also like to add just very quickly that it does no good to invite input and give notice to the neighbors if the ordinance does not allow their input to make a change or a difference. All it does is really upset people. So when it comes back, I don't know if we have consensus, but I would like the neighbors to be able to stop it if it is not compatible with the neighborhood. And if everybody's really, really, really upset because it's too close to homes, too big, et cetera. So I'm not a planner, but that's what I'd like to see. All right, Council Member Peck. Thank you really fast. When you bring back your recommendations, I would like you to, in order for us to actually recommend this, I would like you to put in there the resources you need in your department in order to make this work. Because as Council Member Waters said, if we can't make it work with the resources, then this is just a waste of our time. So thank you. All right, so before we vote, Harold, I guess, and Erin and Ava, what I'm hearing is a lot of consensus from Council on what to bring back as part of your recommendations. And what I would tell you in private, I'm gonna say in public so you guys can disagree with me, I prefer not to have a list of 10 things where non-expert elected officials say, well, I like this one, I don't like that one. Bring back recommendations to fix the problem as experts. Don't give it back to us and say, do you want a variance of four feet or five feet? Do you want, I mean, just give us some expertise and some recommendations and then we can push back on you if you want to. All right, let's vote. All in favor of the motion, the directing staff to bring back suggested changes in ABU ordinance to address the concerns that have been discussed. Say aye. Aye. Aye. Those opposed, say nay. All right, the motion passes unanimously. Erin? Yes, one additional question, Mayor Bagley. It would be helpful for us to know, and we can certainly develop some recommendations as experts in this arena. It'd be helpful for us to know if you'd like us to conduct community outreach prior so we can have that inform our recommendations or if you'd like us to present those to you and then get input from the community because we have heard issues expressed on both sides. Can you hear me? Yeah, Harold, that basically she asked if you wanted, if council wanted them to seek community input before bringing it back, I think community input's always good and anybody opposed to that, I think we have consensus indicating that you should go ahead and open it up to the community and make sure that those neighborhoods without HOAs get an opportunity to discuss this. Yeah, and I think to your point, Mayor, I think we now know the issues that you all are focused on as a council and I think I can work with Joni and Erin and Ava and the staff to really refine that and bring back some very specific recommendations based on what we heard tonight. Cool, are we doing okay? Do we need another, oh, Councilor Martin, do you have something to say or a question? Yeah, I move that we direct staff to bring back a plan for rental licensing. Second. All right, there's a motion for a plan to bring back a rental licensing. I don't see any, I just don't see what that would do, meaning that, I guess what I'm saying is that, again, we would require someone who wants to rent. I mean, if we really want to allow rent, I mean, if we wanna make housing affordable, as someone who already is not running out as ADU because it's too problematic, there's no way you're gonna get me to rent my ADU for any price if I have to go get to work with the city. I just won't do it. I've got three properties I could rent, I currently don't do it because this council makes it too hard. Next, if we have a rental license, all we're doing is saying, Harold, come up with staff that's gonna go out and enforce the rental licensing because if I don't get a rental license, who's gonna show up? Is Eugene gonna take me to court if I don't have a rental license? And last but not least, if the purpose is to make sure that the rental license is assuring that we have good landlords, that's not gonna do it. I mean, all it's gonna do is just be one more cost saying that before I can rent, I've gotta meet these criteria and pay some money. And so I'm not gonna vote for that. Do I still have the floor? You can have it back. And then I'll go with Councilor Christensen and Council Member Reed-Ivo Farron. So this is the first place I've ever lived where you didn't need your rental license. And we have heard a bunch of resident complaints that about ADUs, about short-term rentals, and all of it has to do with, we can't enforce anything because we don't know who's doing it because we don't require a license. So that's the argument on the other side. And I think, especially with, well, as soon as somebody advertises something, we know they're doing it. So it's not so impossible to enforce licensing. All we've asked for at this point is to request a plan. If the staff says, oh, there's no, we can't come up with a feasible plan and we can't find any other cities that have successfully done this, then they can tell us so. But let's look at it because we hear a lot about, this or that is not enforceable because we don't have licenses. All right, I guess, if we pass it, we're gonna play a game. I'm gonna tell everybody as mayor that I'm gonna rent my ADU and I'm not gonna have a rental license, you catch me. But I'm gonna tell everybody here, I'm gonna do it. And then I'm gonna show you how unenforceable it is. Council member Christianson, but I'll be a good member. Well, don't worry, Mr. Bagley, I will not be renting from you. As Council, good, we've agreed on something. Councilman Martin does rent places and when she brings it up, she understands that it's serious, you know. Most people who rent want to be good landlords. They want things on the up and up. They want things to be regular. They want their tenants to pay on time. They want their tenants to keep a good place. They wanna keep a good place. I don't understand what people find problematic about this. This is what every other medium-sized to large municipality does. It is not onerous and it doesn't have to be expensive. And the city of Boulder's yearly inspection fees are pretty modest, you know. That keeps everybody honest. That way tenants can't complain that, oh, their landlord's not fixing anything. Well, maybe it, you know, maybe they're not telling the truth either. Everybody has a record that they can agree on. That's the kind of basic idea of law is that everybody stands with some middle ground where you can agree on something. To me, this just is what a sensible modern city does. It makes us able to understand what is going on and keep statistics. It makes us able to understand where our rentals are and what they're doing. We can communicate better with landlords. We can communicate better with tenants. We make sure that everybody in town has a decent place to live. Not like the place that I lived where there was a gas leak and the landlord wouldn't fix it. Things like that, you know. It's just a very logical thing to do, whether you can't enforce anything. I mean, people who have been building, have been renting out short-term rentals for a decade now when it was illegal. People have been smoking marijuana for 40 years. That was illegal. People doing all kinds of things that's illegal, whether it is enforceable or not. It sets a basic tone of the fact that we want fair and decent housing here and we want all landlords to be operating on the same principles so that good landlords don't have to be in competition with bad landlords. You can't make a good landlord with a law any more than you make a good tenant with a law. But you can say, this is what our principles are and this is what we stand by. That's the point of it. That was a very eloquent argument, Council Member Christensen. All right, who else? Council Member Edaglfaring. It's still not gonna read from you. Still not gonna read to you. Council Member Edaglfaring and then Dr. Waters. Okay, so I actually just had a couple of questions. And it was really around how many of the complaints that code enforcement receives that could be resolved if we had licensing in the city for landlord licensing. And the other one was around would it serve community, the community resources department, Susan Spaulding who works with landlords for her to collect a better database and understanding of what's happening in the community and just building those relationships between landlords between the city and landlords in the city with tenants. So I think I wanna jump in. Hey, it's hard. We can't answer that tonight because it's actually a different group of staff that would work on that with code enforcement and the other groups. So we would have to look at that and get back to you all with the answers to those questions. It's just a different group that really handles those issues. Okay, thanks. Dr. Waters. Well, maybe Harold then you can't answer this question or Joanie, I saw the Joanie turn out the motion is to bring back a plan for rental licensing. So what my question is, is that a solution to a problem or is that the new problem in terms of enforcement? Are we gonna solve enforcement problems or are we gonna create a new enforcement problem if we create rental licensing? So Mayor Begley, members of council, Joni Marsh, assistant city manager. So I think that's actually a good way to state that question. I think that that's going to take us some time to evaluate out of our 41,000 dwelling units in the city, how many of those are rental? What does the volume of an annual rental program necessitate in terms of staffing? Currently we have one code enforcement housing inspector for all of our IPMC International Property Code maintenance complaints. All of those complaints are largely complaint driven that come through to rectify issues in both rental housing, both multifamily and any of the things we've talked about. So I think there's a whole gamut between short-term rental, ADU, and then also your day-to-day plumbing, heating, all of the necessities that we expect people to have in their home to live comfortably. I think Harold and I are going to have to spend a little bit of time along with Susan to think about what kind of staffing that would take to actually stand up a program and then what kind of ongoing resources would that generate revenue-wise to support that program? Well, I don't, since there's a motion on the floor to give direction to you and to your staff to bring back a plan, I'm trying to decide whether or not to vote for that motion. And your answer to my question is, I don't know if that's a problem or a solution. It's a problem if we don't have a plan for generating more revenue to hire additional enforcement staff. That's what it sounds like. But I don't want you, but I guess I'm not crazy about giving all the things that staff are working on to give them one more thing to chase without knowing it's a solution as opposed to the new problem. Correct, I think- So I think we need some time to look at some of the factors that go into it so I could better answer that question. I just don't think tonight I'm prepared to understand exactly what that would look like. And I guess the other thing is that on the agenda tonight, I guess what I would propose and what I would vote for is treating this motion. This is basically not, we're not talking about ADUs anymore. This is a totally different topic. It has to do with housing, but it's not ADUs. And so this is more rightly brought up at the beginning of a council meeting, which we'll vote on it now if it's fine, saying let's put this on a future agenda. And I would suggest that the motion should be to ask staff, would rental licenses solve some of our problems and then ask what they think we should do. And if they come back and say, yes, rental licenses will solve the following problems. One, two, three, four, five, we act. And if they say, no, we shouldn't because based on our experience or other cities, we should not. If that were the motion and it were put on a future agenda, I would be all for it. What is the motion? What is the motion, Marsha? Can you restate your motion before? Yeah, I said that we should ask staff and I didn't put any time limit on it because I do think this is a long public engagement. But I was acknowledging that we have two contentious issues in front of them. One of them is ADUs and one of them is short-term rentals and they are both, they both touch on this licensing idea and we both, we're all hearing about them every week. I think we would have to see at least the sketch of a plan in order to be able to judge whether it was another problem or whether it was at least a partial solution. So I stand by my motion with the caveat that it doesn't need to be prioritized. It just needs to be in the queue. And the motion being that staff should bring back the basics of a plan. I'll amend it that far to see what the city could do with rental licensing, a rental licensing program. Would you say could or should as part of the motion? I'm not sure that it's necessary to make that distinction. All right, let's go ahead and vote on the motion. If nobody else has anything to add. All in favor of the motion to say aye. Aye. Opposed say nay. Nay. All right, the motion passes five to two with myself and Dr. Waters in the minority. All right, let's move on to, should we take, it's currently 1054. Can we have a motion to extend the meeting please? Still moved. I'll second that. All in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed say nay. All right, the motion to continue the meeting past 11 has been approved unanimously. Let's go ahead and take a three minute break and then we'll come back and talk about land development code amendments, all right? We're going to go ahead and start with six C land development code amendments. So Don is there before we start in preparing this agenda, legal department had some concerns about what council was trying to do. Can we start there? And then, is it part of your presentation? I do have a small portion of about a two minute statement that I was going to make that touches on. You spoke right, et cetera. I was more going to let the council know that we would be sending this to our outside legal council for land use to make sure that we are considering the same legal issues that we were looking at with the SES system. Right, so I guess my question is before we launch into a big discussion and debate on whether or not city council will review individual major development applications that are adjacent to city-owned parks, greenways and open space, would it be more prudent to have legal council say, yes, this is what we can and cannot do before we start having that discussion is my question. What do you guys think? Mayor Pro Tem, Mayor Pro Tem. Are you on mute? You can unmute. Am I on mute? No, we can hear you, I can hear you. Aaron, we can unmute. I couldn't unmute myself, I'm sorry. No. So my question is also along these lines in the sense that it seems like legal had narrowed it down to conditional usage and variances for these kinds of things, not generally all development applications that would come into contact with or a but, I guess, city open space or parks. So to me, it felt like legal had already narrowed down the definition, is that incorrect? So Mayor Pro Tem, Rodriguez, Mayor Bagley, members of council, so I was the person who took the first crack at making the red line changes based on the information that was in the motion that was made almost two years ago now. The motion included the language that it was any application that would have gone to the Planning and Zoning Commission. The city council is already the decider for the majority of major development applications like annexations, rezoning, land use amendments and so on. Items that are not included in your purview and that you do not have final review approval for currently would be conditional use site plans and other variances. You've already given yourself variances for the SES with the revisions that we did previously. This would be, for example, I wanna build a hotel I'm next to a greenway. I wanna build it higher than the zoning code allows. I wanna go 50 feet instead of 40 feet. Previously, that would have only gone to the Planning Commission. Now, if you approve this, it would come to the city council and you would hold a quasi-judicial hearing on the variance itself and you would make a decision based on the review criteria for variance. I understand the process. So my question was just that it seemed, you know, it said in the packet that there were problems before and that at a second point in time that the council clarified so we could be at the point we are at tonight as far as the red line version is concerned. So I was just wondering what were the additional legal concerns on top of what's being presented to us tonight in the red line version? So I think some of the things that we need to be thinking about, for example, our nexus with this change, we also need to be thinking about whether or not there are any vested rights or development rights that we may be impinging upon with a change to our process. That does not mean that these are not items that can be addressed through code revisions, but these are the things that we need to think about. And then there's always the issue that we look at from a taking standpoint. Those are the kinds of things that we would be looking at that we would ask Corey to review when and if council gives us the direction. The reason that I did not send this through to city council, or I'm sorry, to the city attorney's office or to our outside legal council was that I was trying to meet the deadline that I had promised the council when we were doing the SES of getting this back to you in October. If this would have been a perfect world, I would have had time to get that done earlier so that they could have reviewed it and given us any comment prior to this meeting. And Don, my comments were not, so Don, my comments were not to chastise you for not doing it. And Mayor Rotam, my comments are also not to delay this conversation. On the contrary, it's to make the conversation more effective and efficient, having the information that he just referred to so that when we come back, we don't have to argue about ideologies and ethereal ideas. It's either yes or no, it's a taking. Yes or no, they're development impingements. Yes or no, and we just do what we need to. Sure thing. Just one final comment on it as the person who made the original motion, Lord, a couple of years ago now, and it seems to this point, the holy impetus was to bring accountability to the council who are the elected representatives of the people versus an appointed body, such as the zoning commission, specifically in cases where development is occurring next to city-owned properties being open space in parks. And that's the entire motivation impetus behind the motion I made a couple of years ago and where we're at right now. It was not to add further restriction, it was to work in conjunction with the SES as well as the other land development exchanges that we've already made at this point. So it was not to further restrict, but rather just to add a layer of accountability for the voters. So thank you. So really, what do you guys wanna do? We can either have legal come back and respond and so we can continue, or do you want to have the conversation knowing that whatever we decide or talk about it, we might not be able to do. Aaron, it was your motion. What do you think? And then we're gonna go with Councilor Christensen and Dr. Waters then whoever else raises their hand. Well, I'm not quite sure if I've gotten the answer from necessarily our legal department, but to me it sounds like the legal department is at the point where they would like it to be reviewed by a special counsel. I don't know if that's incorrect or not, but that's kind of the characterization I'm getting here, the feeling I'm getting. And if that's the case, I'm okay with making sure that what we are doing passes legal muster by all means. Outside of that, I don't see many other problems with what I've read in the red line as well as our communication as far as meeting the spirit of my motion from a couple of years ago. And for whatever it's worth in the beginning, I would have been opposed to this and the red line, I would agree with you. Just so you know, I'm not opposed to it either. Dr. Waters, actually Councilor Christensen, I saw you nodding. Do you agree with Mayor Pro Tem or do you have something else to add? I do have something that I would like to ask as a question because it's kind of basic. The things that are not covered by this ordinance are, they're two things. Anyway, it also does not cover minor development applications, it says. Could you give us an example of what a minor development application is? Mayor Bagley, Council Member Christensen. So a minor development application would be, for example, a site plan. So it's a use that's permitted in the zoning district and the applicant is proposing to meet all of your regulations that are adopted within the land development code. So those are minor development applications that are approved at a staff level. They don't go up to the planning commission, we review them. For example, and even though, if I wanted to build a McDonald's as an example and it was in the proper zoning district and it required a site plan that would be reviewed at a staff level, this would not cover that at all. If the drive-through was a conditional use in that zoning district because it could impact residents or other kinds of businesses in that area then it would go to planning commission. If this change is approved, planning commission review if they'd make a recommendation to the council, city council would hold the final public hearing and make a determination of whether or not to approve that application or not. Okay, but if McDonald's were abutting the riparian area that would not be a minor application. So it would depend if they are able to meet the standards that you set. If they can meet all of the standards and they stay out of the riparian area, they'd meet the setbacks, all of the everything that you had approved with the SES, they would not need a variance. But if they can't meet those, then it would automatically come up to you. Yeah, okay. Okay, thank you. You're welcome. Dr. Waters. Just in response to your question, Mayor Bagley. First of all, Don, I appreciate you're putting it on your calendar and getting this back to us. In October, I know this has been a grind to work through all the issues around the SES. And you referenced in a perfect world, I suspect the world would be more perfect if you had those four planners you've been working without all year and you might have been able to get it all done had you been fully staffed, which goes to some of the other things we've talked about earlier on this agenda. But Mayor Bagley, I agree with you if there are legal issues that we need to be paying attention to, we ought to do that before we get deeply into doing much more with this rather than spending time on it tonight and then have that be overruled or have the advice from council that we've gone too far or we've been sloppy in what we've done with the redlining. Council Member Beck, I don't know why my microphone's not working and it seems. Thank you, Mayor Bagley. So Don, as you stated correctly or at the beginning of this, this was in our, this land development code we worked on two years ago. So my concern is if we send it before we look at it tonight, we send it to the lawyers. What timeline are we talking about here? For them to, because I don't want it to be May and we're still waiting for these LDCs to come back to us. And that's my only concern is that we keep pushing it off. And then my other question is while we are waiting for us to adopt this are developers allowed to develop on the old code? Yeah, and so that's a problem. Can you tell me what kind of a timeline we're looking at if it goes to the attorneys first before it comes back to us? So Mayor Bagley, Council Member Peck. So first, let me take one step back before I answer the, I think there were two questions in there. But I do see value tonight in discussing this from the standpoint of making sure that what the changes I've got drafted are in line with the motion that was approved by the council. If something is in error or missing, I'd like to know that because that'll be information we need to give to outside council. Okay. So that's the first thing. I'm gonna answer your last question first. Yes, right now, if somebody wants to move forward, they would be under the existing development code. They, unless the council were to pass some kind of a moratorium, which we've talked about in the past. Yeah, that didn't work. They are allowed to proceed underneath the current rules that are in effect when they apply. But once those are adopted, they will be applicable to any development that comes in after they're adopted by the council and in effect. And as far as the time period for getting back, Harold at our meetings that we have every Thursday for agenda to discuss, as we look out through the end of the year, there's not that many more meetings for council to have and take action on along with the items that I think have been prioritized for bringing back to the council. I don't know what Corey's schedule is. Eugene would have to reach out to him and find out when he could get a review done on that and get that back for Eugene to review and discuss with us. So it's possible that it may be February before we're able to bring back an ordinance and get on an agenda, but if council sees this as something that needs to be done and prioritized, then I think that's what we need to know so that we can work with Harold on getting this back on an agenda for you after it's been reviewed. Okay, I would like it prioritized. Actually, I would like to look at your red line version tonight and discuss it and vote on it and move it forward. I have a problem with the timeline because once it goes to the attorneys that it has come back to us to discuss and then it goes to an ordinance then it goes to a second rating, we're looking at a long hall and I don't know that any developer is gonna wait for us to do that. So my comment is I would like to go keep this on the agenda tonight and discuss it, look at your red line version. Council member Martin. Thank you, Mayor Bagley. Mr. Burchett, I looked at the red line version and I don't have any objections to it. It seems consistent with the direction that we gave in the past and I'm seeing nods around. Do you have a presentation on this or is this just an opportunity for us to ask questions and raise objections to the red line? Mayor Bagley, Council member Martin, my presentation tonight was really just an explanation of what the motion was, how I believe that the changes actually implement those. I wanted to touch on the process of that after tonight if we were directed to move to an ordinance that we would begin working on that, but as part of our process, we would send this to Corey, the outside legal council to get his review of the ordinance to make sure that we are not treading into an area that we should not be. And then based on his review, that would dictate whether or not we schedule it for a first reading or if we need to come back either an executive session through legal advice or some other kind of meeting or some kind of memo to the council with an update on that if it's needed, if the changes that are proposed do not cause problems, then we would bring the ordinance back to the next available council meeting once that's been reviewed and approved. That might be our solution just to move that we proceed with the ordinance and make sure that before the ordinance comes back, legal gets the opportunity to review those issues. Second. Yeah, that's a motion. God, you're good mayor pro 10, you got this political thing down. So all right, there's a motion on the floor directing staff to proceed with the drafting of the first ordinance with the caveat that they should run it by legal first before bringing it back. It's been seconded. There's no further discussion or debate. All in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed say nay. All right, the motion carries unanimously. All right, Don, great, good presentation. Thank you. Have a good night. All right. All right, and then last but not least, let's go to the 2021 budget. Mayor Bagley, members of council, Jim Golden, chief financial officer. I'll try to make this brief. We've put this item on your agenda so that we could try to get any final direction on the budget before we present ordinances next Tuesday night. We had identified in the communication that there's $95,701 of one time money that is still undesignated. Since I put this communication together here in the last 24 hours or so, we've identified that next month the staff is planning to come back to you with information on the BMX course at Left Hand Creek. And there are costs that are identified with the solutions that are different options identified with differing costs. So that might be, well, that is another unfunded project. What I would suggest this late hour and given what we're trying to do anticipation of putting an ordinance together for next week is that maybe you might direct the staff to take the $95,701 and add it to the council contingency for the 2021 budget so that you can give us direction at a later date when you have heard about all the needs. So moved. Second. It's been moved and seconded. All in favor say aye. Opposed say nay. All right, the motion carries. There you go, Jim. That's great. That's all we need. Thank you very much. All right, that was easy. All right, let's go on to the mayor and council comments. Anybody want to say something? Council Member Peck. Thank you. I'm trying to pull up what I wrote down that I wanted to say. Hold on. My computer died so I didn't get it. Okay, this message goes out to our public safety department and I want to thank them for working tirelessly to keep Longmont safe. These are strange times with all the fires surrounding us and the challenges posed with this election. I think they're doing an incredible job and I believe I express the sentiments of all of council when I say that we support you. You can count on our support because you've got a very difficult job. Please feel free to let us know how we can better serve you as you serve our community. Thank you for everything you do. Thank you, Joan. Aaron, did you have your hand up? Okay, I guess the only other thing is I got a call today from Chairman Lee Spoonhunter who's the elected leader of the Northern Rappo tribe. They wanted to come down and meet with some council members as well as the sister cities because we have yet to formalize that, you know, the formality thingy. And so they wanted to come down and make sure that we're still their friends. And so my response was we have not met face to face as a council for anything. Is there anybody who would feel comfortable meeting with me with them? Okay. All right, there's four of you, five. So everyone's gonna feel comfortable as long as we social distance, wear some masks, that kind of stuff. All right, well, I'll just have Harold and Maria coordinated them, but they were wanting to come down on, not this Friday, but the following Friday. Joan? So how do we do that with the Sunshine Lodge? Does this have to be- Yeah, we'd post it. Yeah, we'd post it. Yeah, and the, but the questions they have are, well, when are we gonna sign the official sister cities agreement? What about the Sweat Lodge that we talked about? How's Longmont doing? You know, they just wanted, they just wanted to come down and be our friend, I think. Councilor Christensen? I'm really happy to hear that because I attended several conferences, you know, Zoom meetings for Indigenous Peoples Day and I, we haven't done anything. We really need to do more. So, and I also, I'm worried about how their health is. So I'd like to know how the community up there, both the Shoshone's and the Northern Arapaho are doing. And if there's anything we can do to help them. I think they will find that question and concern heartwarming and welcoming. That's awesome. Yeah, so I'm really delighted. I just think that they're gonna come down. It's cool. All right, cool. All right, any other comments other than the fact that it's COVID, Northern Colorado is burning. We've got a presidential election like none other and it just keeps getting more and more interesting. So, Marcia, do you wanna introduce your cat please? And then we'll go to Harold. Sure, this is Gimbal. He is my last surviving cat. So he's gotta live a long time because otherwise I won't be a weird cat lady anymore. And of course he won't look at the camera and now that, come here, Gimbal, show your face. Okay, yeah, that's him. Okay, all right, we'll keep cat. Harold, do you have anything tonight? I do have a quick question for you all. So we were supposed to have the joint meeting with the Housing Authority this Tuesday based on everything. We just didn't have time to get it done. Probably a good thing. We didn't add that to this agenda. We do need to do it on the 27th and wanted to throw it out to council. Would you all be willing to do a pre-session with the Housing Authority so that we don't, we start the other one at seven and we can have the public meeting starting at five or 530? It looks like everybody agrees, Harold. Okay. All right, Eugene, what about you? No comments, Mayor. Earning your money, Eugene. Always earning your money. That's right, buddy. All right, Joan, somebody, can we have a motion to adjourn, please? I guess this is my job. Second. All right, all in favor of adjourning? Say aye. Aye. Oppose, say nay. All right, the ayes have it, we are adjourned. All right, see you guys next week and then on Friday with your Apple. Thank you.