 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 or the mayor open the meeting for public comment. Callers are not able to access the meeting at any other time. Watch for the instructions to be displayed and write down the meeting ID when it is played at the beginning of the meeting. Wait for I or the mayor or me to open public comment and direct callers to call in. When the mayor or me say to call in dial the toll free number enter the meeting ID and when asked for your participant ID press pound. Mute the live stream and I repeat mute the live stream and listen for instructions on the phone. Callers will hear confirmation they have entered the meeting will be told how many others already participating in the meeting, which includes staff and the city 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 allow to unmute to provide their comments. Comments are limited to three minutes just like normal public invited to be heard per person and each speaker will be asked to state their name and address for the record prior to proceeding with their comments. Once done speaking callers should hang up. At this time we will take motions to wreck the city managed to add agenda items to future agendas. Councilmember Martin. Thank you mirror pro Tim. I would like to move to add the resolution that the council members received in their email this afternoon to the agenda, the consent agenda for the next regular meeting. And I would like to ask the city clerk because of the ballot mailing timing, whether it would be appropriate since next week isn't a regular session to suspend the rules so that the council could debate it. I'll second the motion to put this on an agenda I don't know what to do the rest with the rest of the request. I don't either that's why I asked so we've got a motion now we can debate it right now we can discuss it right. Yes, the motion is the motions been made and seconded. The proper procedure would be at that meeting to suspend the rules of procedure to make such a vote, if you will. At least that's my understanding if somebody would like to clarify any gene. Eugene. Mayor and council you could vote at this meeting to make next week's meeting a regular meeting. Otherwise you could suspend at the time that next week. I could spend rule procedures to take a formal action then. Thank you. Thank you city attorney may as such let's I think before we decide on any procedural votes let's let's first have any sort of debate on this motion. Council member pack, I mean Christensen sorry. I don't really think it's appropriate for us to spend our time debating ballot issues in city council. These are statewide ballot issues and I, I really don't see why we would be debating them. We all vote on these and I, I don't see the necessity of spending our time and the public's time debating state ballot issues. Council member Martin. I find that a surprising attitude because last year council member Christensen was in favor of a number of resolutions in support of legislation going on at the state level that had strong impacts on municipalities. And this ballot measure has the strongest of all possible impacts on on the state on municipalities and our local school districts, and it has been endorsed by the Colorado Municipal League. So, I think it's important for for Longmont to add its, its voice, because we, you know this was an emergency referral by the in the emergency session of the state legislature for the purpose of making sure that the municipal and school budgets were rescued from a possible loss in revenue due due to operation of the Gallagher amendment which would lower the residential assessment rate by almost 2%. To raise anybody's taxes unless the price of their home is homes assessed value goes up at the desk next assessment. It just freezes the residential assessment rate where it is now. So, you know, I, I think it's important that we have this, this, you know, this fiscal rescue measure be endorsed by Longmont because we are severely impacted by it. And certainly we should debate it. I mean you guys can vote it down if you want to but I think we should debate it. Any other comments for council. Seeing none. Just quickly before we weigh in. I don't think there's anything inappropriate about weighing in as a council on state measures measures say for instance that RTD is taking. Obviously can take positions on these things as a council, whether we do or not it's a different story, but I feel that it's totally appropriate to do so. So, as such, seeing no other debate, I will take the vote all in favor of Councilmember Martin's motion say aye. Hi. Hi. All opposed say nay. Nay. So the measure passes five to one with Councilmember Christensen-Descente. Is there any additional motions at this time? Mayor Pro Tem may I interject a question just to be clear? Yes. That motion did not include changing the meeting next week to a regular session. Not at this time. Okay. Councilmember Martin indicated she may have an additional motion. Very good. Councilmember Martin. Again, I'm, you know, the next regular session right now is essentially on the same day as most people will be receiving their ballots. It's just not before the ballots are mailed. So I'm not sure that we need to disrupt the schedule just for that. I think that the next regular session would be sufficient. However, I'm willing to listen to arguments for bringing it sooner. Okay. Before we hear any sort of arguments on not yet made motion, which I didn't hear a motion in that statement, I'd like to ask Attorney City Attorney May if we can have a procedural motion in the next meeting, not to make the whole thing a regular session, but to hold a vote on one specific item. Okay. Next up, Mayor and Council Eugene May, City Attorney. Generally it's either regular session or study session is the way that our council rules of procedure are set up. I think you could vote to have just that one item. It may be confusing for the public. Not knowing if it's labeled a study session, then they think maybe that there isn't any formal final action that is going to take place. So I would think that the structures laid out in the council rules of procedure are those that would be followed. All right. Thank you, City Attorney May. Any additional motions at this time? All right. Seeing none, I guess we'll move on to the public invited to be heard according to my script. It's time to call in now. The information is being displayed on the screen. Please mute the live stream and dial in now. We'll take a five minute break to give everyone time to get dialed in. See you in five minutes. Thank you. Dawn, can you hear me? You're muted, Mayor Pro Tem. Thank you. I saw that. Hopefully Mayor Bagley will take control of the meeting. All right. Mayor Bagley, welcome. Sorry about that, Erin. I really appreciate you doing that for me. Thanks. Where are we at? First call, public invite to be heard. We are at public invite to be heard. We have one caller. Great. Let's hear who they are and what they have to say. All right. Caller with phone number ending in 414, please unmute and state your name and address for the record. You have three minutes to speak. Caller phone number ending in 414, please unmute and go ahead and speak. Caller 414, can you unmute? Can Polly make it back from the funeral? She did. Did she hear? Caller 414, can you unmute? There you are. Please state your name and address for the record. You've got three minutes. Good evening, Mayor Bagley and Council members. Sharon O'Leary, 534 Emory Street. I'm here tonight in anticipation of the City of Longmont turning 150 years old in 2021. But paired with that excitement, it's concerned for the fear of its 175th birthday in 2046. Presently, the greatest detriment to Longmont's preservation is holes in the city's demolition requirements for historic neighborhoods and the lack of a full-time planner for historic preservation and the missing or lost architectural guidelines within the new streamline zoning of the city. A present example is 830 Emory Street, a home within the original square mile will be allowed to add an addition to the front of their home after it demolishes the entire house above grade with the exception of the north and south walls and then replace it with a two-story mishmash of architectural styles. The demolition process does not require presentation or feedback from the Historic Preservation Commission. Another potential scenario is demolition by neglect. Because of the present code, homeowners can allow their property to just deteriorate until maybe it might need to be demolished or if someone accidentally demolishes their property, they are only fined $50. The penalty hardly fits the crime. In streamlining the city zoning, Tena lost their RLE zoning, which addressed architectural guidelines for new additions. This would give property owners clear guidance on what the expectations are in the developmental code, so I ask that you direct city planners to review this. First, any new construction compatibility should be determined by the roof's pitch and overhang, window size and orientation or exterior materials. Second, new construction incorporating elements from a single architectural period. A craftsman's front porch doesn't belong on a Victorian home. Third, alterations to existing homes should have minimal impacts on the streetscape. A second floor addition that changes the roof line should be stepped back. Fourth, site plans should continue the existing development pattern of the neighborhood. Maintain a front yard, a side yard and setbacks to match the pattern within the block. Maintain ample year yard with garages and accessory dwelling units and setbacks towards the rear of the line. So what I'm asking you to do is to give direction to staff and walk the walk. Please put a temporary moratorium on demolitions within the historic area, such as downtown, historic east side and historic west side neighborhood, until a more thorough update is completed. To authorize staff to add protections for historic neighborhoods as a result of the new land development code. Architectural guidelines that were part of Henneth's previous RLE zoning were promised, but to date have not been completed. And finally, designate a full-time historic preservation planner rather than a part-time position that has been constantly changing. If you cannot do this permanently, then in honor of Longmont's 150th birthday, please give the present of a one-year planner so that all work can be completed. Our concern comes out of our current rapid sale of homes within the historic east side neighborhood, Longmont's oldest neighborhood, and anything you can do to help preservation is greatly appreciated. Again, I thank you for your time and dedication to the citizens of Longmont. All right, thank you. All right, let's go ahead and do our COVID-19 update. Harold? Mayor and council, I have a quick update for you. I wanted to start off with this afternoon, Boulder County did release a press release. And you'll see in some of the data, they have seen a slight downward trend in the number of new cases among 18 to 22-year-old residents over the last week. They are seeing some increases in the other age groups. And while the downward trend in 18 to 22-year-olds is good, it indicates that the strategies they're using that are starting to work, they do want us to pay attention to the growth in the other age categories as we continue to move forward. It's important that we continue to follow the guidelines that they talk about on a regular basis, socially distancing, wearing face covering, limiting gatherings, and staying at home when sick. You know, what this does, and I've talked about it before, is really, we know that how they look at where we are in various stages is really based on the numbers and what we're seeing within our community. And so, you know, and it could affect occupancy limits for businesses within Boulder County. So we need to really stay vigilant, I guess, was the message that they put out. They were out front on this one. If we look at the cases, we're in the red zone for new cases. Obviously, that's still a product of what we were seeing within the 18 and 22-year-olds. But in terms of the positivity rate, we moved in the yellow zone, and I will show that to you all in a second. Boulder County Public Health is going to submit a formal mitigation plan to the Colorado Department of Public Health on September 30th, based on the timelines that are put in place. They're going to include evidence of results coming from the mitigation efforts that they've put in place thus far. They will then have a conversation to see if there are any additional mitigation efforts that's going to be necessary. So what they're really saying in this press release is we've been doing well in terms outside of the 18 to 22-year-old population group. We've been performing better than the state has throughout this, but we're starting to potentially see a trend that's similar to the state in overall cases. I'm going to bring this up, and I'm going to share my screen with you all. So when you see this screen, this is the dial screen that we've been talking about when you look at, and this is the one that CDPHE has put out. What you can see is we are in the red in terms of the number of cases we've been seeing. Again, when you see the other charts, you can see that it's related to the growth that we've seen in 18 to 22-year-olds. This is the one that Jeff was referring to in terms of the positivity rate. If you'll remember the last time I presented on this to council, we were actually in the green. We're still in the green in terms of hospitalizations. Based on the report I received from Dan this morning, as of this morning, we actually had two cases within the hospitals here in Lawnmower. Going to, can you all see the other screen with the charts? Yes, Harold. Okay. So when you look at this chart, you can see obviously the spike that we hit in cases when we were talking about what we were seeing with 18 to 22-year-olds. It's been going down. The last few days have been pretty good in terms of the number of new cases. This is really the chart that shows the impact of that 18 to 22-year-old population. As you can see, we had nine cases on the 27th. We had 29 total cases, two of which were in the 18 to 22-year-old population. I had a question today about this number. And I think when we look at it, we really look here and see what's happening. But again, we were much lower earlier in the process. So just a reminder that as we're watching these numbers, we need to continue doing what I call the big three, wear your face mask, socially distance, and practice good hygiene. When you look at the data, our current five-day average percent positive is 5.9%. Overall, we're at 4.3%. This really tracks what we've been seeing over time. And you can see that increase where we were over six. We've now dropped and we're a little below six as we continue to move forward. Again, still performing a significant number of tests in Boulder County, in excess of 1,000, many of the days over the last week. And so that's a good sign that they still have the ability to perform a large number of tests. When you look at the transmission source, at least in the last data set, you're not seeing the orange, which is in the community side, you're seeing limited person-to-person or travel in those numbers. Again, just looking at the numbers themselves, a lot of cases in this age group. And this is the slide that I showed you that was in Jeff Zayac's slide deck that he presented last week on the school issue. They've now included on their webpage, so it's a good slide to see. Obviously, you can see that slight uptick that they're referring to in all of the other population groups. But in 18 to 19, you can see repeat. And now they're moving down. They hope that the mitigation efforts continue performing and show a further decrease. Same with 18 to 22-year-olds. And then this graph, they now have the scale set. And you can obviously see where the bulk of the cases are within Boulder County. Again, the five-day average, when you look at the numbers, this is a really good sign. We hope that this continues, again, because the numbers are really setting the plane filled for how we continue to move forward. And then when you look at the cases where folks live, so obviously, boulders at 2,600 cases were now at 909. And then when you look at, when they normalize that for 100,000 population, you can see where everyone's moving, or the three larger communities are moving in the same direction with Boulder at 2,400 cases per 100,000. These numbers are now staying relatively consistent. I think this hit 3.2. It's now 30.3. And then when we look at long-term care facilities, you can see a couple here and there. But again, nothing like we saw at the front end of the pandemic in the long-term care facilities. You can see then on the dials that, and this is one I want to show you all, if you'll remember, I think last time the available MedSearch beds was somewhere in this area. It's now back in the yellow. And then the ICU beds, they've moved into the red. But again, what we're seeing locally in terms of patients admitted for COVID, Dan indicated that there were two today in Longmont. So, I mean, that's the data that I have to go over with you all today. Obviously, we're now starting to have more meetings. I know that they're scheduling more meetings. There was one yesterday with the emergency managers in terms of what we're seeing. They're going to start scheduling those on a more regular basis with us to start going over information. So, we understand the situation and potentially where we're moving. But at this point, the data is very similar to last week. And the big thing for all of us as a community is to continue doing what we've been doing. And it's wearing our mask and socially distancing as we continue to move forward. I'd be happy to answer any questions at this time. Thank you, Mayor Bagley. Just a quick question. You may not have the answer to this, Harold, but as far as the breakdown between CU-affiliated cases and non-CU-affiliated cases, I was just wondering where the degree of separation is. For instance, if you are a couple living in Boulder, you don't work for the university, but say your nanny is a student, would they, for instance, if they caught a case, would they be included as CU-affiliated? You know, I don't know the answer to that question. Let us look into it and we'll get back to you with that information. I think at least what I remember them hearing is whether you're a student or a staff member there. So that wouldn't necessarily get counted on that number? I don't think it would, but let me double check the answer and we'll get back in touch with you. All right, thank you. And if you remember in the last week's slide deck that we had from Jeff, they actually broke down 18 to 22 and those that were associated with CU and those who weren't. So I know they're parsing that data out. All right, thanks, Harold. All right, let's go on. I've got one thing. We don't have city manager comments at the beginning, but one of the things I did want to talk about with you all, you've had a lot of questions regarding where we're moving with AMI and I wanted to let you all know Dave will talk about that in more detail, but we are planning an update to council in October to go over that in more detail. Now I'm done. All right, let's hand it off to Jim Golden. And let's do a 2021 budget presentation. Mayor and City Council, Theresa Malloy, Budget Manager. Jim, are you going to say something here? No, go ahead. Okay, so if we could have our first presentation, please. And next slide. So I am joined by Melody Palero. So Melody, if you wouldn't mind joining me, please. And together Melody and I are going to cover for you the priority-based budgeting. Then we have Annie and her staff and she's going to talk to you about sustainability followed by Valerie and she's going to cover the next slide programs. And then David Hornbacher will talk about advance metering. And then Sandy is going to cover the public, the Longmont public media. And finally, Jim is going to wrap it up with those final three topics for you this evening. So next slide, please. My comments this evening regarding the priority-based budgeting are going to be pretty brief for you since we did just provide a more in-depth review of our process for several of you back in June. We certainly can't get into more details. Should that be desired, just let us know. The city has utilized a priority-based budgeting process citywide since 2013. In 2018, the process was updated to incorporate the Envision Longmont guiding principles as the desired results. As Council is aware, this process includes several steps that ends with a prioritized list of city services. It includes a community involvement step to value the results. This involvement process resulted in the relative weightings of the results that you see here. This weighting was used in the scoring of the programs. The complete background information including the steps and the scoring criteria can be found on the city's website, and we did provide a link to our information that's on the website for you in the Council Communication. Next slide. The city's priority-based budgeting data has been updated to reflect the 2021 proposed budget. The quartile graph on the top here shows the 2021 proposed budget. The darker blue bars on the top compared to the 2020 adopted budget. 58.4% of the 2021 proposed budget supports quartile one programs with another 26.1 supporting quartile two programs. It's important to note that this is the operating budgets only, and does not include any funding that is part of our capital improvement program, debt service, or any transfers to other funds. In your packet, we included three PBB attachments for your reference. Attachment O is the quartile graphs for each of the major operating funds. Attachment P and Q are a complete list of all programs, and the 2021 budget amounts broken out by personnel, non-personnel, and total budget. P is the list of community programs, and Q is the governance programs. Each ongoing budget request was evaluated from the perspective of how it aligns with our PBB programs. The second graph on the bottom of the slide shows our ongoing level one, and level two increases by quartile for the general fund. Next slide, please. So I'm now going to turn it over to Melody, who's going to take you to our PBB model that is available to the public on the city's website. So Melody. All right, good evening, Dawn, if you could hold that up please. So good evening, Mayor and Council Members. I am Melody Polaro, the senior budget analyst with the city. So as Theresa mentioned, this is our budget prioritization information that we have out on our website. At the top of this is just our overall background, and then as you scroll down, you can see the steps that we have identified just for your information. And then at the very bottom of this screen, we have a tutorial video that will walk you through the website I will be walking you through tonight, and then we also have an email address if there's any questions, there's an email that the public can access that we can respond to. So Dawn, if you'll go to the website, please. So this is our PBB online data website, and this is a nice capture of all of the information we put together during our party-based budgeting process. And I'll let this, oh, yes. I'm sorry to interrupt, but can you enlarge that page? It's very, very small. Or Dawn, can you? Sorry, Dawn's driving for me tonight. Is that better? It doesn't fill the space like the other presentations do. So I don't know what it is, but it's very tiny. That's as large as it will go for me. Okay, thanks. All right, sorry about that. So across the top are our community results, and you can see if you click through those tabs, the definitions below will change so that you can see how those results are defined. And then we also have in green our governance results, but I am going to focus on the housing services, amenities, and opportunities for all. So if you click on that, if we scroll down, this will open up a tree plot, which is all of the departments that have programs allocated to this specific result. And on the right are our community services grouping that I want to focus on. So if we click in there, this will open up all of our community services divisions that have allocated their programs or their resources to these programs within this specific result. So if we take a look at the recreation division, I'm going to show you this program here. So what I kind of want to explain what these boxes represent. So the larger the box, the higher the dollar amount that has been allocated to this program, and then the darker the shade of the box, the higher that specific program scored to those results. So on a scale of zero to four, four being higher score. So if we take a look at the rec center program events and services, we can click on there. And it will open up a detailed description of that specific program, the total cost that has been allocated to that program, the total FTE. And then if you scroll down, there's a pie chart, and that is breaking up the personnel versus non-personnel costs that have been allocated. And then if we scroll up a little bit, there is a positions tab. And this opens up all of the positions that have been allocated to this. And if we scroll down a little more, those are the specific positions with the costs that have been allocated. And then if we scroll back up, there's the operating costs. And these represent the line item budget that has been allocated to this program for those operating costs. And there's that breakout below. So if we close this, we can dismiss this at the bottom of the screen. It's over to the right. And there you go. So if we go back to overall, if we click that, it will take us back to where we began. And then there's also a table view of all of this information, which then is able, you are able to export this to Excel for anybody who's interested in that. And that's all I have on this. So thank you for your time. So certainly feel free to poke around and play with our model that's on the website. And if you have any questions, as Melody mentioned, we do have that email address. You can send your questions that way and she will be able to answer those for you. Over the next six months or so, staff is going to embark upon a complete update to our PVB process. And that will include the addition of an equity component to the scoring part of the process. The update will then be implemented with our 2022 budget. So that concludes our remarks for you on the PVB portion of the presentation this evening. You can certainly answer any questions that you may have. All right. We're good. Next. Okay. Turning it over then to Annie Noble. Erin, I need to step away just for a sec. I'll be back in two minutes. It's yours. Okay. Can you hear me and see me? Absolutely. Okay. Thank you. Can you start the sustainability budget presentation, please? Thank you. So Mayor Pro Tem, members of council, I'm Annie Noble, Environmental Services Manager and Public Works and Natural Resources. And I'll be presenting the sustainability budget tonight. There are several staff here to help me answer any questions. And we look forward to taking any comments or direction you may have. Next slide, please. So I have 10 slides, but I'll be brief. I'm going to start out by looking at what is sustainability? What is the role of the program and what are the funding sources? And then I'll talk about the work that's currently underway and go into the 2021 budget. And I'll conclude with a list of other citywide efforts that are related to sustainability. Next slide, please. So sustainability is often described as meeting our needs without compromising the needs of future generations. I view it as a lens from which we evaluate social, economic, and environmental factors when we make a decision. This is also called the triple bottom line or the three pillars of sustainability. The role of the program is to manage track, sorry, manage, track, support, and collaborate on the strategies identified in the sustainability plan, which involves a wide range of programs citywide. Next slide, please. The sustainability plan identifies 10 topic areas which contain specific actions that are categorized into immediate, near-term, and mid-term timeframes. The city council work plan also directs the work of the program, and a significant example of this this year was the work of the climate action task force. Next slide, please. This year was the first year that a sustainability fund was established with funding contributions from various city funds. In 2021, funding contributions are being requested from the funds listed on this slide based on the topic areas that were identified in next year's work plan. 2020 was also the first year of the Boulder County sustainability tax, and Longmont received $125,800 from that tax, and we provided a $32,000 much. Next slide, please. So on this slide, I've listed the major components of this year's budget. The first four items were funded through the Boulder County tax, and that included hiring a grant and residential program coordinator, which is a two-year fixed-term position, funding a neighborhood impact grant program, which is a fund that has been set up in partnership with the Longmont Community Foundation, and that's it provides an opportunity for neighborhoods to apply for grants to make improvements that have a public benefit. The WIC farmers market program, which provides weekly vouchers for income eligible families to use at the farmers market, and then the development of the equitable carbon-free transportation roadmap, which is a plan that will identify opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the transportation sector, and this will be presented to council this fall. Other program initiatives that were not funded through the county tax included the 2019 greenhouse gas inventory, which will also be presented to council this fall, the sustainable business program, which has been helping businesses with economic recovery from COVID, other neighborhood programs like the SOLE program, which is sustainable opportunities, lifestyles, and leadership, and that program involves training volunteer technicians to go into people's homes and do energy and efficiency improvements, and also provide education and outreach. And the last is the development of equity strategies with the support of the Just Transition Plan Committee. Next slide, please. The proposed 2021 budget is $359,000, and that's excluding salaries and a $50,000 one-time request for an update to the sustainability plan. This is the same as the base budget for 2020. And I've grouped the budget into similar categories that I just described. General sustainability includes items like temporary staff, membership dues to CC4CA, which is the Colorado Communities for Climate Action programs related to waste, air quality, the natural environment, and building an infrastructure. There's also a line item of $70,000 in the budget, and that's for efforts that will be funded through the Boulder County Sustainability Tax, and I'll go through that in greater detail in the next slide, please. So the 2021 proposed budget assumes $150,000 for work funded through the sustainability tax, and that includes a 25% match of the $150,000. $80,000 has already been committed, and that's for a two-year fixed term grant and program coordinator position. Staff is currently seeking feedback from the Sustainability Board and through the Sustainability Coalition on four other opportunities for the remaining $70,000, which includes the continuing to fund the Neighborhood Impact Grant, the development of a climate vulnerability risk map to identify areas, geographic areas in the city that are of climate risk, and develop recommendations for addressing those risks. Funding a temporary position, which is a Climate Equity and Community Engagement Specialist, which could help support recommendations in the Climate Action Report, and then expanding other neighborhood programs like the SOLE program. Next slide, please. So in addition to the funding in the 2021 Sustainability Program budget, there are many proposed citywide budget requests that help support the strategies of the sustainability plan, and I have several of those listed here on the slide. This includes CIP projects for city building efficiency improvements, funding for transit, residential and commercial energy efficiency programs, air quality programs, waste diversion, which includes recycling and composting, and water conservation programs. So with that, next slide, I'm happy to answer any questions, and there's staff here to help me. All right, I don't see any questions, so let's keep going. Is that the second report, or is there another one? I think there's somebody following me, maybe next slide. Next slide's following, and then then David. All right, Ms. Dodd and Dale, you guys up? Yes, I am. Good evening. Good evening, Mayor Bagley, Members of Council, Valerie Dodd, Executive Director of NextLight. I'm happy to be back in front of you. I'm going to talk a little bit about 2020 results, which I think, Mayor, you've been interested in lately, and I'll talk also about 2021 or 2021 budgets and strategies. So we'll go to the next slide, and I always want to make sure that we orient ourselves in the mission for NextLight. And it really is to deliver our neighbors a world of possibility by providing fast, reliable, fiber connectivity while being accessible and easy to do business with. Those last two points you'll hear throughout my presentation. So now let's talk about the 2021 goals. Really, our goals and objectives are going to be the same, probably year to year. We might tweak some of the numbers, but really what we're trying to do is drive customer growth. We're trying to make sure as many people as many residents in Longmont as possible have access and actually have our service and can get it and afford it. So that's very important. The next piece is assuring that we have the capacity for all those growing customers and their growing consumption, as well as a very reliable network. And then lastly, this is an important one, is we want to make sure that we're delighting our customers and our residents. We want to drive an exceptional customer experience so that they become advocates on our behalf. So next slide, speaking of the customer experience piece, we've done a few things in 2020 and late 2019 that have improved our customer experience. One is really recent. We have implemented a new IVR system so that customers calling into either LPC or next light don't have to go to the same call queue, don't have to wait in line. They don't get confused about reporting the next light outage versus an electric outage. So we've separated the phone IVR and then we've added in a callback feature. That way you don't have to stay on the phone waiting for the next available rep if you don't have to. So we have recently implemented that and are excited about it. We also, as you probably are well aware, introduced the customer connection corner or center at our service center location on Sherman. And that allows us to invite customers in to see us if they have perhaps hearing difficulties, if they want to make cash payments, etc. We're making it really easy to do business with us at that location. We've also extended our hours of support. We have 24-7 online sign up for service. We now are doing Saturday installations. It goes back to being accessible. We want to make sure everybody working Monday through Friday, if they can't get off work, they can stay at home and get a Saturday install. We're also making evening calls or evening support available as well, two nights a week. In 2021, if not sooner, we're hoping or we will be implementing a pay by phone functionality. This is important for two reasons. One, it's again easy to do business with. It is for our customers. Secondly, it allows our customer service reps to work from home. Right now, they're taking a lot of payments. And in order to take a payment from a customer, they have to physically be in a PCI compliant workspace. So going forward when a customer can just hit a number and go into a queue and make an automatic credit card or bank account payment, then they can do that from home and they don't have to come into the office. So that's particularly important during this pandemic. So we're excited about that functionality. Sandy, thank you for your help with that. And then secondly, to improve our customer experience, we are trialing some Wi-Fi mesh satellite devices so that if you happen to have a large home, maybe Mayor Bagley does, and he has his router in the basement, but he wants his service up on the top floor, then this would be an extender to maximize that wireless coverage. Next slide. Now I'm going to talk about customer acquisition. So think of that as the sales and marketing arm of Nexlite's operation. So in 2020, we've done some cool things. We've refreshed our logo. It's bigger and easier to see from a distance. So it helps with our branding and marketing. We added to the tagline gig internet. It did have broadband before. Broadband can be copper or 3 megabit. We didn't want to do that. We wanted to take full advantage of the fact that we are gigabit capable. So gig internet was added to the tagline. And then hopefully you've seen the beautiful fleet vehicles that we have driving around with the new logo, which looks kind of like this slide on the bottom right hand corner. We've also recently engaged a new marketing partner and agency to help us with our digital online marketing, advertising our website, and really helping us reach out to the right segments. This is, I think, great interest to all. And it's something I'm really proud of the team for getting done very quickly. And that's the income qualifying offers. And it was something we wanted to do. COVID happened. We jumped into high gear and got the necessary approvals very quickly for which I'm so grateful. So customers that have maybe never had internet or had our internet could get free internet installed at no cost and get service for two months free. Now, if they want to keep the service, they can pay just $14.95 a month. It's a great deal. They can also get one gigabit, which some people have done. And then for existing customers that would be income qualifying, because maybe they're part of a school lunch program or on Medicaid, then if they were paying the higher normal rate, we allowed them to come down to that $14.95 or $44.95 In fact, we reached out to all of our CARES program participants and said, you know what, we see that you have our internet service you now qualify for this lower rate. So we were very proactive in making sure we moved them to the right price point. So that was cool. The next thing we've done is with the Sharing the Next Light program. For one, we made sure we extended it to K through 12. Well, then we realized we might have some community college students or even local college students that were Pell grant recipients. If they are, they are now qualifying for Sharing the Next Light program, which provides free internet service. One other thing we did is we realized some children may be doing their schoolwork and getting their child care from an aunt and uncle, a grandparent. Well, we needed to make sure that those children in those extended family households during the school year could get access to internet. So we're including those families as well. As long as there's a student in their home, they can qualify. Again, income qualifying part of the school lunch program. And then lastly, one thing that we were working on, thanks to Dr. Waters, which I appreciate he reached out to me and asked about preschoolers because preschoolers could conceivably get left behind if their parents are not online, getting access to information about education, about schools, about medical care, about COVID, whatever it may be. And so we're now looking to see if we can find some additional support, some other foundations that might be able to contribute to Sharing the Next Light such that we can get preschool or families with preschoolers online. So Dr. Waters, we hope to have an update for you very soon. And then the last thing under this particular topic is the bulk internet. That's something that we implemented recently with, oh, I'm going to think of the name, Village Co-op. And that's whereby we get 100% of those units signed up with our internet service by going through the Property Management Organization, and they basically handle the billing to their residents or occupants. And so we're able to provide service to them at a discounted rate and get 100% of the occupants. It's a great thing. Now in 2021 and or possibly sooner, we will have a refreshed website. It'll be ADA compliant and not only will it be in English, but it'll also be in Spanish. It'll be a parallel mirror site of the primary site. We'll also have new digital ads. We'll have landing pages for those targets that we're really trying to reach that we haven't yet. And then lastly, the thing I'm really excited about, and I believe Harold is as well, and that is cross city promotion capability. And so we're hoping to get a sophisticated website such that we can promote if it's composting, if it's golf discounts, tea time discounts, or the museum or whatever might be relevant to that particular customer. We want to make sure we do some cross promotion with that. Next slide, please. I mentioned the bulk housing. We're working with Harold and Kathy and team on doing some things with those properties. For one, we're helping turn up the TLS circuit so that those properties can get on the city network. Secondly, we're making sure that they all have fiber so that they can all get access to next slide internet service. So we're building out fiber to the suites as we speak. And then we're looking at doing that bulk deal so that we can provide a good discounted internet price to those properties, which also happen to have tenants that might be income qualifying. So it's really getting, providing a great value and a great service for those properties. So we are working through that. I do want to note that the deal that we are giving LHA would be no different than any other property management or apartment that happened to be serving income qualifying households and willing to sign a bulk deal. Next slide, please. So let's talk about customer results and outlook. So 2020, we're experiencing about a 9% year-over-year growth. Pretty phenomenal. We're hoping to end the year with 22,500 customers. That is 800 above the original forecast and budget, so pretty excited about that. In 2021, we're going to probably see a little bit of a dip in the growth, but still a 6% growth is what we're expecting and would end the year at 23,780. So again, that is exceeding our outlook as well. Next slide, please. So I talked about those special offers that we implemented at the onset of COVID earlier. So let me give you the numbers for that. The income qualifying offers, which are the $14.95 or $44.95, we have 432 households with that service. We have 72 households that are experiencing the two months free. Hopefully, we'll convert them to a $14.95 customer, or those customers could qualify for sharing the next slide, and then they would have service for a year. Sharing the next slide, we have 54 households with it, but we have money right now for at least 40 more. And I know children, youth, and families is working hard to process those applications to get as many online as possible. In 2021, we really want to continue this focus on some of the different segments that we have not reached in a lot of those households that maybe haven't been online yet. So I'm setting a goal for us for us of 1,000 new customers that would probably represent lower income. It could represent senior households, some Hispanic households, et cetera. But we've got a map of those underserved households, and that's really our target next year. Next slide. Okay, quick updates on the network. Boy, we're growing our customer base by 6% to 9%. And guess what? Because of COVID, data utilization consumption has gone up about 15%. So we need more bandwidth. So we're spending a fair bit of capital on 100G transport circuits to make sure that we have the capacity up to the internet. We're spending money rehabbing the network. It's not just, you build it, you're done, you got to continually rehab it. And we've been able to replace some devices that were faulty, reducing our trouble report rate by 50%. In 2020, we have enabled over 3,000 new premises. So we've still got a lot of building to do. There's a lot of new development. So we're at about 88.5% fiber-enabled. For 2021, we have a DDoS mitigation plan. We're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars there to implement some scrubbers to make sure that we can prevent cyber attacks from cratering our network. And then we're building a new fiber hut around County Line to accommodate some of the growth there. And again, we'll have probably 3,500 new premises that will be fiber-enabled next year alone. So probably in the year at about 90% fiber-enabled. I told you before, we'll probably never get to 100%. For once, some apartments won't let us in. And then for two, we continue to grow and we've got to keep up with that growth. Next slide. And the employees, a huge piece of our success with Next Light. Super excited about our team. We were able to finalize our Next Light organization this year. We've got 40 employees. And that's about how it's going to stay for next year. We were able to organize in such a fashion that many existing employees were able to take a new role with maybe a slight increase in pay and responsibility. So a lot of good opportunity for most of the employees in the organization. Secondly, we added a few external hires, somebody from the Geek Squad and other places. And then I'm excited to say that I brought on, I convinced a dear friend of mine and former coworker Dennis Pappas to join us to help run the network piece of Next Light. He has over 30 years experience in the telecommunications industry on the private side, has public policy experience, engineering, and operations experience. So super happy to have Dennis taking over that piece. Another thing I'm really proud of that a committee has formed lately within Next Light. And that is to do equity and inclusion. And we know the city's got a lot of focus on that. We know we interact with customers all day, every day. And we wanted to make sure we were particularly aware and sensitive to those things. So we have a committee working on education with our organization. In 2021, I already mentioned we won't be adding any headcount, but we're really starting to see the organization scale. We're adding customers and revenue, but we're not having to add employees. Next slide. And I'm winding down the good news. So this is kind of the summary slide. Customer count up 6%. Employee count is virtually flat. Revenue is up 9%. And that's just because we have higher paying customers. Originally, we had a lot of people in that charter membership that $45. Some of those have churned out and been replaced with $65 customers, which is our rate card today and very competitive, that also offset some of that $14.95 price point that we have in the market. Our operating expenses up just a little bit. Some one-time expenses. CIP, I talked about last time, it's up due to about $800,000 worth of one-time expenses. So we are a little negative on the net income side, but we're not dipping below our fund balance. So that's the great news. And I'll show you a couple of things on the next slide. But you see at this bottom, oops. Okay, I'll go ahead and go to the next slide. That's fine. So here, upper left-hand column, this is our ending fund balance. You see we're dipping low because we're really investing and future proofing the network. But look at the cash that we start spending off in the next handful of years. That is our ending fund balance over $20 million. Look at the bottom left-hand corner. You'll see that the revenue continues to grow and our expenses start declining. We've got to pay off some of the money we borrowed from LPC due to the unexpected growth and success. We'll pay that off in 2025. We'll pay off the balance of our debt in 2029, at which time we will be very margin-rich and we'll be able to reinvest in the network and see what else we can do for the community. So last slide is a celebration. We continue to get a lot of recognition. I get a lot of phone calls and requests for media interviews because of our success. We make it look easy and I warn everyone that it's not as easy as the team's made up look. We've gotten recognition for the low-income offer that we did to Great News. And then once again, PC Magazine has recognized our exceptional product and ranked us the fastest ISP in the Western region and the fourth fastest in the country. That's all I have. Thank you for listening. Can I get the screen back? Thank you. All right. Any questions from Council for Council Member Pritchinson? Not a question, just a comment. About once a year I call up your tech support folks and they're always fast and they're always have a good sense of humor and they always get me taken care of in no time. It's usually hold down that button that's the third from the left for five seconds and yeah, and that does it. But anyway, thank you very much. You have very good customer service and that's really, really important. Thanks. Thank you so much, Council Member. Council Member Riedal-Ferring and then Council Member Lyme. I have a question on the numbers you gave us, the 72 for the two free month, the 432 for the income qualifying offers. Are those, do those numbers, are they overlapping? So what are these individual like separate? They're on separate, yes, Council Member or Mayor Bagley, Council Member Sissar, I'm still out of practice. Those numbers are separate. They're on separate rate plans. So the 72 could turn into the 432 paying customers or they could turn into a sharing the next light customer. Got it. And then which ones, because I've heard from parents that maybe they didn't qualify for one. Are there other offers? So let's say they don't qualify for the two, three months. Could they do the, during the next light or what is, how is that structured? Generally, if they would qualify, if they're part of the school lunch program, qualify for sharing the next light. If they have some kind of federal assistance or any kind of subsidies whatsoever, then they can qualify for the discounted service, the income qualifying service. If they don't qualify for those, we have some people that are receiving $25 credits for three months because they're, they don't qualify for those lower income offers, but they can't really afford things because maybe they're out of work or they have reduced income. So we're making accommodations for them with a credit. And then worst case scenario is they could get a 25 meg symmetrical product for $35. Okay. So if they don't qualify for something, it's not, if for one of the sharing the next slide or the two, three months, there's still other options if they call and ask. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Thank you. All right. Councilor Martin. Yes, I recently learned that an acquaintance in a mobile home park doesn't have access to next light. Is that true of all of the mobile home parks in the city or only certain ones or what outreach effort are we trying to make to convert those? Because a lot of people there need this. Mayor Bagley, council member Martin, the issue probably is that the management company for that trailer part probably is getting door fees from a competitor and therefore they're making more revenue by having just one carrier in there. And so they have not signed a service agreement letting us in. So that has been a continual problem. We have about 2000 premises for which we cannot get a service agreement. If you want to shoot that one specifically to me, we'll take a look at it. But otherwise, we are certainly trying to finish turning up everything everywhere that they will grant us a service agreement. Okay. Thank you. I will do that. Dr. Waters. Thanks, Mayor Bagley. Valerie, it's a great report on great work. I mean, it's very impressive what you've been able to do with an outstanding. I agree with council member Christensen. Customer service is extraordinary. I mean, you got the right people doing the right stuff. And I appreciate your acknowledgement of the need to ensure that every family with young children, obviously preschool, families of preschoolers don't qualify for free and reduced lunches because they're not in school. And I appreciate that you offered that. What will it take for us to get to that place where we can say there are no families with young children in Longmont who are not connected? And the editorial ad is I don't know how we can talk about equity in the city of Longmont and not ensure that every family with young children is connected, that they are connected. And I kind of parallel to that. I'm going to follow up, Teresa, just a heads up to you. I didn't ask when you did your presentation for examples. And I don't need them tonight, but I'll follow up with you examples of programs that didn't score with the priority based budgeting process into a tier one or a quartile one. But we've chosen to fund it because their exceptions because of how they advance the cause of equity or provide for folks who otherwise would not have been provided for. So that's a heads up, Teresa. But Valerie, I'm curious, what's it take for us to get there? Mayor Badly, Council Member Waters, totally appreciate the question. And that's certainly the goal. And I didn't include our vision statement because I was trying to cut back on my words, but it is truly a fully connected Longmont. And so I can say, and I think Jim and Teresa can back me that nothing was turned down. Harold and team and others have been very supportive of what we're trying to do partly because we're an enterprise fund. They see that here in the coming years, we'll have some, be spending off some extra cash. So I don't think that's the issue. I think it's partnering with the right people to get the right grants and the right foundations to contribute. And we started having those meetings, thanks to you again. And so we're trying to work through that. And so I'm confident that we're going to get some additional funding. But I also am going to set it up and say that my boss, Dale, and I are thinking about this in a different way as well, trying to see, is there a way that we don't have to be dependent maybe on a foundation and that this can be part of our, really our business strategy. But I need to talk to Dale and Harold about that a little further. So I'm happy to come back in a couple of months with a longer term plan on how we do exactly what you suggested. If I can jump in on that one, I think it's also when you saw the fund balances in the out years. So at that point, we're going to have different options available to us. I think when we talk about social equity and the work that we're doing in internally right now, it's also how do we work with our cultural brokers to really get the word out? Because I think that's the piece too. We've talked about this a little bit. You can put information out, but in some cases, you don't all information. And so how do we connect within various groups throughout our community via our cultural broker so we can really get that connection in and be able to provide those services to various residents in our community. And when we talk about the digital divide, one of the things I wanted to add to Valerie's presentation, you saw where she talked about the bulk rate agreements. And we've talked about digital divide not only being a problem, not only being a situation or an opportunity, actually, where you deal with our younger population. It's also something we need to look at when we talk about our older populations. And you're seeing Valerie engage in that conversation with her looks at bulk rates and applying the same discounts to those that qualify in different ways. So it's really a holistic look at everyone in our community. And I think as we continue moving forward, we're going to have some answers to that question, but we just need to continue taking this step by step. Thanks, Harold and Valerie. Again, terrific presentation. And I appreciate the fact that you and Dale are thinking differently about how to make certain that every family with young kids is connected. Thank you. All right, Valerie, thank you very much for addressing the concerns that are just questions we all had. So, Dale, good job. You made the same thing. You guys did great. All right. Why don't we go ahead and take a two minute break, a three minute break before we launch into our discussion on late fees? Sound good? All right. Back in a few. Come back, everybody. Sorry, I thought we were done. Sorry, guys. I could use a two minute break. All right. We're going to take a three minute break. Then we'll come back. We've been going now for almost an hour and a half. I'm listening to the debate in the background as we're having our meeting. All right. Now that we're back, Jim, you want to keep going with that budget presentation? Yeah. Next, actually, Dave Hornbacher is going to, I believe, introduce the next one on automatic metering. Great. Thank you, Jim. Good evening, Mayor Bagley and members of City Council. I'm David Hornbacher, the Executive Director of Longmont Power and Communications. So during the CIP presentation, Council asked for additional information on the Capital Project ELE 099, which is the advanced metering. Additionally, Council heard several comments from the public sharing their views regarding this, their views and their concerns regarding this project. We do appreciate and we do take that feedback seriously. As Harold had stated earlier tonight, we believe that the best path forward is to hold a study session discussion on these issues and invite a wide range of views and perspectives into that discussion. We plan to hold that study session later in October. For tonight, though, I will still provide a brief update. So this project is the largest LPC project in our budget and it transforms the current handheld electric metering system to a robust two-way communication system. And this provides the framework and technology to engage our customers regarding their energy use, the integration of distributed energy resources, create a connection between the renewable energy production and to consumption, and other activities and policies that are essential to reach our goal of 100% renewable energy by year 2030. The 2021 budget is the second year of this three-year funded project, raised for years 2020 and 2021 that support the overall Longmont Power and Communication budget. As presented, we're approved by City Council last year in 2020. So regarding progress of this project, Longmont Power and Communications continues to pursue multiple tracks. So for example, we have been actively recruiting for an advanced metering infrastructure manager. It has not been an easy task trying to find the right person. In fact, we have literally for many, many months, well over half a year, multiple job postings and numerous interviews, we've been looking for the right person. So I am happy to state that we are in the final stages of onboarding a new manager and we do expect him mid-October. So once that is official, I will announce information about him and he will start joining some of these conversations. Other activities we've done in coordination with purchasing is we've reviewed other existing AMI contracts for options that might leverage these contracts for pricing and timing benefits. In fact, one that we've been reviewing very carefully is a one from Colorado Springs Utilities. So Colorado Springs Utilities actually offers four utilities, water, waste, water, gas and electric. And so they have significant benefits from what's called a volume purchase for their multiple utilities. So we've been working with Colorado Springs Utilities to evaluate that bid and to see if it would meet City of Longmont's needs and if it might be a great financial and timing benefit. As part of that too, we have also employed the firm Black and Veatch and they are assisting us in creating a detail functionality list and part of the contract evaluation. We also to continue to evaluate alternative modes to convey the meter signal fill that support advanced metering infrastructure and this includes the radio frequency, so the RF, as well as direct connect options and they must you know need to meet the criteria including technically sound capability responsive to the functionality needs, financially responsible and timely deployment to meet our municipal utility and community needs. Also with this is that we are coordinated with ETS finance at PWR to ensure that the AMI project is synchronized with the CIS system upgrade and that's to ensure the highest overall value and functionalities of these critical systems and as needed the AMI schedule may be adjusted accordingly to ensure that successful deployment of both of these systems. Currently, well why we believe based on industry standard that a wireless solution is both feasible and likely the most economic and advantageous we are continuing to explore wired solutions that may include and utilize the city's extensive next light fiber system. We are not at a final stage at this point would certainly welcome continued community discussion on alternatives and to address the customer concerns as well as the overall optimal solution for long line. So we do look forward to a much deeper dive with city council here in October we're looking to do that on October 20th and so frankly I'm quite excited to be before council and to share much more deeper information. So that's my brief overview pending a much more extensive discussion here in October. All right great thanks David. Jim is that it or do we have more? We do have more so Sandy is now going to cover the LaMont public media. I'm Mary Bagley members of council Sandy Cedar assistant city manager I'm here to chat with you about the LaMont public media contract and public access media for the future in 2021. So as you may remember a couple of years ago during these budget presentations particularly during the financial policies the city council asked for staff to go out for a competitive process for public access television services. The LaMont observer was the successful bitter during that process now known as LaMont public media and part of the the reason that they won the bid was because they had a business model that really incorporated a maker space idea at the Carnegie building being able to gather and have classes and create content and all these great things that were proposed as part of the RFP. As you already can guess the COVID-19 pandemic has certainly put certainly more than a damper on those plans for LaMont public media and there are some concerns that in 2021 that contract cannot be renewed as it is today. So you may notice in your package you have a few different options that we would like for you to consider mostly because the city council is the sole decision maker on the contract for public access services. So I've presented a few different options for council to consider I'll go through those briefly. We're hoping for some direction from council tonight and then we'll continue on with negotiations and bring back a contract as we get closer to the end of the year. So first of all first option the same level of service so you'll see several iterations of the scope of services in your packet. The first one is what it looks like today and so that includes you know includes board and commissions recording it includes the voice text automated service. It includes a couple of different shows that were specific. LPM doesn't really think that they can do those services in 2021 without being able to hire some folks since the makerspace is a bit paused in the COVID pandemic. So they have told us that if we were able to give them $117,000 in one time funds to kind of span that pandemic timeframe that they would be able to continue the current contract. The second option is a reduced level of service. The reduced level of service would essentially eliminate the count the city council meeting recap recording of St. Marine Valley school board meetings which actually happens in any case because the school board has decided to do those themselves. LPM created podcasts and paid marketing so those are the pieces that we would take out of the original scope and for that they still think that they would need to hire a contractor to be able to help bridge that span at $76,000 again in one time funds until they can get back up on their feet. Option three is a further reduced level of service. I felt that it was important particularly in this year's budget since it is a tight budget that you're presented an option that is revenue neutral. The revenue for 2021 is predicted to be $145,000 for 25% of the cable franchise fees. It is a $10,000 reduction from the current contract because that is where things are unfortunately headed is the reduction of cable franchise fees. This further reduced level basically takes the city video services out from 20 hours to eight hours reduces the marketing plan reduces the metrics kind of just brings it down to sort of base level planning and zoning meetings council meetings and public access work. This option would cost no additional funds but definitely brings the service levels down. Option four is to bring public access video services in-house. This is an option that council could choose for us to pursue. We're not prepared to do that quite yet but we could be if that's the direction the council would like for us to move and then option five bid public access media services competitively. If you'd like for us to take the services back out for a bit we could certainly do that as well. The staff recommended option is option three because reducing the scope in order to meet the revenue projections because it didn't seem appropriate again for us in this budget time to bring you something that increases budgetary funds. LPM's preferred option is option two. Well the LPM doesn't really recommend this option because they're not completely sure that they can sign that contract for 2021. We do have a few more months to be able to negotiate in the work through some different pieces and of course the final contract whatever it is whichever direction council chooses would come back to council for ratifying. So there are the different options I would be happy to take any questions and also ask the person in general for us tonight. That converse from one lot public media is also on the meeting tonight get you some specific questions for him. All right we can ask a question I'm gonna actually move that we actually endorse option three the staff recommendation. All right no second council member Christensen. No I don't want to second that I want to. Oh I know that's what I meant but go ahead no go ahead folly didn't you want to say something. Yeah I would move that we so you didn't get a second. Okay all right I would move that we endorse option two and and I'd be happy to explain why but let's see if I get a second. I'll second. All right it's been moved and seconded motions on the floor up for debate or questions. Gaspard Christensen. Okay you know we had a lot of a lot of work was put into already sending this out for competitive bid and then they got started and they've done quite good work considering all they had running against them. I don't want us to start all over again we have very good we have some very good people there we have some good facilities but they have been hit with a heavy load you know all of their their financial plan which depended upon the makerspace has been knocked out from under them. I would suggest that I know this is $76,000 is no small potatoes but I would suggest that we could augment some of that from the council contingency plan for this one time we have $65,000 in that we could augment it with $20 to $30,000 we could find other ways to get the additional $30,000. I just think we should have a little faith in them and I really find the the third thing of having no station manager no employees only contractors they've already been working as contractors for a year that's that's not a good situation it's not fair and I want them to be paid employees that's the right thing to do. Yeah I would I would be for a council member Christensen's augmentation proposal first of all second I there was a plan under discussion for a while where the cable trust funding would be front loaded so that the Longmont public media could continue at its existing service level and we could look at supplemental funding in the second half of the year based on whether conditions have changed or not and whether they are able to start reopening the maker space and producing their own revenue that would maybe get us up to a service level closer to number one which is what I thought we were you know what was really the plan of record inside LPM that they had had plans for expanding their service level based on increased capability to add value to the community. So first of all what happened to to that funding approach and yeah let's start with that what happened to that funding approach. Mayor Bagley council member Martin I think that what's important to note is that funding doesn't usually become more available later in the year I mean you could certainly designate this as part of the budget and we could write the contract any way that you would like to see. We don't receive all the franchise fees at once we receive them in chunks as well which is why the current contract is written the way it is peg fees particularly we don't give them until we get it we give it to them as soon as we receive it but we don't have it before that we know what that what the peg fees are going to even be necessarily but we could structure the contract any way that the council would like. Okay I the other question that I had is you said put it out to bid again I can't imagine what kind of bids you would get for the current funding level which I'm assuming would be pretty much a cap on what anyone could expect to be awarded so I'm not even can you explain what that option is in there for. Mayor Bagley council member Martin only because it was a previous direction of the council it's always an option if you wanted to put it out and see what else was out there but I would say we just did complete the last one so it's not recommended. Okay well let's let's proceed let's proceed as far as I'm concerned with council member Christensen's proposal then. All right let's go Dr. Waters then council member Peck. Thanks Mayor Bagley my personal preference would be to fund them with option one and and hold their feet to the fire to deliver and I'm confident they will. I think I think that's I think that's what we ought to do the difference of $40,000 in a $371 billion budget I don't think is that big a deal. I heard GM last week both identify both the stabilization reserve and the in the fact that we haven't budgeted all of our sale all of our property tax revenues I know we're going to get an update on on the effects of galagorizing or undegalagarizing depending on how the vote goes but I there's still a pot of money I don't with I appreciate the the thought about the contingency I guess I don't feel like we have to go there yet I'd like to hear more from Jim I think I think we've got some one-time money that where we don't have to commit the contingency and I think we have enough one-time money to fund this at option number one if we're not going to consider option number one I'm certainly going to support number two I think of the of the five options we heard from Sandy my preference would be to fund them at option one Joan thank you Mayor Bagley actually this is a question for Sandy I'm curious as to why staff recommended option three what was it in option three that staff thought was worth supporting Mayor Bagley council member Peck I think we were concerned about bringing any enhancements of services or anything that's going to cost additional funding particularly in this budget process what was that a hiring or only going with contractors part of that I believe that would be the plan from Longmont public media is that they would only be able to hire contract work to be able to liaise on it would it would basically be a very bare bones type of operation at that point okay thank you right Councilman Martin um yeah so Sandy this question is for you too and it has two parts one is um you have a a really high level of of devotion and and uh passion and commitment on among the existing lpm employees um and so there is a big opportunity cost for letting those people go um how do you value that as opposed to what you would spend this budget money on if you weren't spending it on paying those wages Mayor Bagley council member Martin that's a pretty tough one to discuss because then you're talking about everything that everybody asked for in the entire budget and how we value that in comparison to this I will tell you that running a cable television station is not easy and there's a huge learning curve to it and so certainly Longmont public media and city staff have been learning together over the last several months um on all kinds of things from not only equipment and how to do it and all these different pieces but also programming and communication and conversations and so um to some extent I would say that's priceless um and you know what I what I would mention is just that we wanted to make sure that we were presenting you options that also left the the revenues as they were intact with no changes and so we wanted to give you the entire gamut um of of conversation so I would say that we value it very much that they're able to do the work that they are able to do um and we certainly wouldn't recommend like I said going out for a bit again that's not our recommendation yeah um it just seems like uh uh you know we we have not laid very many people off in this budget um and and is am I correct in saying that the only layoffs have been in the recreation center where you know there is really no work to be done um and LPM I mean I understand they're not city employees but in fact um there has been so much work for them to do in terms of crisis management that uh they they really are essential learning curve or not um so you know as I uh honestly when council member christensen mentioned option two I was thinking in the mode of of well that's the best we can do or they wouldn't have recommended below that level but hearing dr waters advocating for option one and remembering that we have a big contribution in the stabilization fund this year compared to prior contributions um I am inclined to offer a friendly amendment to uh council member christensen's and you know going big what do you think uh paulie do you think you could you could spring for option one well I personally can't spring for anything but I I just think that but um you know it's just very difficult right now you know we're all we're going to have to cut on a lot of things and I just think it's it would be really hard to spring for $117,000 more I think it's going to be hard to go for $76,000 more so I don't know I would rather stay with two that would that seems to me more fiscally sound right now all right so let's hear from mayor pro tem and then let's have a vote if it passes great if not we'll go on to another option mayor pro tem thank you mayor bagley I believe a couple of the ideas that I heard uh spoken about so far that I think are important one is flexibility I believe I heard assistant city manager cedar say that there's some flexibility still and we don't have to necessarily lock in tonight I think that's important uh one of the other important things I I think we should talk about is open coverage of governmental affairs and we know that their city has no ability to help increase coverage uh through the newspapers and through the long month leader for instance but we do have the ability to be as open and transparent as we can by having a robust public media uh whether it be a different contractor or this contractor and making sure that that that option is available to the public I think is very important on our behalf um I also think that kneecapping basically the long month public media organization in a completely unprecedented year budget wise after just receiving the contract because I think that their level of service is above and beyond what we had before in the city as far as all the various boards and commissions that they're going as well as the other things that they're providing service for and so a big axe I actually agree with council member waters and that 117 to me is not a big ask uh compared to 76 I don't think that that's a big amount of room to cover when we're talking about the budget that we have as well as the services that are actually being provided to the public these are one of very obvious reasons or one of the various obvious services that is provided to the public that they can see and find to be tangible and see what they're getting for their money so I am open to option two I prefer option one personally but I'll vote either way knowing that we have the flexibility moving forward that say we go with option two this time and find out that there is some wiggle room to get us up to 117 then I would also support amending it at that time as well but I think this is a vital a vital service that I don't think we should be looking at cutting as far as transparency between City of Longmont and the residents of Longmont so that's just kind of where I sit on this one all right so there's a motion on the floor for option two and it sounds like we might have a few folks may I catch up in sure so just maybe to answer a few questions and get some more information council member waters did ask about the stabilization reserve we did talk about that a week or two ago that certainly that could be utilized for whatever means just realizing that that's one time dollars we will have we will be getting I did actually get hours of just a few hours ago assessed valuation information from the county so we do have that earlier than we expected I'm not going to say for sure how much that is until Teresa and I agree that we're assessing it correctly but it's it's in that neighborhood of the cost of option one so if I'm calculating it correctly so there are options just keep in mind that that's one time money and that this this contract is typically covered by ongoing revenue and so I think that the logic is though that the expectation would be in hopefully in 2022 that operations would pick back up hopefully out of it coming out of the COVID situation and that that they wouldn't need to rely on that level of revenue again year after year because we we don't like to commit one time money on an ongoing basis all right Marcia you've had more than two comments on this motion so I'd like to just vote on it so as we've got okay we've had so let's go ahead and vote option twos on Dr. Waters I don't think you've had to you're right I have not had to so thank you for acknowledging me the second comment and I don't almost say this I think if we want first of all I appreciate Mayor Pro Tem's comments and and the other comments that have been made about the value that that LPM has brought to the city I think far beyond what we'd experienced in the past I think if we want to position them acknowledging this is one time money as Jim said we want to position them to be able to be viable in 2022 that I think we need to make the investment this year that optimizes that that possibility I think if we put them on a shoestring which I think that option two does it keeps them kind of status quo I I just think if we're going to take if we're going to invest one time to try to get them ready to to be viable over the long run then we ought to commit to option one as the $40,000 is not going to make a difference in a 2020 budget and and give them the chance to to hit the ground and and finish the race so have you spoken twice John all right I'm going to go ahead and call on John personal ways so um thank you Mayor Bagnews so here's my thought there are other things in this budget also that I am I want to bring up about perhaps we should look at as a priority and fund so is there any way when does this contract have to be signed Sandy Mayor Bagnews Councilmember Peck they're under contract currently until the end of December so this contract you know we wouldn't have to bring back to you until we got closer to the end of the year so I was wondering if we could put this off until we bring out all of the issues that we would like to fund and Jim can actually give us some some hard numbers and and how you know one time funding I agree with but there are other things that I think we should look at funding a little better as well and so I don't want to make a motion where we take all of that pile of money and put it in one place so um I'm going to vote a I would vote for two but I really would like a little more time on this contract if if others feel that all of these discussions are important and they're valid but I don't want to make a decision on a half an hour discussion on this um when we have a whole budget that we have to figure out so that that's my thought all right I'm just gonna say I'm gonna probably vote no so we can vote for number one but if two passes that's okay too it's not the end of the world all right so we've got a motion on the table and uh uh delegating staff to proceed with option two all in favor say aye aye all right all of that's an aye council member dougall firing all right all opposed say nay nay is that a nay marcia were you aye or nay marcia I was an aye because I thought it was good to put a stake in the ground for at least that much I wanted to go with mayor pro tem's plan but all right so what the motion passes four to three with council member martin council member christensen council member peck and council member uh dougall faring uh voting for the motion so all right let's move on to actually jim is there anything else yes there are just a few more budget presentations I'll be handling them if we get the last powerpoint please um we'll begin with the uh topic of the special marijuana tax um next slide please and the next slide so the tax was uh passed in late 2018 began to receive revenue uh about a month after that and the first full year was 2019 we had 265 thousand dollars of tax revenue in 2020 our budget for tax revenue is 274 thousand dollars we did have 137 thousand dollars uh from 2019's tax revenue that went for affordable housing and here in 2020 we budgeted 137 thousand again half of the budgeted tax revenue for 2020 for affordable housing and then 87 thousand dollars of council designated for uh hsa funding and 50 thousand dollars for early childhood education so next slide please so in 2021 we're projecting the tax revenue to come in at about 410 thousand which is uh similar to the pace that we're on this year so there will be money uh in excess of budget for in 2020 uh the 2021 proposed budget so far only includes the half of the amount 205 thousand again designated for affordable housing so there's another 205 that could be directed by the city council uh the in 2019 since the council never designated any use of the second 50 percent we do have left over from that 132 thousand dollars in change that the city council can direct for one-time usage so as we just finished discussing different sources of one-time money uh this is also one that's available when you are giving us direction and by the way we will be looking for your direction from your final direction on the budget uh on the night of the 13th so this cannot all wait until then unless you wanted to talk about it sooner next slide that's all ahead on the marijuana tax unless there's questions on that i'm not seeing anybody so let's continue next slide uh now uh the dda budget so uh i've given you uh quite a bit of information within your packet on the downtown development authority budgets the dda act budgets actually have six individual funds within the dda and then in addition to that they also do propose budgets to you for the downtown parking fund and the general improvement district so i've given you all a lot of information on those budgets within the council communication i'm not going to take you through them the one thing i am going to talk about uh their biggest source of dollars is tax increment financing we uh have that budgeted so far for 2021 at about 1 million and 75 thousand which is actually the uh the level that uh we're expecting to receive in 2020 so we've just uh transferred that forward until we get word from the county about that amount but and anyhow what wanted to point out to you is some of the uses for those monies that are budgeted in in 2021's budget you already did here during the cip presentation about the downtown plaza rehab for 100 000 in addition to that we're using tiff dollars for marketing collaboration of 30 000 dollars redevelopment of 25 000 employment incentives for 100 000 economic vitality for 10 000 and art and entertainment funding programs we do this annually it's 289 000 for 2021 uh kimmy mckay is on the line she can answer questions about any of these proposed usages uh we also do use the monies from the tiff uh for project management on our capital projects and as as well as we do uh have a amount of dollars that goes to infrastructure replacement downtown every year any questions on the dda budget or the gid budget it looks like we have any let's keep going all right we can move into the final item and that's uh the gallagher amendment so first i want to point out that um you know the city's uh uh what we do with uh the property tax detail what we do we it's basically administered by the county what we receive money from that from the county every month based on their collections but the uh the actual administration of property tax is done by the county assessors office and that the collections and uh forwarding to us by the the county treasurer's office and they all file have to follow the state statutes in those regards so uh you know we're not the experts on on the property tax um but on having said that i put together information that i have gathered from a few sources uh mostly from cml uh the actually the best source that i have found of information on this topic is in the election blue book uh it does have quite a bit of detail it's useful so but i will take you through uh and i'm going to keep it to factual information since this isn't a ballot question uh the first slide please so the property tax uh is paid on a property's sorry i'm just fix my slides properties actual value assessor determines the actual value of a property the actual value is then multiplied by the assessment rate to get the assessor taxable value but the assessed value is multiplied them by the tax rate which is our mill levy and any entity's mill levy to get to the amount of the tax owed next slide please so the Gallagher amendment uh passed in 1982 and the the intention of it was to maintain a ratio between the taxable value of property as 45 residential and 55 non-residential that's the ratio it was back in 82 and it intended to keep that in place and it's statewide not on a say a city or county level but the whole state so the resident residential property value since then has grown much faster than non-residential has the non-residential ratio is fixed at 29 percent well because of the growth in residential property values the residential ratio has reduced from 21 percent back in 1982 to what is currently now 7.15 percent the residential rate would have increased six times since 1999 uh underneath the Gallagher amendment but for the fact that Tabor since it was passed prohibits that type of an increase to occur without a vote so this is where uh Gallagher and Tabor come into conflict with each other next slide please so amendment P amendment B would repeal the Gallagher amendment the general assembly also adopted a statute that if this does pass the they would freeze the current assessment rates at 7.15 percent residential and 29 percent non-residential that is something that could be changed by future legislators but they could only reduce either of those rates because again because of Tabor they're not able to increase those rates without voter approval next slide please so the residential values continue to grow non-residential values are expected to drop in the coming year in the next uh assessment year and due to the impact of COVID on business so business values are expected to drop so between the residential value values growing and the non-residential dropping the state property tax administrator is projecting that the resident under under the Gallagher amendment as currently in place the residential ratio would drop from 7.15 percent to 5.88 percent in 2021 that's an estimate estimates have differed from actual in in the more recent non i'm more recent assessment years so applying that projected decrease to the current 2019 assessed values which is what our 2020 revenue is coming off of the staff calculates that that a redu that there would be a reduction of property tax revenue of 2.1 million dollars for the city now that's just the impact of the reduction in the residential ratio if there's growth from new construction or new or growth in values that would would offset some of that loss how much who would know i took the same methodology and applied that to the property values for the the county and the school district and their impacts would be 20.2 million for the county and 19.4 million for the school district uh with the school district it's a little different though the impacts uh could differ because uh their impacts could be offset by the state so i think that that might be my last slide yes so try to answer any questions if you have any otherwise that's all i had on the on the Gallagher amendment just for christianson jim the the state legislators put this on the ballot because they've been squabbling about this for 10 years and they couldn't figure out a way to fix it so they're kind of throwing it off on us but why couldn't they just adjust make a different adjustment to the proportions is that set in the law the the Gallagher amendment is in the constitution so what they're doing they're doing is is they're following the Gallagher amendment every assessment year their hands are tied in that respect so there's no flexibility in adjusting those ratios not as long as Gallagher is in place as i understand yeah what a mess okay thank you all right thanks jim you bet thank you uh well you know what i do not have another thing i just wanted to point out though this is the last of our planned presentations in relation to the proposed budget if there's something that the council uh it thinks is missing that there we're looking forward to hearing about let us know we can bring it back next week if uh if that'll work on the agenda uh our intention though is to return to you on the 13th uh asking you for final direction on the 2021 budget all right john thank you uh ryan uh jim i just well actually i want to throw this out to all of council i don't want to make a motion tonight but um we all know that the library needs to be funded it's in the feasibility study it is been talked about here for years um it is underfunded i would like for us as we talk about the one time funding that we have both in marijuana and uh the other places that you told us jim when we do the budget i've always heard that we have carryover from past years that we're carrying over into this budget uh so here's an idea that uh i would like us to think about in funding the library more is some of our big funds like the public safety fund like the fleet fund like the water fund they are they always have carryover from the past years um that they haven't used or they uh didn't get time for their projects that they wanted so they have that carryover funding which gets put back into their budget um jim i was wondering if there is a way from perhaps cutting those budgets i know that the directors aren't going to like this idea by a half a percent or uh some of the one time funding either from marijuana or the other places if we could put more money into the library we've really got to keep that library viable and up i know that we probably can't fund it to the extent that the feasibility study said it needs to be funded but but could you come back to us with some cobbled monies that we could put into it whether it's one time whether it's uh ongoing and and let us know if that's a possibility and that's why um i didn't want to vote for number one that uh councilman water suggested because i do feel that this is an area that we really need to pay attention to and before we get into that feasibility study let's see what the city can do so there you go i just want council to think about that and hopefully jim you can bring back some ideas for us well i i will bring back what i can but i do i will state right away that the only place i would be looking is in the general fund you mentioned a lot of different funds and all of those monies are in separate funds because they are intended for a specific use a lot of them legally are restricted in for use so they couldn't be used for the library second secondly um the monies that we would be talking about would be one time monies so they could not be used for ongoing expenses for the library if we're going to keep with our financial policies but again it'll probably come back to what we talked about during the last discussion here regarding the public media that we have certain amounts of dollars that we were moving towards the stability reserve if you want to instead choose to use those for one time purposes for the library that option is available to the council and we'll bring that information back to you okay thank you all right let's go ahead and take a three minute break and then go under our last item of the evening all right back in three just waiting on erin then we'll go ahead erin can you hear us all right let's go ahead and move on to the last um item the rental fee moratorium or the latency moratorium mayor and city council my name is Karen Roni with community services so i will introduce this item which council asked us uh asked staff to bring back uh recently and um i believe in august of this year the city and county of boomfield did adopt an ordinance which enacted a temporary prohibition of property owners to assess late fees when there was um late rental payments um basically due to to covid related hardships so so we um we are bringing forward to city council tonight uh an ordinance that is very similar to what the city and county of boomfield did did enact which basically uh in essence temporarily prohibits property owners from assessing fees for late rental payments um and it it does include some suggested documentation for um for how to how um to establish a hardship if you are a renter it suggests that the prohibition ends with with either the expiration of the centers for disease control eviction moratorium order which is set to expire the end of this year or unless that is extended um or when the governor resends the declaration of the emergency disaster related to covid-19 we also suggest the penalty under this um for violation of this section of the ordinance would be by fine only and we suggest that five hundred dollars certainly are open to what kind of input that that city council would have so in essence this uh the ordinance before you is very similar to the city and county of boomfield um our city attorney Eugene may was uh attorney with the city and county of boomfield and responsible for drafting the ordinance if if you have specific questions i'm sure uh Eugene would be um would love to answer those so i think the um the only couple things that we want to add then obviously we'll open it up to direction from city council is that we really did not um because there was an interest in moving bringing this back fairly quickly we did not you know spend a lot of time doing additional analysis really looking at what the impact is for um for law mod renters or to really look at what some of the unintended consequences could be by passing this particular ordinance so so this this communication does not include any of that particular um analysis and so we we just wanted to to point that out the other thing we wanted to point out is that uh governor polis did appoint a um a task force that has uh that basically started to meet um the mid part of of september to also advise the um the governor as well as the um the department of local affairs on various strategies to really look at housing stabilization so um they are to bring back their recommendations to to the governor and to dola by mid october there was a 30 day window once they had their initial meeting and they also might be discussing statewide um a variety of strategies which could in you know which could include a a temporary prohibition on late fees assessed for late rental payments so so there is a there's there's a you know so we could continue to have or we could have a piecemeal legislation which we talked about or there could be certainly a statewide recommendation for how to address um housing stabilization and uh and rent fees prohibition of late fees could be part of a statewide effort too so we just wanted to point that out and um and at this point really turn it over to city council to provide staff direction on whether to bring back an ordinance for first reading or and any modifications or anything else that you would like to direct us to do all right councilor peck thank you mayor bagley karen uh uh thank you for explaining that task force when i read it i realized that um late fees were not really the target of what they were getting at but if they do uh address that and come up with some ideas i would like to add that the temporary uh let's see how do i put it that this temporary thing would also include whatever that task force comes up with with late fees because that may determine a different end date for this and a better one a better outcome um so i think we should put that in this ordinance as one of the uh at the very end as the uh one of the options of of when how long we extend this based upon the result of that task force if they do in fact address late fees i don't know what kind of wording to use i think that's probably you jeans area but uh the other thing that i wanted to bring up because we've we've had emails not as many as i thought we would get actually in phone calls and you addressed that saying you hadn't really done any outreach for this uh susan spaulding is the one who actually has those monthly meetings that susie hodago and i went to is there do you know when that next meeting is because i think that would be a great place to get feedback and uh address this that is a great question and um i do not know but i see my colleague carmen ramirez um that is still here in the still still with us so i don't know carmen if you know when the next landlord tenant meeting is so usually their council good evening sorry carmen darmeet is community neighborhood resources they're held the second wednesday of each month uh with the issue of zoom we've had a little bit of issues on presentations but we could definitely do one or two things convene the meeting as we typically on a monthly basis and or send out some questions because we have quite a large contact list to landlords as you that would be great i think that would be a good way to get some uh feedback from the property owners um my other question is uh and this is what Karen you probably know when i talked to susan spaulding later in earlier in the spring she mentioned that she did uh renter landlord one-on-ones to work out some kind of a situation and that the city could use that neighbor to neighbor fund to uh help with the landlords getting some support from the rent if the renter could not working out a compromise between them and the reason i'm saying this is that i don't want the property owners or the landlords to think that the city is not concerned about them losing revenue that they need to pay the mortgages on these places so i think that message needs to go out and i would not be adverse to using some of the council contingency fund to uh help landlords be in and uh well landlords property owners make up some of the rent that they might be losing during this time and i see herald has an answer for me so um if you remember when we were talking about the cares funding during uh last council meeting i'm going to go over everything that we're actually bringing to bear for uh individual housing assistance so in in the cares component we're putting 400 000 for utility assistance um and we have a 126 000 for housing services support so that's 526 000 in that out of that bucket for the individual support and then when you move over into the cdbg cv funding um we talked to council about putting 657 000 a little over 657 000 for individual housing assistance so in the arena of all of the expenses that individuals have related to housing whether it's utilities or the housing perspective we have over a million dollars that we're putting in via the cv funding and the cares funding thank you herald i didn't realize that that uh applied to property owners as well uh for their it won't it won't that that is so if somebody's having trouble making their rent we want to work with them so that we can use those funds so they can pay their rent to the property owners okay so you don't work with the property owners directly no but in that world we're where um susan is working on that issue between the property owner and the renter that's where we have the ability to bring those funds to bear so that we can provide assistance now again there has to be a covet connection in this so if it's lost their job they were furlough i mean those covet connections are there to provide that assistance similar to the way this is written i believe this is written as the covet connection has to be there okay so uh carmen when when you do reach out to these people then perhaps that could be explained a little better that it wouldn't go to the property owner but it would help rental assistance to make up part of that and if i can add i think they understand that is my is my point okay and i think if i can add to that what i would say is it it may go to the property owner but the conduit is the individual coming to us because we can't we have to ensure that those funds are being utilized for their intended purpose similar to how we talked about the um early childhood education they would come to us we would then go you need x we would then pay property owner x so that we would have the necessary documentation so we don't have club apps i think that's a great idea and um it would be the reason i think the property owner should know about this as well as the renter is that they could tell the renter where to go for for help so a little different communication thank you so council woman peck if i could just add we repeat that message around our mediation service and connecting people to resources so their tenants so we do that very often whether that's via email or our education classes do that on a regular basis letting them know that we're here to connect tenants to resources so they can pay their rent as well as serve as a communication and mediation between the landlord and the tenants so we we're doing that on a regular basis also okay thank you i think it was councilman christensen and then councilman marvin thank you carmen and karen i and herald i i just think it's it's very important that property owners understand that this is not punitive towards them just trying to keep people in their homes and that the idea is that if everybody can work together a little bit and they can use the city to work together to get this help that they need so that everybody winds up doing a little bit better yeah i i think a lot of well the landlords that i spoke with um didn't they seem to think it was up to the tenants to they they they seem to think the tenants had all the rights and blah blah blah blah i just want tenants and landlords to feel like they can work together and have a happier situation uh marcia thank you maria bagley um i uh i just would like to say that that i think the more holistic approach and um you know offering assistance to tenants so that they can meet their obligations to their let their contractual obligations to the landlords is a better approach um than uh reducing their obligation under contract and the reason for that is that the latter uh can have unintended consequences so um if a landlord is already stressed because remember landlords have obligations not just uh what was mentioned you know property taxes and insurance or even a mortgage um they also have the obligation to maintain the property um to spend money to keep it leased up met with with um you know new tenants so get people in housing when they when they when there are vacancies put a new roof on the place so there are um and and um not just late fees but various fees security deposits and all kinds of stuff typically go into a budget that is that the that the landlord earmarks for that so you know we want to keep the places that people are living decent so um bailing out stressed tenants rather than um uh reducing their obligation to their landlord is just excuse me a better way of keeping money flowing and budget satisfied and uh i think it's it's also necessary to to you know sort of have a unified solution for the same reason you know so that we don't find people moving from municipality to municipality based on um where they can get the best deal i was just gonna okay i'll you go ahead erud you first no maybe please go ahead no i was just gonna say that i i don't think that that council has the expertise or the the or nor should we have the authority to be telling private property owners um how they should charge their late fees we've got a they've all got contracts and uh and i don't i don't know why the renters would be seen as needing help when maybe the landlords need help they've got mortgages they're not all big rich people some of them are struggling to make their mortgage payments and it's not just that you could say oh well it's only $15 or $25 or whatever the late fee is but um those late fees encourage people to pay their rent on time and so people don't pay their rent on time mortgages aren't made on time and when mortgages aren't made on time then you've got defaults and so while it sounds really good to be able to say hey let's go ahead and help people by saying you don't have to pay this um we have no idea how this is gonna impact people and um i just i just think it's a huge mistake and i think it's overstepping our authority all right what a city go ahead may i pretend thank you very vaguely um i understand the the point of what broomfield did with this one um i feel like for us due to the lack of data release that we're going from not an a to b an a status quota b solution issue here i think we're going from a status quota d a solution but we haven't taken the time to connect the steps yet um we don't have the data as far as you know personally as a renter myself even uh there are those folks who have no problem making their rent there's those folks who have made accommodations with their landlord so far and so then we're talking about probably a subsection there that is unable to make the accommodation with their landlord uh as well as they're unable to just normally meet their rent requirements um so i want a before we went to straight up banning late fees i would want to see somewhat what the numbers are uh because i'd also rather before we went straight to what i would call the jackhammer approach uh with a straight ban i'd like to see us provide support for those folks that are possibly incurring late fees that they can't afford or or as was i think proposed in the council communication that we might look at a cap on late fees before we look at an absolute ban um i just feel that there are some steps in between uh where we are at now and what's being proposed in this ordinance before we get to the straight ban um so i'm just i'm a little mixed on it until we explore some other options that i feel that because of the haste of this suggestion we haven't explored yet so i'd like to i definitely would like to hear some other comments from the council uh dr waters yeah thanks miriam bagley um uh i appreciate the mayor pertains comments about uh getting a little bit more information i i think that would be helpful as well and in that information uh karen you you were specific to point out that there's been really no analysis of unintended consequences and i can i'm sitting or imagining what the unintended consequences might be right if the city says i can't collect late fees what i'm going to do is i'm going to double up on my security deposit right or i'm going to i'm going to do things that protect my interest and in the long run hurt the very people were trying to help so i'm sympathetic to what i'm to the ordinance and to what brewfield did um but i but i would like to get a little bit more data both in terms of income the kind of data erin was talking about but also what your take is on unintended consequences and it may be that that uh uh susan has a pretty good idea of that as well um the other thing is um if the if the task force that you mentioned the governor has convened comes forth with a plan that includes late fees uh that's likely to occur before we would get this to a second reading anyway isn't it or not at at this point in time uh council member waters the um i believe the first task force meeting was around september so it answers yes is the answer it's a quick answer to your question if everything goes according to um plan that you know by mid october there would be a set of recommendations presented to the the governor and dola yes and would you assume or should we assume then if they were to include late fees in whatever those uh whatever that order is and i assume it would be an executive order um but that would that would trump or preempt uh anything we might be doing with an ordinance you know that's a good question council waters and i really don't have the you know have the answer to that but um but certainly we would certainly know by mid october what that set of recommendations is um and and that certainly would inform what actions okay thank you to give you specific dates if we um first reading would be on the 13th because the sixth is a study session and then second reading would be on the 27th uh uh council member christensen so if the governor doesn't do anything then we are starting from scratch uh in mid october um i'd like to read something that um um Sharon Tissier who's a councilman at uh broomfield wrote um council member law evans and myself representing both sides of the political spectrum work together to ensure that equity was in place for both tenants and landlords we consulted with a lot of landlords and tenants like this ordinance honored and respected the landlords who were already working with their tenants they are leading by example unfortunately there are still a lot of landlords and leasing agencies who are making profits off of someone else's demise during covid and beyond late fees were not put in place to make a profit or to be punitive but to be a fractional incentive for collection of rent some landlords are charging fees in excess of 200 the first day the tenant is late and 20 per day they're after some tenants have paid their rent but owe more in late fees under facing eviction due to being unable to pay their late fees please vote to support this ordinance and stay in touch with your family resource centers and housing authorities to ensure that they have what they need to enact this ordinance successfully um this ordinance does not ban outright late fees it bans any late fees that have to do with covid um hardships and you have to prove that you have either been laid off or that you have had covid and thus were unable to work it's really a very modest little ordinance and it will prevent a lot of people from becoming evicted by the end of october if we do nothing then it'll be by the end of november and then you know we're just talking about keeping people off the streets keeping people in their homes so that we they have a chance to get back on their feet that's what this ordinance is about and i say that if we should do that but not on the backs of the the landlords i mean why don't we i mean it's it's not fair to put it all on them dr waters yeah i just um i wasn't suggesting that we not proceed polly i was suggesting that uh as we move forward we'll have more information from whatever the governor does before we would before this would be before us for a second reading and in the meantime we could we could benefit from the analysis of unintended consequences that karen and or you know others on her crew could do and inform this so i i think we're moving forward actually with something i i would just observing that that we're going to learn a lot more before we get to a second reading at the end of october on this so all right councilman councilmember redarvo farry then councilmember peck so a couple of things so one of the things and yes i agree with um councilmember waters in you know we will be collecting data and we will be looking at these pieces as we move forward the other piece is so when we have a landlord who is struggling to pay off their to pay their mortgage and make their mortgage payment because of a tenant who's fallen behind would they be able to apply for any of the would the cares funding piece be able to apply for them i think what we would want is is the landlord to connect the tenant with us okay so that they could get the cares funding that we have available so they we would then in turn pay the landlord so can there be something a piece a component to this either in this ordinance or as something gets pushed out in communications that is tied to this ordinance that kind of stipulates us steps in the procedure so if we okay so you hit this point before charging a late fee or going that route you know contact um susan spaulding or contact you know what are what are people's landlords and tenant options and have that in language as well where it's tied to this ordinance so it's seen as a group so they're not looking in two different places i think oftentimes when people are strapped or they're in crisis mode being able to seek out resources in but in different places so if there's a way that we could have all this together streamlined i think when we're dealing with people in crisis or financial crisis to have something streamlined would be my opinion would be helpful but is that doable um so you don't have to talk about the construction of the ordinance and and how we could do that but what i could say is i think in terms of streamlining the connection points we can do that because we already have segments on our website so there are multiple ways for people to get assistance on housing the county has housing dollars we have housing dollars and so i think can we streamline to go here's where you go the answer to that question is yes how that comes into the construction of the ordinance we'll have to talk with you gene and and look at it because it it may be something as before or you can before this occurs the tenant has to have gone through a b and c i think that's what i hear you saying if that's the direction of council we can certainly look at it before we bring that back to council for first reading if that's your direction you know and and matter if i can add um and we included that in the the council communication so some of the initial recommendations from the task force is exactly what a council member at doggo fairing is talking about so um you know so making sure that that when renters are behind that there is a you know that landlords do connect the the renters with the assistance that is available that they're so they really are outlining um some other options um in terms of communications what um other sources that um you know that landlords can apply for so i think that's part of their outline of of other recommendations and you know i think what susan spalding would say is that that um property owners and and renters in long mark are doing a great job of working together our our mediators um on our city team as well as the city of boulder team they are really spreading out throughout the entire county to help resolve situations for both the property that benefit really the property owners and and the tenders we want to keep people housed and um and i think um i just need to mention that they are really doing it a great job and both our property owners and our renters are working together with our mediation teams to try to weather this storm and keep people housed and link folks to resources i don't know how again that gets constructed in an ordinance but um but yujin can uh help us with that i guess and i think it's really important to note too that as you go through the process and it comes to surface that the reason why the tenant is behind has nothing to do with covid they will be charged a late fee so you know you have these bad players on both sides i mean i rent a home i love the pertin the homeowner who we work really well together and you know my husband's a plumber so it's we have a good open relationship between landlord tenant so and i know i hear that happen often but i also hear that that's not happening and what we can do to really ensure that people are not because of covid getting kicked out to the streets so uh councilor beck so thank you mayor badly um so susie our councilwoman hidago fairy you you put in a better conversation basically of what i was saying even though we have that communication out there we do have bad players on both sides and if both players know what to do then perhaps it wouldn't become such a uh an anxiety point for both if if the if the property owner can direct the tenant if they know about this funding and that that's what i was getting at make sure that the property owners the management companies know that before they go to the nth degree of uh uh late fees or whatever to direct that resident to susan spalding or whatever website we need to go i'm just i was just talking about the communication um because from the emails and the phone calls that we've got those property owners don't know about that they're they're very concerned that they're going i don't want them to lose money and uh if their tenant can pay the mortgage through the city they need to know that so they can direct their tenant that's all i was getting at and mayor badly i would agree with you on some of your points if in fact that late fee was the same everywhere but to charge a late fee and then interest on top of a late fee just puts everybody behind and thinking of the city i don't want these people on the streets because we haven't figured out how to work together so and and i guess what i'm saying is there's people in people have entered into contracts landlords with banks tenants with landlords and putting it on the landlord to say well now you're responsible to make sure that people don't go to the streets i don't know i live i live in prospect um it's a very left-leaning neighborhood and uh they're all million-dollar homes why don't we uh why don't we take up a collection down here and start helping people pay their rent but putting it on the landlord who we have no i i mean uh council member redog fairing she just said she rents a home i think marsha martin rents a couple homes um those aren't the ones i'm thinking about what happens if you have an apartment building with 400 units i mean who's gonna police i mean it sounds good to say well it has to be coronavirus induced but who's the police to determine whether or not it was coronavirus induced here's the city panel is there i mean what we're talking about is it's not gonna work and and even karen roney said they've not taken the opportunity to think through the unintended consequences so it sounds like a really generous idea but again what we're doing to do let's stick it on the landlords they they own property the rich they can do it council member martin uh thank you mire bagley i just wanted to clarify a couple of details about the administration of these care funds that maybe is buried in there somewhere i didn't catch it but first of all if a tenant applies for care funding the funding that they're granted is paid directly to the landlord right so there's no opportunity for the fund for the grant to grow astray the rental assistance to go astray that's the way i would that's the way i want to construct it so you can have the accountability you need so you don't get the money called back correct yeah and so and so then the the other question is is what is reimbursable through these through this funding is it rents only or is it tenant debt to the landlord um in other words can will the cares will the cares money pay for pay for the relate fee you know that's a good question i'll have to i'll have to work with peter on that one because um if you remember when we talked about it you can't i mean they're so the city we can't use it as a as a revenue replacement fund and and so that's right we're going to have to track down with dola because it could be it very well could be that we could only use it for rent we couldn't use it for late fees um but we'll need to track that question well and and it i mean the answer to that question also informs what we would do about an ordinance like this um you know if we know that the landlord is going to get uh at least the base rent then forgiving a late fee is a little different than if the landlord could go on forever and get nothing from any tenant um and the other thing that um i wanted to ask was uh about unintended consequences there already are some in that landlords are already increasing security deposits for new tenants um you know so which is another good way to keep people from getting into housing if you now have to have two months rent and the security deposit um that's really nearly unattainable um so it would really the it's a better solution to make sure that landlords feel secure um than it is to make them less secure that's something to consider all right so what do you need from us garen well we we could use some direction on uh on whether you want us to bring forth this ordinance for first reading like it is modify it don't do it at all or something else so it's it's we could use some direction councilmember christensen uh councilmember christensen please turn your microphone sorry i move that we move forward with it all right i have a second all right go ahead customer peck what you can either second you to make a normal your own motion well i just uh wanted an amendment to the uh motion that we put in the task force part that if if the task force comes up with a solution on late fees or recommendation on let the late fees that we take that into account for this ordinance as well if and i would accept that amendment would we did you say caren or harrell that you thought this would come back on a second reading after the task force has made their recommendations if the task force stays on schedule then the second reading will fall after the task force recommendations come out so i think we should say we would follow the task force recommendations on late fees whatever that is all right there's a there's a motion on the table i don't see any more uh discussion or debate so let's go ahead and vote on it all in favor of the motion say i i i i'll oppose say nay nay nay all right raise your hand if you said i all right so the motion carries four to three so we'll proceed with that and that was with councilmember christensen councilmember waters councilmember dago bearing councilmember peck voting in favor all right great all right let's go on to mayor and council comments anyone councilmember christensen i just like everybody to remember um that the opening for the day of the dead is at the museum is october 1st and it's um a wonderful time for everybody around the world to remember all the people who've gone before them thanks all right councillor martin yes i would actually like everyone to know that the league of women voters has done a really fine job of deeply researching the issues on the colorado ballot this year all the way down to um to municipal level um issues and uh that their voter guide goes online live at 411vote.org on october 2nd which gives you a week and a half a good 10 days to really study the ballot before you have to fill it in and still vote really really early um that you know there are nonpartisan organization they did wonderful research and they endorsed both of long months ballot questions so everybody go to 411vote and get that get that ballot in early all right thanks councilmember martin all right herald you got anything no comments mayor council you gene no comments mayor all right councilmember peck we have a motion to adjourn please i move to adjourn i'll second on paper say hi hi hi close in a motion carries unanimously all right see you next week guys thanks bye