 All right, I would now like to call the November 17th, 2020, Longmont City Council regular session to order. Can we please start with the roll call? I'm here. Yes. Mayor Bagley's here. Councilmember Christensen. Here. Councilmember Hidalgo-Fairing. Here. Councilmember Martin. Here. Councilmember Peck. Here. Councilmember Rodriguez. Here. Councilmember Waters. Here. Mayor Yvakorum. All right. Great. I'll go ahead and lead us with the pledge tonight. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible liberty and justice for all. You never know if you know the pledge until you've had it shouted like that in your ear with no cadence. All right, just a quick reminder to the public. Anyone wishing to provide a public comment during tonight's first call, public invited to be heard? You need to watch the live stream of the meeting and we're going to have a call-in only like we've been doing the last several months. And I will, of course, open that when the time comes for public comment. The toll-free number, just so you guys have it available, is 888-0099. And so just watch for instructions when that time comes. All right. Have we already approved the minutes for October 27th? There's no minutes ready for this agenda, Mayor. Right, right. That's what I thought. Okay, cool. So do we have any agenda revision submission of documents or motions to direct the city manager? And Mayor, there was one document revision, not an agenda revision noted in the substitute ordnance for ordinance 2020-62 for item 12A1, the Costco item. When that leads me to my next question, what is the difference between an ordinance under our consent agenda and the ordinances listed on general business? Those are still first reading of ordinances, correct? Correct, correct. Okay, in case people were wondering, that is why. Okay, then let's go ahead. And Harold, it's been a big day with COVID-19 and the governor and it's been a rough week. So do you want to go ahead and report to us? Yeah, I mean, we actually have a fair amount of information to report today based on this. Susan, will you bring up the chart with the new level that the governor just announced today? So I'm gonna start with the final revised metrics. So what you can see, and Susan is going to zoom in on this so you all can see it. But basically what they did is the old level red became level red, severe risk, long-term sustained metrics or multiple metrics met. And specifically what they're looking at is greater than 350 between, greater than 350 and 100,000 cases in a two-week incidents. There's no limit on the percent positive. And then hospitalization is staying the same, increasing the stable or declining. If you remember, when you look at the orange level, it's no greater than 15% of the percent positive. And then what it used to be was up to 350. So that's the big change. If you look at level purple, extreme risk, what I wanted to talk about there is that's really the old, that's the stay at home component. And what they're focusing on there is the hospital capacity risk being breached, which may be indicated by approaching the need for medical crisis standards of care, utilizing alternative care sites, critical shortages of PPE or staff or hospitals approaching 90% of the reported surge capacity. So that's really establishing the stay at home level under this new matrix. Susan, can you bring up the revised dial piece on this now? So while she's doing that, I'm gonna highlight some of the changes. And as I go in there, so it was just reported that the state CDPHE did move us to level red. Boulder County, they moved 14 counties. They indicated that they were gonna move some other counties to orange. And also in the press release stated that there may be some additional movements for other counties and they would let everyone know when that, if and when that occurred. But the big change in level red, when you look at high risk populations, where we were in level orange, it was strongly advised to stay at home. Level red actually puts the high risk populations in the stay at home category. So if you remember when we went into the, when we started the issue with COVID in terms of the pandemic, older adults fall into that category, people with pre-existing heart conditions, asthma, all of those categories that we talked about, they're actually now in a stay at home order based on where we are today. Not eligible for variances, no personal gatherings, that's another significant change. In the orange level, it was up to 10 from no more than two households. So now they're saying no personal gatherings. In terms of schools, schools is a little bit interesting. So K through five in person is suggested. Middle school, in-person hybrid or remote suggested. And then high school, they're suggesting a hybrid or remote. So you can see they're definitely making the difference with a high school age. And then in terms of higher education, their remote suggested limited in-person when necessary. And what they really talked about was the piece with the technical and the trade schools where they do need to come in and perform some work. What we're also hearing in some of our conversations in terms of the schools, it's also really managing staffing levels based on people that are out in the governor definitely touched on that subject today during his press conference. Another significant change is really to the restaurants. And so now they're saying take out curbside delivery or to go orders or open air dining with only groups from the same household. So they're saying no indoor dining anymore. In terms of offices, in the orange level, we were at 25% remote work where it was strongly encouraged. They're now 10% remote work is strongly encouraged. Obviously for the city, we definitely fall into some of these categories, but we really look at critical operations and what that means. So what you will see us move through is anywhere from the 10 to 15% depending on the nature of the operation. Gems and fitness centers are at 10%, 10 indoors per room or outdoors in groups of less than 10 with reservations required. Again, this is another category that's gonna really impact our organization in terms of what we do in recreation. And so we're gonna have some more conversations tomorrow based on these orders and what that means to us. And then critical and non-critical retail is essentially staying the same as it was in level orange 50% with increased curbside pickup and delivery and dedicated times for seniors or people in the at-risk population is encouraged. Events, any indoor events are now closed. Outdoor events have been reduced to 25% or 75 people based on the size. And you have to be within your own household group, six feet apart from each other. And that's generally at a high level, the changes that are gonna come from this red level. So obviously you can tell personal gatherings is a big change, restaurants is a big change and then the stay-at-home order for high-risk populations. All right, Susan, I also have Dan Eamon on. He's gonna come in after we go over the numbers. Are there any questions on this first piece? Sorry, Doc, didn't see it, Dr. Waters. Yeah, real quick, Harold, on that list, indoor unceded events are closed. Is that what I saw? Correct. Is our library categorized as an indoor unceded event? So libraries are, they have a different guidance for libraries and it's in a separate area of the orders and we actually are in curbside only right now. Based on that. So that's due, I mean, we're now reverted back to or gone for re-creating curbside only. Correct. All right, thanks. So now I'm gonna go into the data that the county's provided me. We try to get someone here, but obviously with all of the changes, they were moving pretty fast today and working any number of issues. So I'm gonna share my screen, but when I do that, Mayor, I can't see. People, I have a, my other monitor went out. So if you see something, if you'll let me know, that will help me. And so obviously right now, I'm going to, do you all see the little COVID symbol? Yes, we do. So when we go into the slides, this is really what we're seeing in terms of what the governor's reacting to. And so if you look at this, the two-week cumulative incident rate, Boulder County's currently at 758.9 per 100,000. If council will remember, that's last week we were at approximately 458.8. So we're definitely seeing in Boulder County the growth, but we're seeing that really throughout the entire state. When you then look at the positive, the two-week testing positivity rate, we're currently at 8.3% during the last presentation. We were at 7.1 last week. What's really interesting in this, and if council asked this question, I'm gonna just deal with it now. And I don't know the answer, but I'm asking it. So when you look at some of the thresholds, obviously you can see that we were in red in terms of I'm gonna back up. So if you look at this, you can see Larimer, Weld, Boulder, we're all in red in terms of the cumulative incident rate. But when you look at the positivity rate, we're actually at a lower level than Weld and Larimer. And those counties, when you see the press release, we're not included in that move. And so I'm just gonna hit this up front because I've had this question already. And I pushed it into both Boulder County and they forwarded to the state to understand that. And so it may be that those counties are going to be counties that move at a later date. I do know that the state wanted to personally have conversations with counties before they made the move. And they were actually able to catch most of the Metro counties at one time. So that may be part of it, but if there's a question on that, I'm still trying to dig for the answer. When you look at hospitalization status, currently we're at 11 days of decreasing or stable admissions, but you can obviously see that there were other counties that are at a higher level. One of the things that we did hear and I think it was in the governor's statement that there were a tremendous number of cases that occurred in Pueblo and they actually had to move some of those patients into other areas where there was capacity based on what they were seeing. And Dan was gonna talk a little bit about what we were seeing locally in Boulder County. So we've obviously been watching the young adult gathering public health order metrics. So what we can tell you on this is we're in the same spot that we were before. New cases and positivity worsened over the last week and so we're just continuing to move in that area. So now let's take a look at the numbers in Boulder County. So this graph really says it all. You can see that we hit a high of 326. We hope that the trend that we've seen recently continues in terms of where we're moving because that will make a difference in terms of the level red piece. And I'll touch on some points that Jeff mentioned to us, but we hope we continue moving in this direction. But I think that's incumbent upon all of us continuing to do what's being asked of us as we move forward. When you see this, I think so, something that's important in this is for a while we really started seeing fewer cases associated with college students, but now about 12% of the cases in the past week have been among CU affiliated Boulder County residents. So we're definitely seeing that creep back up into the process and hopefully with a decision that CU's made in terms of their classes, that may change some of the numbers that we're seeing as we continue to move forward. When we look at this, the other change, and we hadn't seen this for a while, but we're starting to see it again is actually the number of cases that are associated with long-term care facilities. So they made up about 5.5% of the cases as of 2 p.m. yesterday. So all the data is as of 2 p.m. yesterday. So if you look on the website, there may be more up-to-date data, but this is the one that I could count on. There have been 64 long-term care facility associated cases among Boulder County residents in the past two weeks, and there are currently nine confirmed active outbreaks in the Boulder County long-term care facilities. So we're seeing that again, as an if council will remember when we talked about this before, one of the things that everyone gets concerned about is when you tend to see cases in long-term care facilities, a lot of those cases tend to go to the hospital and they tend to be in the hospital for a significant period of time. One of the things that I will tell council about is based on where we are in level red and based on what you're seeing in the long-term care piece and where we stand in terms of the housing authority. We are based on these orders also going to have to take some actions with the housing authority process and the high-risk adults being at stay-at-home to deal with certain areas within those facilities in terms of where people can congregate. So you may hear that, but we also have to do that based on the orders and what we're seeing in other facilities. I did talk to the housing authority board today. We've had a couple of cases where we are made aware very late or we were made aware of positive COVID tests that were very late, almost to the point to where when we found out they were out of the 14-day period. So based on all of that, we're gonna have to take some actions in those facilities to ensure that we're meeting the requirements and first and foremost, protecting the health, safety, and well-being of the people that live in those facilities. Again, our five-day rolling average in daily case count is at about 220.6 cases per day. And that date is through the end of the day on the 1115th, which is higher than any other time. And it rose from 146 case average on Tuesday of the previous week. Obviously, if we continue on the trend that you saw on a previous slide, that number will continue to go down and that's gonna be really important in terms of how we look at a potential move from red to orange in the future. Again, this is really looking at all of the cities in the metro area. Can you all see my pointer if I move in it? Okay. So what I wanna point out here is the red line is actually bolder and you can see the spike when we had it with the university and then, so we're right about there. So while new cases have been rising rapidly across all of the metro area, Boulder, which is, I showed you the red line is lower than all but Douglas and Broomfield counties in terms of the new case rate per hundred thousand. So again, that's important for us to keep in mind as we're moving forward. And so now we're gonna look at it in terms of municipality. So you can see in terms of what we've seen since the first of October and the cases per hundred thousand we're now the highest in Boulder County. Boulder, Lafayette and Lyons have also had pretty high increases as you can tell. One of the things that they did say about Lyons that they're trying to figure out is a lot of them have PO boxes. So they're the data, they're still trying to work through that issue. What I can tell you though is in the past seven days about 39% of the new cases have been in Boulder and 36% of the new cases have been in Longmont. Again, this graph is just a different depiction and it gives you the same look at the data per communities. Dark blue Boulder, light blue Longmont, Louisville, Lafayette and Superior and then all the other municipalities in this. And so Boulder for last week had about 656 cases, Longmont, 598, Louisville, Lafayette, Superior, 230 cases and then 183 in the rest of the county. Again, the highest cumulative rates per 100,000 they were in the 18 to 22, 23 to 24, 24 to 34 and 35 to 44. So basically that 18 to 44 range has really had the highest case counts recently. And then this is what we're seeing among youth in Boulder County. And I know this slide prompted a lot of conversation last week, but we are continuing to see increases in the number of cases of all school age groups when we compare it to the most recent two weeks and into the previous two weeks. I'm not gonna get into the percentage increase, but you can obviously see last, the previous two weeks were at 15, now we're at 44, 29 to 75, 41 to 110. And then the biggest growth is in the 15 to 17, which is 32 to 136 cases. And I think if you tie that into the level red and how they were making the suggestions regarding high schools, you can start seeing when they look at middle school and high school where they're seeing that growth. Again, the slide says it all. Pretty much every category, but this one is on an increase and it just recently changed. And I think it's hard to tell, but I think that's the 75 plus category, but everything is continuing to increase. Again, now this is an important slide, 78.2% of the cases in Boulder County have a known race ethnicity. And this data is as of 2 p.m., 11, 16. The, again, seeing persistent large disparities among the Hispanic Latinx population. In the past seven days, 47.6 of our cases or 506 have been among the Hispanic Latinx and 49.3 or 524 cases have been among white non-Hispanic category. Again, just a graphical representation of what I just went over in terms of the data and what we're seeing. When we look in the testing, again, remind you, 10-1, we're at 4.7. Today we're at 8.5 as of 11, 16, 9 a.m. And when we talk about that 8.5%, it's 8.5% of a significant number of tests. You can see, how many tests we've been performing in Boulder County recently. And again, Dan will talk a little bit about what we're going to continue to do in the future. Our current 14-day average test per day is 1,635, to be exact. Again, this is just a different way to look at where we've been moving in terms of the positivity. This is actually a good sign. Who would have thought when we were actually just before here and we were below 2% that we would be seeing this move to 8.5% is a good sign. All of that's gonna come into play when we look at the way they've constructed the new dial. Again, another example of what the different age groups have been doing over time. There's a seven-day rolling average of PCR tests with positive results at the different age groups and you can start seeing where some of the drivers are coming in terms of that. And finally, I know we've had a lot of questions about hospitalizations. This is cumulative over time in terms of what we've seen. Dan's gonna go into more specific detail in terms of what we have today. But this is what's been going on in Boulder County over from the beginning. And you can definitely see hospitalizations. And this is what the governor talked about. It's actually now starting to occur amongst a broader age group and what we're seeing in something. Can you hear me? I think I accidentally hit you. I'm sorry, I was trying to unmute myself because I've got a cool question. If you go back. So these are total cases, right? Correct. Dan's gonna talk to you about what's happening now. Okay, because really the data that I want to, I personally wanna see is I wanna know how many total beds, how many beds are occupied, how many med surge beds are occupied and how many ICU beds are occupied so we can see how much is left. There could be 25,000 people in the hospital but we have 75,000 beds left. And I know that it's getting, I know that we're like just a couple of beds shy of being in capacity. So I just, I mean, just to see that. So Dan will talk about what we have. There is a site that I have. I'm kinda questioning the numbers a little bit based on some conversation I've had but I'll jump in on there when Dan goes over as well. So this really talks about our hospital resources and until a little bit, you know, what it's saying is we have 108 ICU beds available in Boulder County. Total 108 ICU beds, we have 19 available as of today. We have 512 med surge beds, 145. And this was as of the 1116. So Dan's gonna have the updated information on this. So we have 145 available med surge beds, adult critical vents, 50 total, 28 available, non-critical vents, you can still see that all of those are available. And then what you can see in the staffing is, and this one doesn't, we're gonna have to talk about this but in terms of where they are in the staffing, this has changed a little bit because this has been in the green and PPE still is in good shape. And this gives you a sense of what we've seen in terms of hospitalizations recently. And again, this is as of 1116 but I think the number that Dan's gonna report today is probably gonna be back up around 90 in terms of overall hospitalizations in Boulder County. And again, this is the statewide hospitalization piece. And so the blue is confirmed COVID-19. The brown is under investigation or the light tan under investigation for COVID-19 in terms of the entire state. And then finally, this is a death among Boulder County residents who've tested positive and you can see how from about June 6th to the end of September, anytime you lose a life, it's tragic for a community and a county but it looked much different. We are starting to look similar to where we were in April and I think that's part of what they're also looking at. Our most recent death based on this data was on the 14th of November. They've had 27 deaths since the 1st of October. Nine were reported since the last surveillance update. About 71% of the deaths to date have been among the long-term care facility residents and we've had a total of 108 deaths. So you can understand why we're also watching long-term care facilities. And again, this is the key COVID data resources. I will also have the full side deck that I'll get to Don to go over all of that information. I know it covered a lot of data for you all today but based on where we are. Harold, let's just, I think Marcia has a question and then we'll finish up. This is just maybe this will be in Dan's but for a while you were showing Longmont specific data and are we gonna see some of that tonight? That wasn't in the slides that I was provided from the county and so it was incorporated in some of those other slides. What I'm gonna try to do is to get that but to the point of Longmont specific, we're now since the first we have the highest per 100,000 think as I indicated, we've had 590 in the past seven days, 36% of the cases have been in Longmont, 39 in Boulder but we'll get you the more specific data. Yeah, people were specifically asking about hospital resources. Dan can talk about that. Okay, good, thanks. All right, Dr. Waters. Thanks, Mayor Bagley. Here last this question last week and I'm still curious because you're not reporting any data from the wastewater testing and I thought you said we were close to being able to have or see those data in to include in these kinds of reports because that would be the earliest indicator, right? Correct. So we've had some conversations on that they've actually had the ability to run a couple of modeling scenarios and predictions. We've actually only had two examples of where we can compare what the prediction was versus what the actual count is. So we're waiting on one or two more. We also are gonna have a conversation with one of the things I wanna do is have a conversation with Dan, Mike Shard and then the Boulder County health staff to really have the epidemiologist check our math to make sure everything is making sense. And then once we do that really talk about utilizing this as a leading indicator. We're not hearing that others are doing this work. This is frankly work that Roberto, John Gage and Becky Doyle have been doing. So we wanna make sure that we truly understand the correlation before we go public with it because we don't wanna have bad information out there. On bad premises. So we have a little bit more work to do. But what I can tell you is I've seen two examples and they were pretty close. So you're validating the modeling, right? That's what you're in the process of doing against the actuals. Do you have any idea when you might be able to include that? Because of all the things we've seen, the urgency we ought to feel is fueled or not. We either know that we're making a difference or not based on a data a statistic like or an indicator like what we're learning from testing wastewater. I am hoping that I can get some things scheduled late this week where at least we can generally talk about we're seeing lower loads and based on what I mean. So we can say we're seeing higher loads and we think it may mean something in the neighborhood of this or lower loads and it means this and that's probably as far as we can get in about a week or two. I think further out we may be able to get more specific but what I can tell you, well, let me get the data and make sure I'm correct before I say this. Absolutely, it'd just be helpful to include we're not there yet, right? Just to acknowledge that we're collecting those data. We haven't finished validation things. Okay, yeah, we'll do that for now. Any other questions? Nope, we don't see any. Dan. Go ahead. Dan, you're up. Okay, good evening everybody. I'm gonna add three things here. I'm gonna talk about testing hospitals and then vaccinations really fast, local testing. So as everybody knows, we did open up, well, public health opened up a testing site at the fairgrounds and it's been pretty busy. I think they, well, I know they've run at least a thousand tests every day through that site. It's open eight to five every day, seven days a week. They prefer that you do register, but you don't have to. We also have a site over at the innovation center, the school district innovation center, right there across from the rec center. That one's run by a company called Colorado COVID Check and it's open from 10 to five, Monday through Friday. And then we've also started doing some targeted testing. Harold talked a little bit about the disproportionate amount of cases in the Latinx community. So Carmen, as Carmen always does, partnered with public health to develop some kind of targeted testing sites that we've done two of so far. One last Tuesday and one today that a countryside village that are targeted specifically towards a bilingual portion of our community. So we have bilingual staff down there, kind of resource kits available for everybody coming through. And both times we've done about 120 tests or so. So it's clearly showing a need. But what we've also discovered is public health is pretty stretched and we are likely gonna have to pick up some of this burden ongoing. And we've decided as a city, this is something we want to continue to do. So we're looking at ways that we can add staff, resources and all of the necessary things to make sure we're continuing this service that is a targeted testing solution towards portions of the population that don't necessarily wanna go to a eight to five testing center or can't. So we're gonna continue to do that and figure out ways that we can supplement the larger community testing sites. But the larger sites are ripping every day 100,000 a day. So I think the testing available in the community is good. We are at a good level for that. Hey Dan, so before you go on, before you go on on the hospital piece, one of the things I did wanna talk to council about is based on the need that we're seeing with the County Health Department in terms of their staff capacity and what we're gonna need to do to really jump in and help, especially on this targeted testing in different demographic groups. I know when we talked to you all about CARES funding, we had some CARES funding established for the pandemic leave pay amount within the organization. I'm probably gonna have to shift some of that funding over in to help with the testing component of this. So I just wanted council to know ahead of time that in terms of the funding component, I'm gonna look at that piece within the CARES funding. So some specifics. One second, one second. Joan and then Tim. Sure. Thank you. Before you get into the hospitalization, Dan, can you tell me if these sites are the rapid 15 minute tests or are they the three to five day tests? No, they're the longer term tests and most sites that we've been tracking that a little bit and we've seen about three days is the average we've been getting. They haven't been going too much longer than that but they're all the longer term three day tests. Can you tell me what the difference is between the three day results versus the 15 minute rapid test? No, I really can't. But we can certainly get a answer for somebody much smarter than I and get it out to you as to the exact differences between those. Okay, thank you. Real quick, Dan, as you were doing your presentation, I got a text from a resident who was indicating that there is testing walk in and drive and testing it solute in the afternoons. Was that one of the targeted locations or is that gonna standard procedure now? No, they've been doing those on their own and they've been a little bit up and down as to exactly when they've been doing those but they've been doing community testing for actually quite some time. These are new sites that I've been telling you about but we'll make sure to get every location out and make sure that they're up and out on our website. Very good, thank you. Okay, are we ready for hospitals? No, no, no. Council Member Donald Ferry. One more just for clarification. These sites, they are free, correct? Yes. Okay, that's what I wanted to make sure that people understood that they could and then do what is the time limit for the one at countryside? And is that only for the residents who live there or anyone in Longmont? That's anybody in Longmont. We did the last planned one today but we're planning on continuing that service. It might not necessarily be at that location again but the idea will remain the same to try to target a bilingual population or some other underserved population but it may not be at that specific location again. And since we don't have a council meeting for some time after this, the site that I'm exploring with Dan and Carmen in our local group is actually Lashley Street Station because based on some other data in terms of where I'm seeing, generally things occur that's pretty central. We've got to make sure that the traffic and everything else works but just in case we move faster than the next, well, we will move faster than the next council meeting. I wanted you all to know that's the site that we're looking at. Okay, thanks. All right, Dan, let's keep going now. Okay, you got it. Hospitals, so today, unfortunately we did break our previous record. We had 91 in the hospital today. That was up significantly from the last couple of days and that's county wide. In Longmont, we had 29, which is a significant number for Longmont. We can talk about beds and I can give you those up-to-date numbers for today. They're a little bit misleading, no, because we don't break out COVID ICU beds versus regular hospital ICU beds. So those could be filled up with strokes, heart attacks, whatever. But as of this morning, county wide, we have 108 total, 72 of them, excuse me, 15 of them are still available. And then on the med-surge side, those are a mix of all kinds of things. But the med-surge availability right now is 112 in the county and 14 in the city. But again, those are, they're a little bit malleable. They can shift those around if they need to. But I think the big message that Harold was giving really does hold true is they are full. They're definitely full. They have not moved towards canceling electives yet, although that is evaluated pretty much every day. And if they start doing it, it would be electives with overnight stays, those sorts of things. The hospitals are very concerned about staffing. Harold talked about that a little bit, but it's not only just fatigue. They've been doing it a long time, but their staff is also affected by quarantine sickness. But an important point is they are not seeing any, if any, spread inside the hospital. Their people are getting sick like, our staff is too, it's outside the employment, the place of employment. It's in the community where most people are getting sick. So their people are getting sick just like everybody else. And they're worried about the upcoming holiday season. They're worried about the upcoming flu season, which so far has been actually really mild, which is a one piece of good news I can give you. Harold did touch on this too, but from July to September, there were nine deaths in the county. We had nine last week. So there's some trends that we would certainly like to get ahead of here. Quickly on to vaccinations. This is something we get asked a lot. And there isn't a tremendous amount of information on these yet. I'll give you what I know. So the state had to submit a plan to the CDC, middle of October, about the 16th, that really was about defining tiers. Who's gonna get it first? Who's gonna get it second, that sort of thing? And there are significant logistical issues involved with vaccinating a entire world. So the amount of planning that's going into this is just enormous. We've had some good news recently from Moderna and Pfizer on significantly good results in clinical trials. And those still need to go through the FDA process to get emergency use, emergency use. And then after that, it's a matter of manufacturing and distribution. But there's a significant amount of discussion and planning. And I wouldn't think about anything that's gonna be community available before March, April-ish. So we're not planning for any widespread distribution before then. There certainly could be some available, but likely those are going to be targeted towards places like long-term care facilities and then down the list of places like hospitals, first responders, but those have not been determined yet either. So lots to be done there too, but we'll certainly let you guys know what we know when we know it. That's about all I have, but I'm happy to answer any questions. Thanks, Dan. Is that it from the city? All right, Dr. Waters? Just one more question, Dan. Oh, we've heard so much about contract, contact tracing and people just kind of given up because of the scope of the job. And we've heard a lot that those people being contacted when people are following up, refusing to cooperate. What experience are we having in Boulder County, both with our capacity in the response of residents? Well, what we have heard from the county is the contact tracing that they are trying to do, the virus is so far ahead of it that they're really not trying all that much and they don't have the staff to catch up either. The state was assisting, but they've pulled the staff that they were lending the county to go to other places that were even more hard hit. So the contact tracing in the county is really virtually non-existent. And I don't know about the people answering the letters, they've basically gone to a letter system. And by the time you might get the letter and check your mail and answer it, we're down the road a little bit. So that's one of the reasons why they're really highlighting the personal responsibility aspect of where your mask do all the right things because the contact tracing just isn't there. So I'll jump in and answer some of that part of that question too. So obviously staffing is a big issue in terms of the contact tracing based on where we are in the level red and what we have to do in some of our facilities. Contact tracing is one of that kind of work is something that's allowed in the CARES funding. And so if we have to repurpose people, I did make the offer to Jeff in the county and we're gonna talk about this. If I have folks in the organization, so let's say we have to not do X. If I have folks and I can use the CARES funding to pay for them to do Y, which may be contact tracing or a basic contact tracing, that's what I would like to do. And so I had that conversation with Jeff and there's gonna be more in the next few days so that we can understand what that means for the organization and how we can help them. Mayor Pro Tem Rodriguez. Thank you, Mayor Bagley. I noticed a kind of recurrent theme in some of the graphs and I guess it would essentially be sort of anecdotal at this point, but it appeared that as we've come over a crest on a bunch of the graphs, that would seem to correlate with the, probably the Halloween type of the year. And so as we're just hitting more and more holidays as we go, be it Thanksgiving next week and Christmas and New Year's, is that some of the things that public health is looking at? Because we do obviously see some trends here with holidays and spikes. Yeah, they've talked about that too in the epidemiologist meetings. That's a clear trend. And it's certainly something they're significantly concerned about coming up over the holidays. And I think that was something that that fed into this decision to move counties into the red is to try to highlight that as a trend and a concern. But that's certainly something that has talked about that pattern that we just highlight of the after-holiday spikes. That, and it's also pretty clear via what they can ascertain from the data it's the social gatherings in terms of they're not seen it at workplaces, they're not seen it in hospitals, social gatherings. And I believe last week it was even kind of iterated that while there are some cases, the vast bulk of the cases from indoor dining do not contribute as heavily as to the private functions. Is that correct? That's what I've heard, Dan. Yeah, that's what I've heard too. All right, let's keep going. All right, that concludes our COVID-19 update. Thank you guys. It's getting a little tricky as you figure out how to walk that line. So we appreciate you. All right, let's move on to special reports and presentations at 2020 Colorado APWA Parks and Trails Award for the Dickens Farm Nature Area. Yay, staff. David? Steve? Yes, Mayor Bagley, City Council. Steve Randsweiler, Senior Project Manager for Public Works and Natural Resources. We are pleased to present to City Council an award that the city was provided this year from the American Public Works Association, Colorado Chapter for the Parks and Trails Project within a large community and for Dickens Farm Nature Area. Pete Adler, who is a member of the Colorado Chapter of the APWA is here to provide an award. And I think Susan is going to provide a video to remind Council what Dickens looks like. So we'll take this short video here. Steve, you're muted, buddy. You're still muted. We've lost your audio, Steve. Yeah, Steve Randsweiler, Senior Project Manager. Hear me now? Yes. Okay, I think it was taken over by the video. Sorry, as I think most of Council knows, this was a very heavily used nature area in 2020. And we're very proud of this award. I'm going to turn this over to Pete Adler to present this award to the City Council. Okay, thanks, Steve. As was mentioned, my name is Pete Adler and I'm the Colorado Chapter Delegate to the American Public Works Association. On behalf of the Board of Directors of the Colorado Chapter of APWA, I'm here tonight to recognize the City of Longmont for the Dickens Farm Nature Area. This is the 35th year the Colorado Chapter has recognized outstanding achievements and individuals in public works in Colorado through our awards program. Project categories are administrative, disaster emergency construction, environment, operations and maintenance, parks and trails, public outreach, structures, sustainability and transportation. We also recognize a number of professional managers in different public works disciplines. The criteria for these awards is to include innovation for a better way to serve the public or internal customers. If the public project achieve all set goals, can other communities and situations learn from this project and was there cooperation with multiple parties to achieve the set goals? The project we are recognizing is the Dickens Farm Nature Area. This is the type of project that the Colorado Chapter is proud to recognize in the multiple, for using a large area for multiple purposes. As I understand the project, the planning process for this multi-use district park, now called Nature Area, was nearly 20 years ago. Some of the park areas and amenities were completed in 2004 and the city was planning on moving back to finish the work on the project site in the 2010s. However, with the record September rains and flooding in 2013, staff rethought the use of the area and not only completed a great open space area with many recreational opportunities, but also used the area for future flood mitigation. This is a dynamic use of development that was supplemented as a separate eater rose. Now I worked for City of Arvada for over 30 years and the middle of Arvada is the Majestic View Park. Majestic View Park is a multi-use park in Nature Area in the middle of the city. As Longmont grows and expands, you'll have the Dickens Farm Nature Area will continue to be a great open space oasis in the middle of the city and Longmont did an extraordinary job in developing this public nature area. So therefore, on the behalf of the Colorado Chapter of the American Public Works Association, I want to congratulate the City of Longmont for the Dickens Farm Nature Area for their Colorado Parks and Trails Project of the Year. I also want to add, this is the type of project that APWA looks to recognize on a national level and the Colorado Chapter is here to assist you with submission for National Project of the Year consideration in this area. And finally, we at the Colorado Chapter of American Public Works Association want to thank all public works field workers for their continual efforts working for the public throughout this pandemic. Good job, guys. Good job. The only question I have, where those people swimming and whatnot, is that like the same water quality as Union? Is it before or after the final water treatment? Water quality in that stretch of the river, where the mayor is above the wastewater treatment plant? I would say it's probably superior to or similar to what is in Union. Okay, all right, cool. I'm just curious. And then, how long has that been open? Mayor Bagley, City Council, we had a soft opening in March of this year. And so we were working on punchless issues for three or four months, but the public was using it from March on. And is that area the whitewater rafting, so to speak? It is the Laumont-St. Varene Float Course. Right, but we don't do whitewater rafting. A luxury of gradient to call it a whitewater, but we're calling it a float. No, that's why, because we were talking about kayaking, but that is the kayaking, right? Mayor Bagley, City Council, I have seen kayakers. I've seen paddle boarders. I've seen tubers. I've seen floaters. I've seen fishermen. So I've seen a lot of multiple uses on that stretch. Cool, it looks beautiful. Thank you guys. Well deserved. Congratulations. Yep, Council Member Peck. Thank you. Thank you, staff. It's beautiful area. I love going out there and cycling around it on the way to Sandstone. So thank you very much. Well deserved. It's gonna be a gym in our community. It's great. Thank you. Okay, then that's it. Let's go ahead and take a three minute break and we're gonna go ahead and get all of you. If you wanna talk, first call, public invited to be heard. Now is the time. Dial that number and let's talk back in three. Something is wrong with my screen, but can you guys see me? All right, so I can't see any of you, but let's get started. Let's go ahead with first call, public invited to be heard. Oh, there I am. All right, so let's go ahead. How many callers we got, first of all? Well, we have quite a few, Mayor. Give me just a minute and I'll give you a count. Looks like we have 16 and I'm just waiting for the slide to clear our live stream, which it did. And I'll begin with the first caller. Your phone number ends in 665. I'm gonna ask you to unmute 665. Yes, good evening. This is Matt Eldred. My address is 318 Carter Lane here in Longmont. I'm calling tonight. I am the executive director for TLC Learning Center, the Tiny Tim Learning Center at 65 year old non-profit early childhood program here in Longmont. Calling tonight to thank city council for the generous support in 2020. You allocated a little over $200,000 for expanding early childhood services, specifically for professional development in 2020. And then COVID happened and those funds have been redirected to providing PPE supplies and leveraging those funds to be able to make sure that early childhood programs and early childhood centers are open and able to open safely with those supplies. So I wanted to thank you for your quick and swift movement with those funds earlier in 2020 and throughout the year as we've been able to reopen. I know that that comes under Karen Roney and Christina Pacheco-Simms and then Olga Brunuitas with the Bride Eyes program. And that money has kind of been funneled and folks have been asked to contact Olga for those usable supplies, which has really been a huge help to be able to open and stay open for early childhood programs so that we can continue to provide services for our youngest residents here in Longmont. Also wanted to thank city council and especially Harold is, he's looking at the CARES Act funds that we're trying to spend through the end of 2020. And those funds, hopefully some of those will be able to be used for early childhood programs to make sure that they remain open again so that we can provide services for some of our vulnerable and most vulnerable residents in Longmont. And especially some of those folks that you were talking about earlier that some of our essential workers that need to be working in Longmont to be able to provide services they have to have places for their children to go. And so we're really thankful to the city for the foresight of being able to direct some of those funds to early childhood programs. And I'm sure you'll probably hear from others tonight how that has impacted them as well. So thank you for your support and please let us know if there's anything that we can do in terms of providing you data and feedback on what those supplies are going to provide services for children in Longmont. Thank you. All right, thank you, Matt. All right, next call. All right, our next caller, your phone number ends in 045. I'm gonna ask you to unmute 045. You may wanna try hitting star six that might help you. There you are. Okay, can you hear me? I sure can, you may begin. Okay, yeah, my name is Maria Villagran and I've been a state licensed child care Boulder County provider. And first of all, I wanna thank you for the PPE protection stuff that you've given us to eliminate a lot of our, to create a, to create a better safer area and safer workplace and healthier work area for our children as these supplies come in, they're beneficiary to all of us. It helps us to keep our business cleaner and from the minute the children walk into our daycare from the one minute to the next throughout the day at the end and then when they're gone and then we have to sanitize and it's been a tremendous help for the hardworking high-end child care providers. And it also helps eliminate for a lot of the providers that have been out looking for stuff that, some of us, we share a lot of our stuff and we keep in contact with each other. Somebody finds like Lysol or Lysol wipes or whatever gloves. And one of us don't have any, we go out and just kind of share our stuff. And this picking up just one lump or bulk in one area is really handy and we don't have to be going out all over the place and doing less traveling and less being out in public, looking for all the stuff that we need to. Thank you, we appreciate all that. And it again, it helps keep us safer and I just wanna say that it helps our business to stay cleaner. And although some of us are limited to just certain toys and we're not limited to learning but just to keep healthy and keep our children as healthy as we can. So thank you so much and that's all I really have. We appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you, bye. All right, the next caller, your phone number ends in 584. 584, I'm gonna ask you to unmute. Hello. Hello. You may begin. Hi, good evening council. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to call in and share our voices. My name is Elizabeth Fanon, 1445 Serenity Circle, a Longmont resident. I'm also the director of the Aspen Center for Child Development, a nonprofit early childhood education setting for children six weeks to six years old. We're also a part of the Our Center, a family resource center. And I wanted to call in and really give my sincere thanks for all the PPE equipment and support the city has offered us throughout 2020 in the COVID pandemic. It's definitely brought some relief to our school, some comfort and sense of security to the parents and the teachers knowing that we're able to follow the cleaning and disinfecting protocols from the public health department and really maintaining a high level of safe and healthy spaces for our entire community. So thank you very much. I'd be happy to help in any way that I can providing information that you need to make other decisions and really am just so, so grateful for your support. So thank you. Thank you. And to the other callers, the best way you could probably thank us is just to say thank you quickly for the PPE. In serious, if you've got, I mean, just let me know that I'm not saying that you shouldn't call and you shouldn't say anything. We've just got a busy schedule tonight. And so everybody should have the opportunity to say what they're gonna say, but if there's 15 people gonna say thank you for three minutes, I know the biggest thank you would be a quick thank you. So all right, let's go, next caller. The next caller, your phone number ends in 396, 396. I'm gonna ask you to unmute. All right, can you hear me? This is Scott at the Longmont Chamber. Hi, Scott, yes, you may begin. All right, good evening, Mayor Bagley and members of City Council. Again, Scott Cook at the Longmont Chamber, 528. And like the other callers before, I was calling to thank the City Council for the funds for PPE for our early childhood providers. So I will keep it short as the Mayor requested, but just from my role, I've spoken with a number of employees who are employer, sorry, who are doing their best to work around their employees' new schedules, which can be very difficult. So keeping our childhood care providers open and having the proper PPE for them is vital for us during this pandemic and our economy is obviously very interconnected. And it's very important that we have these services so that our working families can work as well as they can during this time. So just wanted to pass along our thanks from the Chamber as well. Thanks, Scott. All right, in our next caller, your phone number ends in 322, I do not see that caller on our list. The next one is 887. And I do not see that one listed here as well. And the next one is 142. And that is not one of the ones we were expecting. So I will go down the rest of the list. Caller that ends in 180. I'm gonna ask you to unmute 180. Are you there? Oh, that may be another person that is with another item. 470, let's try you. 470, I'm gonna ask you to unmute, there you are. Hi there, thank you. Michael Belmont here at 841 Tenacity Drive. Thank you, Mayor and council members. It is common knowledge that in 2012, Longmont citizens voted overwhelmingly for an initiative to ban fracking within the city limits. Though the Colorado Supreme Court overturned that ban in 2016 and 2019, the Colorado legislature passed SB 181, giving far greater power to municipalities to regulate fracking within their borders and elevating health and safety of citizens over the promotion of fracking. That bill did not preclude a ban as a means to regulate. Naturally, the group that spearheaded the initiative, Our Health, Our Future, Our Longmont, has with the help of attorney Joe Salazar in Colorado Rising, sought to restore the will of the people in Longmont by reviving the fracking ban in light of SB 181. However, in recent days, council persons Waters and Martin have written opinions scolding Mr. Salazar, Colorado Rising, and by implication, Longmont citizens that support Our Health, Our Future, Our Longmont in honoring the voice of all those citizens that voted to ban fracking. Waters and Martin claim that we are magically safe from the ill effects of fracking because of one agreement with one operator promising not to drill on the surface within city limits. When there are scores of potential drillers in Colorado that would happily do so. This does not secure our future, only the ban that passed overwhelmingly in 2012 by their fellow citizens can do that. We believe it is better to have full protection to perpetuity than the tepid so-called protection they tout that is subject to the vagaries of time. Waters and Martin whine about spending too much money on this effort based on council member Martin's claim that it cost the city $358,000 over eight years given our population that equates to $3.60 total per person. Over those years, which is just 75 pennies per year per person spent on behalf of protecting the health of our entire population and to uphold a mandate of a compelling majority of voters to ban fracking. So tell me Dr. Waters and Ms. Martin, what price would you put on the health of your neighbors, your children, your family? Mr. Belmont, you're out of order. Yeah, you have to address the chair. Indeed, every Longmont citizen or are we simply number? I mean, is this, what price would you put? Is this, are we just numbers and an accounting exercise with the goals to maximize the bottom line? So please don't give us yet another sermon about how one contract with one operator will protect us or that we have spent too much money, 45 cents per citizen per year toward truly and permanently securing the health and safety of our children, our elders, and yes, you and every one of us in this fair town. Thank you, Mr. Belmont. Thank you. All right, please call it. The next caller is 499. Your phone number ends in 499. I'm gonna ask you today. Okay, can you hear me? I can, you may begin. Okay, thank you. And this is Doe Kelly of Barbary Drive and I would like to say something about COVID and vitamin D. As we're heading into more safer at home guidelines and lockdowns with more and more people being economically harmed, my sister who is a physician's assistant has sent me the following report that I would like to share with you. Titled New Study Suggest Vitamin D Deficiency is linked to severe COVID-19. Quote, a recent study has found that more than 80% of approximately 200 COVID patients in the Spanish hospital were deficient in vitamin D. This research seems to support a previous study that indicated an apparent correlation between vitamin D deficiency and an increased risk of acquiring COVID-19. The new study published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism found that 82.2% of the 216 COVID patients studied were vitamin D deficient. It was discovered that patients with lower vitamin D levels had also higher levels of inflammatory markers that have been associated with worse outcomes in COVID patients. Useful in COVID-19 patients and the general population is vitamin D's ability to support the immune system and fight infection by repelling harmful bacteria and viruses. And it also works to balance the immune system. Low levels of vitamin D have been linked with frequent colds and flu end quote. And I note the common cold is indeed a coronavirus and we've all had them. Now I'd like to ask why are people in positions of governmental health authority not telling the population on a broad basis to do such things as take extra vitamin D3C zinc and so on as preventive measures to COVID? Furthermore, why have such esteemed nutritional experts as Andrew W. Saul PhD and others been actively censored from the get-go from the likes of Facebook among other when they share this message? Why would our own health authorities withhold this truth from the population in favor of a future vaccine that certain specific vitamins and minerals can be highly protective from COVID and that no one needs it to die? So nobly espoused by the frontline doctors who then were promptly censored. I hope you will take these questions to heart and then please provide publicly strong leadership in widely promoting already proven natural proactive countermeasures against the scourge whose survival rate is between 95 and 99% depending on age and comorbidities. Most people do not die of COVID in spite of what we have been widely programmed to believe and I will send you all the article containing this study. Congratulations on your award. Thank you. Thank you and thank you for hitting three minutes exactly. All right, next caller. The next caller, your phone number ends in 511. I'm gonna ask you to unmute 511. There you are. Hello. Yes. You may begin. Okay, yes. Hi, my name is Gail Allen and I live in the Greens here in Lamont and this is about the COVID numbers, the rising numbers. My concern was that I think that there is some confusion or ambiguity on when to wear a mask when you're outdoors. A couple of weeks ago, I was walking down Main Street between third and ninth, the business district and I passed a dozen different people on the sidewalks through the crosswalks and only one was actually wearing a mask. One had it on their chin. So the question is if you're not wearing a mask and you can't social distance, that's people feel if they're outdoors they don't need to wear a mask. I've also seen that even on golf courses where they're golfing and they figure they're outside so it doesn't matter if they share a card or walk together. So what I'm asking of city council is if they might be able to strongly suggest to our residents that they carry a mask when they're outside. So if you do come across people and you can't socially distance, at least you have that mask you can slip on and wear until you're socially distanced. I hope that would help to reduce our numbers. And thank you for all your efforts. Thank you, ma'am. All right, next call. The next caller, your phone number ends in five to five. I'm gonna ask you to unmute five to five. There you are. Hello, this is Laurel Richie. I'm a realtor in Longmont and I just wanted to speak on behalf of realtors and the residents of Longmont. Again, first of all, I wanted to thank you guys for all the long nights you're putting in because I realized it's a big deal now that I've been watching these for a while. But I did wanna talk about property rights again and regarding the Airbnb, as I've said before, I know that it's not popular among some people on the council, but determining the use of a person's property seems extremely big brotherish. Letting the market decide what people want seems the reasonable thing to do and Airbnb's are not gonna be going anywhere soon. People love them, they love staying in them over hotels and so many people that stay in Airbnb's are relatives of somebody living nearby. I hear that is a huge part of who's staying there. And I watched a zoning board meeting not too long ago and what I realized was a really big difference between yours and that there had to state if they knew or had any contact with the person who was applying for something, which seems like a really transparent way to deal with this kind of thing because some of the people promoting the limiting of the Airbnb, I know live very close to the trouble house, the quote unquote party house. And it would be nice if people were to disclose what their motivations were by saying, I'm friends with this person who has to live behind a quote unquote party house. That same sort of transparency would be nice. And I know this was a discussion even last week about transparency. You guys like to know who is calling in and not have anonymous people, but yet your relationship with these people is not transparent to us as the public. And it's making a big difference. This could potentially affect maybe now just a handful of these houses but maybe a ton later on. And I have seen the photos of what kind of signs Pearl posted in her backyard facing up towards the Airbnb. One of them said, we don't like having an Airbnb in our backyard, don't talk to us, don't look at us. And another one had big eyeballs on it and said, we're watching you. This is not what a good neighbor does. The type of response she would prompt from the people who see those is not gonna be positive. So she's not being a good neighbor. And whether a person's a short-term person or a long-term renter or even an owner, that's not the kind of neighborly thing that I would expect to be happening in long months. So if these Airbnbs are gonna be eliminated, I think it's only fair for the people involved to disclose how they're related to these people. Because we are only talking about one troubled house. And that's all, thank you. All right, bye. Thank you, ma'am. All right, next. Next caller, your phone number ends in 593. I'm gonna ask you to unmute. There you are. Hi. Hi, you may begin. Good evening, Mayor Bagley and Longmont City Council. My name is Beth Anderson and I live at 421 Gay Street. I'm calling about the short-term rental ordinance you'll be discussing during tonight's meeting. My husband, Tom and I own a home two blocks away that we operate as a short-term rental through the Airbnb platform. Longmont short-term rental ordinance is a powerful document in its current form. It protects our neighborhoods from trusts, LLCs and investment companies purchasing homes to operate as STRs and not being present to manage the property. It requires investment property STR owners to live within the city and only allows one per individual. Many cities didn't have the foresight to enact limitations on STRs before they got out of hand, but Longmont did. And your planning staff has reported that there are minimal problems with the operation of them here. This ordinance should be short up by perhaps limiting the number of permits and giving code enforcement the power to revoke a permit if there are valid violations. With these current limitations, only 12 permits for investment STRs have been issued since the inception of this ordinance. 12 is a small number. When you talk about 33,406 households, the city website says we have here in Longmont, that's fewer than 410,000 of the rooftops in the city. That's tiny. On the other hand, 12 is a huge number. When we talk about our city council shutting down businesses that they gave the green light to less than two years ago, let alone during the middle of a pandemic. If you change this ordinance in the proposed manner, that is exactly what you'll be doing. I've lived in Longmont my entire life. Tom is a farmer who has lived in the city for 29 years and Boulder County his whole life. He plans to retire soon and we are counting on the income from this small business we started to supplement his social security. We have time, money and heart wrapped up in this venture. I implore you to consider other solutions like limiting the number of investment STR permits or charging additional fees that would be dedicated to helping the homeless in our town. At the very least, consider grandfathering those who have already have permits into the updated ordinance. Please do not put us out of business when there is absolutely no local data to support this drastic change. Thank you for your time. All right, next caller. All right, the next caller, your phone number ends in 722-722. I'm gonna ask you to unmute. Hi, mayor and council member. Got you ready for me to go? Of course, you may begin. Yeah. My name is Lynette McLean and I live on Sandpoint Drive in Longmont and I'm representing the Longmont Citizens for Climate Watch tonight. I was disappointed by Councilman Waters and Councilwoman Martin's recent letters to the editor supporting fracking in the city of Longmont. I cannot understand why either one of them would take this stance, which is the complete opposite of their previous stance. They both ran for election to the city council as against fracking and both have supported the climate action resolutions for that climate change. Councilwoman Martin serves on the Northern Colorado Partners for Clean Energy and the Colorado Renewable Energy Society. Both of their letters to the editor were riddled with misguided exaggerations. First off, Joe Salazar is the legal council representing our house, our future, our Longmont, a local group who is asking the courts to put the fracking ban back into place in Longmont. The case was tried in district court, one court, and is now on the way to the Colorado Court of Appeals. Since both council members Waters and Martin were elected to represent the city of Longmont, it's inappropriate for them to take a position against fracking. It's okay to personally be in favor of fracking, but in 2012, 60% of the Longmont citizens voted for the charter amendment banning fracking in the city. This charter amendment is still in place and it's up to the city to uphold our laws. Senate Bill 181 allows cities to be more restrictive with oil and gas activity. Fracking has an economic effect of lowering property values, but most importantly, adversely affects our health. Research indicates that fracking as close as one and a half miles from residences can cause birth defects and cancer. In a Pennsylvania study, radioactivity was measured as far away as 12 miles from fracking sites. Drilling back under homes and lakes, as is being done at Union Reservoir, is also dangerous and can make our drinking water unpotable. Union Reservoir originally called Cock and Lake was carved out during the last racial age and is one of only a few natural lakes left in Colorado. In 1903, the Union Ditch Company began drilling a tunnel to release water into the St. Rain River. According to Colorado Water Law, that made Union a true reservoir. Horizontal drilling such as what is being done at Union Reservoir is susceptible to leaks and explosions and can contaminate the air, ground and water. Perhaps the council members have been brainwashed by local developers who have retained the mineral rights under their housing developments, but please assure to those developers that it's not likely that the citizens of Longmont will allow gas and oil activity under their residences. If you don't wanna support a ban on fracking, you can simply throw away the mailers requesting donations and don't take it personally. If you're interested in putting the original fracking ban back in place in Longmont, you can donate to Colorado Rising at corising.org. Thank you. All right, all right, that's three minutes. Thank you. All right, next caller. And I just want his chair to say that I admire the discipline of council members, Waters and Martin. The next caller, your phone number ends in 819. 819, I'm gonna ask you to unmute. There you are. Good evening, I'm Tom Anderson. I live at 421 Gay Street. My wife Beth and I own and operate an Airbnb at 906 Fifth Avenue, a block and a half from our house. We've been in operation for 14 months. Things are going well. Most of our guests are people from out of state visiting family in Longmont. A lot of grandparents visiting their kids and grandkids who live here or kids whose parents live here but have no room for them to stay with them. During this pandemic, it's been a safe haven away from a hotel setting where they can isolate and feel safe to be around their family. In fact, we have some grandparents coming in January for three months for the sole reason for helping their kids school, their grandkids. We opened our Airbnb following all the stringent guidelines Airbnb requires and all the protocols the city requires according to ordinance, which by the way, I feel is an excellent example of how well the planning department did divide in it. They are true professionals. This ordinance has only been in place for 20 months and seems to be working well. There are only 12 investment Airbnb's in the whole city. 12 individuals who've invested their time and money into these small businesses. I'm 66 years old. I was born and raised in Longmont. Fourth generation is a matter of fact. Operating this small business is a block and a half away from where I live as part of my retirement plans. I think it is very unfair that the city would take that away from me. Seems you should encourage small business, not shut it down. Thank you, sir. Next caller. All right, our last caller, your phone number ends in 401. I'm gonna ask you to unmute. Are you there? 401. Hello, my name is Susan Green. I live on Western Sky Circle in the Harvest Junction Village neighborhood. First, I wanna say thank you to Mayor Bagley and the council people for allowing me to speak and also for responding to my emails. And also the COVID reporting earlier is sobering and definitely puts things in perspective. I'm calling about the Costco development that is up for discussion later today on Ken Pratt Boulevard. And I just wanted to say that before we purchased our home in Harvest Junction Village, we did our due diligence. We looked at all the planning documents and we understood that gravel mines were permitted and it was pretty much a done deal that those gravel mines would be there with the end result being remediation to Golden Pond-like park. So you can understand that we're a little disappointed to have that done deal kind of changed at the last minute. And now we will have a big concrete building behind our house. I understand and support the Longmont Economics and Diversity. I'm a longtime Longmont resident and we definitely support this in the community. I think that neighbors that I've discussed this with all we are really asking for is consideration that additional and sufficient landscaping or visual barriers be put in place so that we do not have our property values affected by this and the light pollution, traffic and auditory impacts of having a large warehouse behind us don't affect our daily lives. So thank you for your time and your consideration. Thank you. All right, next. Mayor, that's all the calls for tonight. All right, great. We all doing okay? Can we go through the consent agenda quick? We doing all right? All right, let's keep going. Thank you, Mayor Pro Tem. I'll take that as an absolutely, let's rock on. All right, you wanna go ahead and read the consent agenda for us? You bet, Mayor. Item 9A1 is Resolution 2020-122, a resolution of the Longmont City Council approving a cooperative agreement between the city and the Longmont Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 6 for January 1st, 2021 through December 31st, 2021. 9A2 is Resolution 2020-123, a resolution of the Longmont City Council approving a cooperative agreement between the city and the Longmont Professional Firefighters Association International Association of Firefighters Local 1806 for January 1st, 2021 through December 31st, 2021. Sorry, 9B is Resolution 2020-124, a resolution of the Longmont City Council approving the Intergovernmental Agreement between the city and Adam State University for a Memorandum of Affiliation permitting educational experiences and counseling. 9C is Resolution 2020-125, a resolution of the Longmont City Council approving the Intergovernmental Agreement between the City of Longmont and the County of Boulder for the acquisition and management of the McLaughlin property. 9D is Resolution 2020-126, a resolution of the Council of the City of Longmont, Colorado, finding that the petition for annexation of a parcel of land located in Boulder County, State of Colorado, known as the Riverside Annexation, generally located north of Boston Avenue and east of Sunset Street, substantially complies with the Colorado Revised Statute Section 312-1071. And 9E is Resolution 2020-127, a resolution of the Longmont City Council supporting public health agencies in slowing the spread of COVID-19. Council Member Peck, I'm sorry, Council Member Christensen. I would like to pull item B and E, items. All right, I'm gonna move the Consent Agenda, less item B and E. Council Member Waters? I'd like to pull item A. All right, I'm gonna withdraw my motion and I'm gonna move Consent Agenda, less A, B and E. Second. All right, all in favor of passage of the Consent Agenda, specifically C and D only, say aye. Aye. Opposed, say nay. Aye. All right, the motion carries unanimously. All right, let's go back and look at, let's start with just an order. Item A, Dr. Waters, do you wanna start? You can start by- All right, yeah, thank you. My question is really not about, because I took it off the agenda because I didn't know when to ask this question. It's not about the agreement with the Fire Department or the Police Department. My question really is for Harold and it's about where we are, because so much of the agreement is about protecting the rights of employees as it should be. But I know we're in the process of reseening the Citizen Review Panel or the Citizen Oversight Panel. I'm just curious where we are with that process and if something were to emerge requiring their services, do we have a panel that we could call to respond? And is that a new panel? Is that a former panel? What's the status of all that? We have the existing panel that's in place for those issues that we've been dealing with now. I'm trying to look at my schedule. I think I go into, at some point this week, I have a meeting to where we go through the applications that we've solicited applications. I have a panel that I'm working with to go through those applications. Friday afternoon, thank you, Joanie. I knew it was on my, so Friday afternoon, we're gonna meet to go over those applications and then I believe it's the first week of December after Thanksgiving where we go through and do the interviews. And so you'll, so in the interim, if something were to come up, you'd have the existing panel. Existing the existing panel. Thanks. With that information, I'll move approval of nine A and I can't see my screen because this thank you. In resolutions 2020-122 and 2020-123. Second. All right, it's been moved by Dr. Waters and seconded by Council Member Peck. All in favor say, ah. Point of order. Yes, go ahead. Should we, since we've pulled these out, take them one at a time, as far as motion. Let's just do it to be safe. All right, we're gonna vote on resolution 2020-122. We're gonna divide the motion all in favor of passage of resolution 2020-122. Say aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed to say nay. All right, resolution 2020-122 passes unanimously. In the second part of the motion, resolution 2020-123, all in favor of passage say aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed to say nay. All right, the motion also carries, that motion also carries unanimously. Let's move on to be Council Member Christensen. The floor is yours. Yeah, I just wanted to make a comment. Sometimes we pay people for internships. I would like to know whether they're being paid for this internship. Doesn't look like they are in the agreement. And I just like to point out, as I always do, that when you don't pay people, then the only students who can do this are people who have money and people who are out trying to actually have to work to pay their bills to go to school. So it's discriminatory. Hey, Eric, Council Member Christensen. Theresa Tate, Deputy City Attorney here. I do not believe that this provides for payment for those internships. I believe it is a requirement of their program. We have a long-standing relationship with this university and this program. But so in answer to your question, I do not believe that they are paid. I guess I would also say that, I mean, if we have all internships required to be paid, a lot of people wouldn't get internships. My firm provides internships to high school kids. Trust me, I do not need or want high school kids in my firm, but it gives them the opportunity to at least be around and kind of see what lawyers are like. And if you said, you gotta pay them, they wouldn't be in my firm because they're losing me. I mean, I lose money by having a present. But in this case, we don't need to debate it because it sounds like it's part of an educational requirement. So do you wanna make a motion, Council Member Christensen, or do you want me to? No, I'll move it because we always do this, but I'm just pointing out that no matter what, it still means that it's discriminatory. Okay, I move Resolution 2020-124. I'll second it. All right, all in favor of Resolution 2020-124, so you know for the debate, say aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed, say nay. All right, Resolution 2020-124 passes unanimously. All right, let's move on to Resolution 2020-127. I was gonna pull that as well, Council Member Christensen. Okay, well, I don't mean to be such a mom, but one of the things we seem to have forgotten about is washing our hands. That's one of the main ways that things get spread around. We all like to touch stuff, we like to touch each other. This isn't helpful. So I'm just saying that it would have been nice to have in this Resolution something about washing your hands because using soap and detergent to remove the fat layer of COVID is one of the most effective ways to keep it down. So anyway, but other than that, I would move Passage of Resolution 2020-127. I'll second that. I guess the only thing I wanted to say is what I, my frustration in the very beginning with the pandemic was just like some people would refuse to acknowledge the threat of the virus, many, you know, many would just fail to see the detrimental impacts on the economy and other issues and secondary consequences. I just wanted to give a shout out to the governor. I thought he did a great job with what he presented today. It's taking into account both concerns. And I don't know about other people, but I lose a lot of sleep trying to figure out how in the world is an individual, a business owner, a politician, a father, just as a person who has elderly parents and does not want them dead or sick, what do you do? You know, so I thought he walked a pretty fine line today. And hopefully we've got a virus on the way. So we'll keep pushing through. So all right, let's take a vote. All in favor of resolution 2020-127, say aye. Aye. Opposed say nay. All right, resolution 2020-127 passes unanimously. All right, let's move on to, actually let's go ahead and take a brief two minute break. And I'm sorry about that, I skipped this. But let's go ahead and take a two minute break for public hearing to consider Action Amendment 20-02 to the 2020 CDBG Action Plan. I don't think we're gonna have anybody, so stay close to your computer and we'll start right at three minutes. Thanks. You ready to keep going? Is anybody on the line for public hearing? No mayor, I do not see anybody that has called in. All right, then I'm gonna go ahead and move Amendment 20-02 to the 2020 CDBG Action Plan and close the public hearing. Second. All right, it's been moved and seconded. All in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed say nay. All right, great. Let's move on to item 12 before we jump in. So depending on how long this takes, I was told by city staff that they can pull item C and D and push it to next week. Our roll need 851 however, so we'll see how this goes. I guess it would also, as we start to talk about the Costco Economic Development Plan and the incentives, keep in mind A, that we've all been in on these meetings as city council members as we've been going along too. There is a fantastic backstory piece that's available along public media if the public would like to know more about the history of the project. And three, just be mindful that this could easily go on forever. So continue Harold, your turn. Yeah, mayor council. This is, we have a fair amount of slides but we're gonna try to move through those with some pace to kind of talk about the project and provide some of the information. So Susan, if you can bring that up. Tonight we have several folks joining us. I can't, I have representatives from Costco. Jennifer Murillo will be presenting on their behalf representatives from the Golden Family and the development team that's been working on this. The presentation's primarily from a staff perspective going to be me, we're gonna have Jessica present a slide on Ancillary Economic Impacts. Dale's gonna talk about the deal structure and Jim's gonna talk about the financials. At the same time, we also have Eugene, Carolyn White and others here to answer any questions. Next slide please. So the first part that we wanna start off with is how did this opportunity develop and why is it important to our community? And we think this is important to talk about with council today in order to provide some perspective on the process that we went through. Can't say this has been something that we've been working on for over a year. I don't know how much over a year, but over a year. Next slide. So what happened here? What happened in Longmont, we were approached by a developer with the potential of locating Costco in Longmont. There were a number of issues that really came out with that original location, primarily from an infrastructure and financial perspective. And when we evaluated it, the developer needed 18 to 23 million to make the deal work for them to meet the Costco requirements. And I wanna be very clear. These were not Costco requirements for the 18 to 23 million. These were the requirements that the developer had to have in order to meet some of those requirements associated with the infrastructure and financial challenges at this location. Next slide, please. So we realized we needed a new location based on the infrastructure and economics there. We knew that Costco wanted to locate a store in the Longmont area, but we also knew the Longmont area, not meaning Longmont. And so we knew there were locations outside of Longmont's municipal boundaries. We knew there were locations being considered in communities to our East. And so we needed to assist Costco in finding a location that met their needs. What we actually did, to be very clear, we didn't pick a particular location. We set a bunch of options based on what we knew the space requirements would be. Costco said, this is the location we wanna pick based on their requirements and what they're looking for in a site. Next slide. So when they picked the location, I wanna take this opportunity to thank Reggie Golden and the Golden family because when we presented these different sites, it was, as we all know, planned for a different use. And so we called Reggie and we said, we have an opportunity in Longmont. This is a location that they wanna utilize and would you be willing to entertain that conversation? A lot of people don't have to do that. And I think their commitment to our community and just helping us with these types of opportunities as a testament to what they've done. And I just wanna thank them for that because it's not something that a lot of people will do is change what they're planning midstream to look at something else. So I just wanted to say thank you. We also, in terms of these types of deal structures because I know there's been some questions about, so why do we do this? I will say this is consistent in terms of the Costco requirements and in the next slide, I'll talk a little bit about that. But we also looked and this is public information that was presented. If you see the last project, the Denver Flyway Project, this was actually a presentation that they made. And it was a similar project in 2020. And so this was in their public slides, but really you can see that this type of structure is consistent in the different communities. Parker in 2009, 11.6 million, and within 14 million. Gorton 3.47, it's a TIF slightly different and then the Denver Flyway Project of 9.5 million. So you can see consistency in the type of deals. I want to again be very clear. That's about having the site ready for development and the utilities up to the pad side. So that is that development cost that's associated with it. Next slide please. So what are the benefits of locating Costco in Longmont? First and foremost, we know that it will reduce our retail leakage. It was interesting for me to see the social media components that we saw on Nextdoor and all the social media platforms and how many people in our community said, hey, we don't have to drive to these other locations. So for us, that's a big component. As we know from the world we're in now from an economic perspective, that's important to weather these storms. It also protects our existing sales tax base. And this is an important point for us because when we talked about the fact that there are other locations outside of our jurisdiction, we knew that Costco is one of the few, and I can only think of two, what I would say retail destinations in terms of where people drive to go to their stores, we knew that that would pull people from Longmont pull other retail opportunities with them. And so we really knew we had to do that to actually keep the existing sales tax in our community. Same time, we knew that it would increase our existing sales tax base. And this is one of the few times that I've been in an economic development deal where it's not just looking at what you can gain, it's also looking at what you can potentially lose if it locates outside of your community. Creates well-paying jobs. Jennifer is going to jump in and talk about the Costco story, but when we look at it, the way they structure their salary benefits, it really actually looks more like a primary employer than a typical retailer. It brings, you've heard me say this one's a destination retailer to Longmont, that's not something that we really have at this point, and it definitely does that, which also expands our retail trade area. And so we've looked at a couple of things next slide. So when we look at this, this is actually a map that we took that's on the website for the Village of the Peaks in terms of what they consider the retail trade area. And then in different conversations, we said, so what does that potentially look like? We really think this is what it does to our retail trade area, we're not sure, but we're saying this is what we think it will do in terms of bringing people into our community so you can obviously see that it makes a big difference and hits many of the points that I talked about earlier. Next slide. And so now I will actually turn it over to Jessica to talk about the Costco economic impact from her perspective, Jessica. Thank you, Harold. So I'll just real quickly talk about from an economic development perspective, we typically look at retail and primary industry projects very differently. Retail projects we're typically looking at significant fiscal benefits, which you'll hear about the significant fiscal benefits which are the direct dollars into city coffers that Costco location brings to the community. When we look at primary industry projects, we're more looking at the broad economic spin-off benefits in terms of job creation and wages that are paid by those jobs and then the spin-off jobs, the direct jobs and then the spin-off jobs that are created as a result. Costco is a unique project in that it has both significant fiscal and economic benefits. So as Harold mentioned, looking more like a primary industry project when we consider the economic spin-off benefits of a Costco location here in Longmont. And what creates that are the number of jobs that are gonna be created by the Costco location here, as well as the high average wages that are being paid and the new dollars that will be coming into our local economy through the expanded trade area that Harold just mentioned. So Costco estimates that they'll create 260 direct jobs in the first five years here in Longmont. Economic impact modeling suggests that with the multiplier effect of those jobs, that's an additional 74.3 spin-off jobs will be created locally totaling 334.3 total jobs within Longmont. When we look at it from a wages perspective, Costco estimates that their annual wages would be $16.4 million with an average annual wage of over $58,000 per year, which is higher than the citywide average annual wage. We estimate through economic modeling that an additional $8.3 million in spin-off annual wages will be paid as a result of this project. So a total of nearly $25 million in annual wages paid as a result of the location of this project here. We also look at the investment, the capital investment that Costco will make in building and furniture fixtures and equipment in the facility, many of those dollars being spent here locally. We also recognize the significant fiscal contribution that the location of Costco in Longmont makes to the school district totaling about $6.3 million over the next 10 years. And that's net of any additional student costs related to additional employees moving into the region. Thanks, Jessica. We're gonna keep going with the presentation and we'll ask council if you have questions. We don't do that at the end, if that's okay. Yes. So the other thing, so one of the things that really impressed me is just looking at, again, Jessica touched on this, their salary structure as a retailer and being more commensurate with a primary employer, but it's also really how they approach how they treat their employees, how they invest in them, the benefits they provide. And then frankly, the thing that I heard from Jennifer is really how they look internally. But let's go to the next slide and turn it over to Jennifer because she's the one that can really talk to you about their philosophy. And I think it'll impress all of you. Jennifer. Hi. Can you guys hear me okay? Sorry, I just lost, hold on. Just. We can hear you. Okay, I just lost my view. Hold on a second. Okay, well, I'm just gonna roll with that. Thank you very much. Can I get the next slide please? First of all, thank you council, staff and community members for inviting me to this today for allowing me to talk about Costco. I've been asked to highlight some of the key issues and talk about how we plan to operate in the city of Longmont. So, I'm gonna run you a little bit. Costco's goal is to provide the best possible values and lowest prices to our members by virtually eliminating all corrals and costs associated with traditional retail. This includes everything from our concrete floors, exposed ceilings, and lack of commercial advertising. Where we don't cut costs is our employees because they make all the difference for our membership. Costco's competitive advantage has always been our corporate culture and that culture is a reflection of our employees. And what does this mean? It means that we pick the best, we compensate them fairly and we grow with them. As this last bullet point points out, community partnership is a very critical component of our strategy. We put a lot of thought into our location strategy because we view this as a long-term relationship is for us corporate giving. All of that stuff you can find on our website, Costco.com with percentages and amounts and all that. But what I really like to highlight is our warehouse staff works directly with local nonprofits to donate not just goods and materials, but their time. If you go on the website, Costco.com, lower left-hand corner, there's a section called come sustainability commitment. And if you click on community, there's some really great information. There's a video with real Costco employees talking about the local community initiatives that they participate in. And I can tell you 100%, those are real employees because one of those is our real estate admin and it's a super cute video. So if you have time to check that out, it really gives a lot more information on this, but I'll speed it along because I know we have a lot going on today. Can I get the next slide please? I would like to thank staff for including this. This is just another, something that we're very, very proud of. It's a reflection that all of the things we're putting into play are having that fact that we want and that is creating a positive and supportive work environment for employees. Next slide, please. So back to fair compensation. One of the ways that this is reflected, as Harold said, we do pay among the highest wages in the retail industry. And one of the evidence of that is turnover rate. So 2019, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said that the average retail turnover rate was 58%. As you can see here, our turnover rate is 13, which is a fraction of that. And if you dig a little deeper and you go after one year, that drops to 7%. And again, this is a huge measure of success for us because happy employees stay. And this keeping great employees and growing with them is what saves us money and it improves the level of service in our warehouses. It is also a great job for college students who need to schedule around their classes. We offer flexibility. We offer incentives and tuition support, all kinds of things that are really beneficial. And finally, it's a great opportunity to grow with the company. When you start, obviously we started 18, you can move up throughout there. And because all promotional opportunities within the warehouse are filled from within. And that means that every executive we have and upper management, all of these people for the most part have grown up through the company. They know what it's like to work in a warehouse and they've moved up to their current position. So I think that's something that's really great and that's something that is a big piece of our culture, our company culture. Can I get the next slide please? Finally, just to drive all of this home, you can see that the statistics on the screen here, it all translates to one thing, which is livable wages and growth and opportunity. I should say opportunity. One stat that's not shown here is that in fiscal year 2019, 90.3% of our employees were eligible for benefits. That's 268,000 employees, 90% coverage. And of those employees, 97% of those chose to enroll. And why? Because they're really good benefits, I can say that. I am an actual cost employee covered by actual cost of benefits. And for a family of four or five, that's $167 a month. So that's huge. I've talked to other people and that's a pretty good coverage. And as a mother of a child with asthma, I can attest that this is a huge relief. It's one less thing that you have to worry about in a time when there is a lot to worry about. So just wanted to highlight on that. And before I go, I'd like to thank staff, Reggie, everybody for welcoming us into the community and giving us this opportunity to become a part of the community. So thank you very much. And with that, I will pass the torch. Thank you, Jennifer. All right, who's next, Harold? Is that it? Dale. Mayor, I agree, and members of council, Dale Rademacher, can you go to the next slide? So mayor and council, I'm going to take a few minutes here and just step through some of the highlights and key elements of the particular agreement that's in front of you. I'm gonna start with some of what staff has understood to be some of the expectations or needs of Costco. As Harold noted, there was only one location in Longmont that Costco decided. It's part of their corporate culture to actually have their CEO come out and literally stand on the site and make the decision that this is in fact where they wanna locate the store. Part of that effort also requires an agreement with the owner to deliver that property at no cost to Costco. And also Costco is looking for pad ready sites. In other words, at the horizontal infrastructure, the water, the sewer, the roads have been built and essentially what is delivered to them is a pad ready site where they can then come in and construct their warehouses and facilities. Next slide. And again, the public-private partnership agreement or the P3 agreement, there's several key elements to it. I'm not going to go through each and every one of these in detail, but suffice it to say, there is a component to the agreement wherein the city is acquiring the 17 acres of land for the Costco warehouse and fueling island. This agreement is also providing the city with a significant affordable housing opportunity. Again, through the acquisition of nine acres of property for that purpose, the city is also bringing to the table, if you will, the satisfaction of the raw water deficits on the property. And the overall property is a 48.66 acres site. We're satisfying those water deficits in a variety of ways. And we'll talk about that a little bit later. As I had mentioned, the public improvements are an expectation. And so the agreement that's in front of you also calls for a sharing of the design and construction of the public improvements. And the city is also, I think of it as sort of backing up, the costs for the private site improvements. Should those costs exceed the contribution of funds being provided by Costco? The agreement has several Clawback provisions that I'll talk about in a minute here. And again, those are to protect the city's investment in the project. And then finally, there's a timeline for the project initiation and ultimately a deadline for the opening of the Costco warehouse. Costco is contributing 6.16 million to the private site improvements. That is certainly in addition to the costs that they are going to expand obviously to build and furnish the warehouse in the fueling island. Next slide. As I mentioned, this is a 48 acre site. It's immediately south of Kenpratt Boulevard and immediately east of the harvest junction commercial and residential areas. The site is very visible. And I believe that that was one of the benefits and attributes of this particular site for Costco. Next slide. This is a property site plan and counsel this exhibit is in your packet, but I just wanna draw your attention that in the northwest portion of the site plan is the 17 acres where the Costco warehouse will be located. To the right of that, there are three or four green pad sites that the owner Reggie Golden and the Golden family will retain through the process. And then finally on the lower left side is the nine acres that the city will be acquiring for affordable housing. Next slide, please. This is a site plan that gives a little more detail for the proposed layout of the Costco facilities. And just to orient yourself along the north is Kenpratt Boulevard. The north-south roadway is coming in. There will be a traffic light. That will be a full intersection on the highway. It will then travel to the south to a large roundabout that will be one of the primary entrances into the Costco site, as well as the adjacent development pads. The fueling island is on the northern end of the Costco site. And there's also a proposed right end, right out off of Kenpratt Boulevard in the far left upper side of this site plan. You'll notice too that there's another access into the Costco parking lot off of the main north-south roadway. That is the primary truck route where all of the supplies that will be coming into and out of the Costco facility will be entering and exiting off of Kenpratt Boulevard and then back out on the Kenpratt Boulevard. Next slide, please. As I mentioned, the PPA or P3 agreement, the city's contributions of that are the actual costs to acquire the 17 acres that will be delivered to Costco and the nine acres of affordable housing. We believe we are acquiring those parcels at very favorable rates. Certainly when you look at development ready property within the city limits, we believe it's a very fair price. The raw water deficits is actually an interesting aspect of the process project as well. The first is the 22.66 acre fee of the deficit on the owner remainder property. That is being provided as an economic incentive from the city to the property owner. Now the satisfaction of the raw water on the 26 acres, meaning the 17 acres for Costco and the nine acres for the affordable housing, both of which are going to be acquired by the city. Council, if you move forward with the ordinances tonight, they are implementing your raw water master plan, that aspect of the plan where we will utilize a portion of the city's water supply to meet affordable housing needs in our community, as well as to meet economic development opportunities that meet the specific criteria called out in the ordinance. The agreement also calls for the funding of the public improvements, as I mentioned earlier, the utilities, both the dry and wet utilities, as well as all the roadway features and drainage. They are being shared, those costs are being shared on a pro-rata basis tied to the number of acres owned. And so again, it's a 48.66 acre site with the city owning 26 of those acres or being responsible, if you will, for 26 of those acres, which equates to about 53.43% of the project and the owner being responsible for 46.57, again, representing the 22.66 acres that they are retaining. And then lastly, the city also agreed to provide and make available as needed up to an additional $3 million to cover some of the private site improvements. Those are the things like the parking lots, the landscaping and the lighting. And one of the callers that called in this evening was concerned about landscaping. I'm confident that as the project moves through the design review committee process that we will certainly be sensitive to in looking at having a very robust landscaping plan that certainly goes to a large extent to screen and provide a buffer to adjoining properties. Next slide, please. Council, there are also related agreements associated with this project. The first on this list is an intergovernmental agreement between the city and Boulder County, which will provide for the approval of Quicksilver Road between North 119th Street and Countyline Road as the hall route for the future mining of the Irwin Thomas site. And I failed to mention, Council, that part of the project, one of the results that we are achieving through this development of the property is a movement, is a shifting of the future gravel mining further away from some of the residential properties. And we were certainly getting numerous calls, as I'm sure many of you were as well, with residents who were concerned about the pending gravel mining on the property. The use of Quicksilver Road was something that our staff has felt was important for a number of years, certainly preceding the particular project in front of us. We felt that way for a number of reasons. The first was safety. We do not believe it is a safe route to take 100 to 200 trucks a day and have them go up 119th Street to the Ken Pratt Boulevard Expressway, enter that expressway and then exit it at Countyline Road only to turn around and go about two miles south. So it's sort of a circuitous route. It's also incredibly dangerous when they're on the way back in, making left-hand turns at 119th Street across four lanes of traffic that are traveling at very high speeds. So we were concerned about safety in that situation. We were also, we felt that because this route was shorter that we actually calculated a significant reduction in greenhouse gas generation from the burning of the diesel fuel to haul the gravel from the mine site to the processing location in Well County. And we believe that is also an important aspect of it. We also know that it is certainly the shortest route to move the gravel. So that intergovernmental agreement, you are not acting on that tonight, but we had it in your packet so that you could see the entire package of information. Associated with that intergovernmental agreement is an agreement between the city and aggregate industries. Aggregate industries will be the operator who will be completing the mining of the Irwin Thomas property, the balance of the property, if you will. That agreement between the city and aggregate industries really parallels what is in the intergovernmental agreement between the city and the county. And in the agreement with aggregate, the city is essentially making aggregate the responsible party for the maintenance and care of the Quicksilver Road throughout the mining period, as well as the mitigation of adjacent property owners, again, during that mining period. Next slide, please. I mentioned earlier, council, that there are several Clawback provisions in the main contract. And just real quickly, a Clawback provision is intended to protect the city's investment. And so these Clawback provisions are all found in section four of the agreement. What they do is they vary depending on where in the process, the construction of the project was when the things didn't go well. And so a Clawback is there in the event that one or more parties default on the agreement. And what's important to the city, we're investing significant money as Jim is gonna talk with you about in a minute. We did our best in this agreement to protect that investment. It even goes so far as to continue that protection for a certain time period, up to five years in the event that the public improvements get built, the warehouses built, it's opened. But for some reason, it doesn't stay open long enough for the city to derive sufficient sales tax dollars, again, to fully recoup our investment. So that protection is in this agreement as well. Next slide. And with that, I'll turn it over to Chief Financial Officer, Mr. Jim Golden to talk about the finances of the project. Thanks, Dale. Mayor, members of the Council, Mayor Begley, members of the Council. Glad to pick it up from here. I'm gonna get into the financing and the project costs first. I'll start with the total project costs. And these are maximum project costs. Dale mentioned that the city's committed up to $3 million to over and above what Costco is paying for their site development costs. So those are maximum estimates and we're hoping that they'll come in at less than that. So these numbers could end up being a maximum and much less or at least less than what we ultimately pay. The total cost for the projects, and that's the Costco and the Affordable Housing Project are $23.6 million. The city share of those costs are just below $13 million. The developer cost are $3.6 million and the Costco costs are $6.9 million. The next slide please. This is a matrix that you can find in the Council communication tonight and I've included it here. There is one difference that is a major difference but just one difference I wanted to point out that I did include since the communication was drafted the private site development costs from Costco of $6.16 million. So that wasn't on there but I was concentrating mostly on the city's project costs here but decided to pull that in to show this total project costs and show that they were investing more dollars in there than I had shown originally. So next slide please. And this matrix, by the way, I'm gonna slice and dice this up but it does have all the information on any of these costs breakdown that I do not break down for you that are in these numbers. So this here are the city's project costs. Costco project is $9.9 million and the affordable housing is a little over $3 million. These are a little bit higher than what you see in the communication of what I refer to as hard dollar costs of $9.6 million. Both of these are a little bit higher because of the Royal Water Deficit that Dale talked about. We'll be refunding the cash and lieu payments for those purposes and didn't consider those part of the hard dollar cost. Next slide, please. So these are the city's project funding sources. We'll be funding and the affordable housing fund will fund $1.47 million of the affordable housing project. The rest of the project for the affordable housing and the Costco project will come $11 million, a little over $11 million that we will ultimately be funding through sales tax to be generated by the development. And then there's $459,000 of the rebated fees I was just referring to. Next slide. Jim, I wanted to make a point really quick. So I don't think it may be if it's on your next slide. Yeah, nevermind it's on your next slide. Go to that one. Okay, so the total affordable housing project is a little over $3 million. The city's paying the affordable housing fund is paying for the land cost of $1.47 million. And then the sales tax from the development will pay for the site improvements and the fees related to the nine acre property. So that's $1.455 million. Again, this is a maximum cost. We think that there are pretty conservative estimates of cost in here. And then finally the cash and lieu water rebate related to this property was $159,000. Does that cover it? Yeah, well, I wanted to say, I think what's important about this is the sales tax paying half of the cost, roughly for the affordable housing project. And it's not all being borne on the affordable housing fund. And I think that's one of the positive aspects of this deal is you have this project supporting affordable housing to a much higher level than what we would have normally done in some of our other development opportunities. Okay, next slide, please. So the Costco project costs $9.9 million. So sales tax will pay the majority of that. Broken it out, though, in that the first line here is the sales tax paying the land costs and the site improvements costs and fees of $6.6 million. And then the $3 million that Dale mentioned that the city is committing for private site development costs the up to $3 million, as I mentioned before. And finally, the cash and lieu water rebate related to this property was a little over $300,000. Next slide. So in order to do this, one of the actions that you are faced tonight, you have a ordinance that will create the Harvest Junction East Special Revenue Fund. That's a fund that we are proposing be put together and that we would utilize to put the funds from a loan from the fleet fund that we're proposing as well. And you won't act on that until December 1st, but that loan would be for the amounts that for all of the city's share of the project that will eventually be paid back either from the Affordable Housing Fund and over five years with a $1.17 million loan. There's about 300,000 that's already budgeted for 2021 out of the Affordable Housing Fund. And then $11 million, a little over $11 million for what we just mentioned that would be paid back by sales taxes. So the Harvest Junction Special Revenue Fund would take the dollars from the loans and then what would happen is we would expend those dollars from that fund and then as time goes on, we would pay the loans back from this fund. Now, next slide please. So what I'm proposing here as a structure for that loan is that now, as you know, the city has a sales tax rate of 3.53%. And 1.53% of that rate are earmarked sales taxes. Now those goes towards open space and streets and public safety and they can only be used for that purpose. So what we're looking to is the 2% that is non-earmarked to utilize that to pay for the loans that were setting up here and ultimately for these two projects. So I'm proposing that half of that 2% go into the Harvest Junction Special Revenue Fund that would be used to repay that loan back to the fleet fund. The other 1% then would go to the General Fund and the Public Improvement Fund in the same rate, split rate that we use currently for the sales tax for the 2%. Next slide please. So the sales estimates that we have from Costco are that for the based on our sales tax rate and the size of the facility that would generate Longmont sales tax of $4.06 million in its first year. So we're estimating that there'll be just short of 26% of that revenue that would come from cannibalization of existing Longmont retailers. Next slide please. So this here is showing that first year, $4.06 million of sales tax. You see up on the upper right side that I have $1,150,000 as the internal loan repayment. That's the 1% sales tax that I mentioned would go to the Harvest Junction Special Revenue Fund. And then the rest of these dollars you're seeing on this screen are the five different funds that we utilize that we allocate our sales tax dollars to. And that's how what the impact would be for them on a gross basis in the first year. Next slide here please. So now looking at that from a net basis after deducting the amount of estimated cannibalized taxes that would be drawing from other retailers. It would be just over $3 million of net new sales taxes in the first year. And this here is not showing this pie chart does not have the 1.15 million on it. But that is again in this as well and it's part of the $3 million. But the other five fund breakdown is shown here and this shows you what essentially I'm projecting would be the net impact of new sales tax to these budgets in the first full year of operation of Costco. Next slide please. So we used a 2% growth estimates and I will say that Costco does estimate much greater growth estimates in their first five to 10 years. But as you know, I tend to be conservative and I wanted to try to model this and see what would happen if we were looking at it from a conservative basis. And so what we're showing is that Costco would generate a 98.6 million of gross sales tax over 20 years of operation and then 73 million of new net sales tax over that same period of time after the cannibalization factors figured in. The next slide. So this is showing that 98.6 million dollars over 20 years. You can see on the right side here the cannibalized tax is 25.5 million dollars. So essentially we're already receiving that type of taxes, what that means. And then you can see up in the blue on the upper right side city participation is what we're currently conservatively modeling what we would be paying back the loans based with the sales tax dollars, the loans back to the fleet fund. And then the new year mark tax is 31.6 million dollars and then the new non-airmark tax would be 28.4 million dollars. Next slide please. So again, I refer to the hard costs of 9.6 million and the recovery of that, and this is for the Costco project alone, the recovery of that by the gross sales tax within, we would recover that in 2.33 years of opening. So that's all five funds of sales tax. We would receive 9.6 million within two and a third years. And then the second part here is the net sales tax. And so looking at it from a cannibalized standpoint, we would recover that same amount in 3.17 years or 38 months of opening. Next slide. So then the city investment of 11.06 million, which is the cost for the Costco project and the affordable housing project that would be funded with sales taxes, those will be recovered by the net sales tax within 43 months of opening. Next slide. Just wanna talk a little bit about the loans and we as councils aware, we have made loans from our fleet fund in the past because we have large fund balances built up for reserves for replacement. We make these loans at the rate of return of city investments so that the fleet fund doesn't lose anything that would otherwise be making with its money. The loan to the affordable housing fund of 1.17 million would be repaid by 2025. The loan to the harvest junction fund of 11.06 million, that would be repaid by early in the 11th year of Costco operations. That again is based on very conservative estimates. So it could be anything earlier than that as well. Next slide. So this is a greater loans from the fleet fund than we have ever done in the past and I'm not doing this lightly. We have considered carefully what we're doing with the fund here. For one, the bank will be closed after this. I've told Dale that a few times and what we'll be doing is proposing a new financial policy that inner fund loans from the fleet fund should never exceed the lower of 70% of the fund balance for replacements or 70% of the average fund balance for replacements over the next five years. And we'll bring that financial policy to you in our annual financial policy review process. We have a resolution to approve these two loans that you'll be entertaining in two weeks but the actual loans won't take place until the closing on the property next summer. And at that point in time, based on the loans we have outstanding and how much they will be repaid at that point and what we are loaning here, this will be below that 70% figure. And as I said, I recommend that we never get above that part. Now that leaves us more than sufficient funds in our reserve for replacement based on the annual needs that we do have for replacement. We map those out for 15 to 18 years. So we know what we're facing into the future and we continue to do that. So this policy will should keep us from overextending the fleet fund. So that's it from my point. I think Dale, are you picking back up here? Yep. Yes, I am. Thanks, Jim. Next slide. So council, just real quick. So what are the next steps after you consider the ordinances both tonight and then for second reading on December 1st as well as the various resolutions? So what we're anticipating as Jim mentioned that the closing on the property would occur at around mid-21. And that will be following the DRC review and approval of the land entitlements. And talking with Joni Marsh, we believe we can get through the entire planning process in that six to seven month timeframe. And so that's why we're anticipating mid-21. At that point, you'll actually have a final plat on the property and you'll actually have property that you can actually sell and convey. At that time, all the city and Costco funds will be placed into escrow. And there is a separate escrow agreement that is also being executed that will actually it'll be prepared to be executed that will describe and control the disbursements of those funds to pay primarily for the property as well as for the public improvements and the private site improvements. At closing or very shortly thereafter, we are anticipating that Costco will then direct the owner to begin the construction of the public improvements as well as the private site improvements. We anticipate that to be a 12 to 18 month timeframe. Again, where you'd be building through a winter. And so a lot of that depends on the type of winter that we have and the weather we have. Next slide. So in December 20, we'll be looking at the execution of the P3 agreements and the related agreements that we discussed from that timeframe to mid-year, complete the entitlement process. And then from July of 21 through late 22, again, complete the public improvements and the private site improvements. Next slide. Late 22, we would estimate that Costco would then begin and initiate the construction of their 150,000 square foot warehouse in Feuling Island. Costco has told us that they frankly built a number of these stores across the country and that they can typically get those stores built and furnished in about 110 days. So it's quite rapid. And then lastly, the agreement calls for some time prior to July of 24 that Costco would move to open the warehouse. So as you can see, this is a several year proposition in front of us and it's going to take continued diligence to get us through that. Next slide. And with that council, I think anybody on the team, we're all here to respond to any questions that you may have. Mayor Pro Tem Rodriguez. Thank you, Mayor Bagley. This is primarily going to be relating to the emails that we've gotten as well as I think one caller, at least tonight, from the map that we saw, it's my opinion that the Costco specific site does not directly but the Harvest Junction Village neighborhood. Is that accurate? Right. So I'm seeing nods and yes. Partially accurate, Mayor Pro Tem, as you can tell from the site plan, yes. From what's been given to us. So what would more accurately be abutting that subdivision would be the nine acres of affordable housing site for the city? One clarification, council member Rodriguez. The Costco site is east of the multi-family apartment complex out there, but you're correct that it is generally to the north and east of the single-family residential neighborhoods. Okay. What is the name of the multi-family? Excuse me? The name of the multi-family, the apartment complex. I think it's not Harvest Junction Village, though. It's something Harvest Junction, I think. I just noted that the address is from the emails that I got. It's Watermark, Watermark, Watermark. We're generally from the single-family development. Generally is who the emails were coming from. That's what I was noting. So as long as we've pretty much clarified those specifically that the Costco specific site will be north of the single-family development, but will be adjacent to the multi-family. Correct. Correct. Let me share that again to point that out. Yes. The Costco site, you can see the property line here, adjacent to the multi-family. I think this may be actually the detention area, Dale. Yeah. Yeah. And then with the housing, you can see the affordable housing property and then the owner remnant at this location. So the concept that somebody's backyard is looking directly into a huge parking lot is not accurate. Okay. And then outside of that, both the Costco site as well as the affordable housing site would have to go through the planning and development process if I'm not. And as such, therefore has to comply with the city's land development codes, which require buffering and requires, for instance, light mitigation from commercial properties upon residential properties and things like that. And that there will also be the appropriate time for people to weigh in when they're going through the planning and development process. Correct. All right. I think that's what a lot of folks are worried about is that, A, it was gonna be in their backyard basically and B, that they wouldn't have the opportunity during the process to voice their concerns. And I just wanted to make sure that those things were reiterated to them if they have not already been by my colleagues on council, that there is a whole process that even the city has to go through when developing properties. And the city is not immune to these same requirements that any developer would have to go through. Thank you. I think we all reiterate what Mayor Pro Temeraduy has just said. We'll make sure that we do that. We'll go with Councilman Martin and then Councilman Christensen. Yeah, I just want to point out that I do live over near harvest junction and I'm familiar with the multifamily development there. And those are designed to open into courtyards as you could see from the map that we had. So it's not really gonna, even though they more closely abut the Costco property, it's not a particular hardship for them because their backyard, their recreational and social areas are inward inside the square of the buildings. Councilmember Christensen. I want to thank council members, Rodriguez and Martin for their comments. I think what I think we all want to convey is that we're not trying to mess up anybody's neighborhood. We really want the best for this town period. And I would also like to point out that there is a greenway to the west of the harvest junction area. And also if they walk, I think it's only four blocks north, they'll be over at Dickens Farm Neighborhood, which is spectacular. So anyway, I really think this is a wonderful project and it'll be very good for many employees in this town and many people in this town. So thank you to Ms. Marillo and to all of you guys for your presentations. Thanks. Councilmember Beck. Thank you, Mayor Bagley. This is for Jim Mordale. I wonder, you talked about the cannibalization and I was wondering if you've done any analysis on village at the peaks generally and Sam's specifically. Mayor Bagley, members of council, yes, I have. So that is how I drew my numbers and I can't go any deeper than that without crossing the confidentiality lines. Okay, all right, then I'm okay. All right, good job on lots of hard work and appreciate the update. We look forward to hearing the progress and seeing what happens. And of course, all those neighbors who are concerned, it has to go through the proper process. Voices will be heard, listened to as we proceed forward. But in general, I'm pretty excited about this project and we can be proud council member Rodamaker. Dale, Rodamaker. For just one quick note, I'd be remiss if I didn't thank Jennifer and Reggie Golden, two people that I really appreciated working through the details on this particular project. And in my world, when somebody gives you your word and you stand by it, that's always important to me. And that is what I have found in essentially every conversation and every decision that we've made moving this project through. And so I do wanna acknowledge that and express my appreciation of that. Thank you. Cool, thank you. All right, let's move on. Harold? Yeah, mayor, council, to the point, I also don't want, I wanna thank Reggie for taking my call, taking a cold call going, are you open to this? I really can't say enough about the partnership with Reggie on that issue and the Golden family and taking a leap with us. So thank you, Golden family and Reggie. What I also wanna say is thank you to Jennifer, Dale, Eugene, Jim and the group because it went with something that I was highly involved with to when LHA hit and we were doing that, that I had to pivot. And we had a team in place and Joanie and Sandy and everyone else that said, okay, we're gonna jump in and we're gonna take this so then we could focus on the other issue. I wanted to tell you all that the team that came together to just take it and go was phenomenal. And I wanted to thank them personally in this for covering that when we had to move to something else. All right, so does anyone have anything to add other than thank you, awesome project, staff is awesome, Goldman family is awesome, can't wait, Jennifer Costco, welcome. All right, Dr. Waters. I move ordinance 2020-62. Second. All right, it's been moved and seconded. Mayor. Yes, Eugene. I was gonna try to butt in and just remind council that there is a substitute ordinance for council's consideration on the public-private partnership agreement. If we could move that substituted ordinance that would be great. All right, it was my understanding that what we are seeing was the substitute ordinance. But both are in there in the packet. The chair is gonna take the motion to mean the substituted ordinance 2020-62. Second still applies. All right, so without, there's no further discussion or debate. All in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed say nay. All right, ordinance 2020-62, the substituted version passes unanimously. Dr. Waters, you're muted. I'll move ordinance 2020-63. I hate it when you cover my screen too soon. I can't see it. Second. Yeah, thanks. All right, it's been moved and seconded. All in favor of ordinance 2020-63 say aye. Aye. Opposed say nay. All right, ordinance 2020-63 passes unanimously. Dr. Waters. I'll move ordinance 2020-64. I'll second that one. All right, all in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed say nay. All right, ordinance 2020-64 passes unanimously. All right, let's move on to short term rentals. Carol. All right, take it back. Joni Marsh. Joni. Mayor Bagley, members of council, Joni Marsh, Assistant City Manager. So this evening we are back for a discussion about short term rentals. This is a little bit of a continuation from our July 14th council meeting. Next slide please. Sorry, Susan, I got ahead of you there. So just to a reminder of the current definitions in the code, both for council, but also for the public who may be watching this evening. Staff did also include a copy of our application form as well as our FAQ and brochure, which is also on our website, so that you could be clear on some of the short term rental requirements. Next slide please. So again, here are some of the additional rental requirements that are currently at play when someone applies for a short term rental. They are with respect to which zoning districts, the number of short term rentals on anyone block in particular zoning districts, compliance with building code, the term of that license, and also some posting requirements. Next slide please. So I did wanna give council a current snapshot of licensing. So I believe at our July meeting, we talked about our third party consultant host compliance, who really is just that here to help us do compliance with folks who are renting on a variety of platforms. Host compliance looks at any and all platforms on the website. So it's not just VRBO or Airbnb, it's up to I think a total 40 or 50 different platforms that advertise. Currently we have 93 licensed as of writing this council comm. The majority of those are residents primary dwellings along with ADUs. You heard tonight on public invited to be heard. It was made mentioned that there were 12 second or investment dwellings. Actually that number we had is seven. And as of yesterday, that actually went up to eight. So we only show eight as a staff. Each month we get a report from host compliance. And I have to say it's actually been very helpful and it's been working smoothly to allow us to see what's actually happening month by month. For instance, this month in November, we had 69 active listings out on websites. So most of those were licensed, some were not. And that allows us to then contact the homeowners or renters and help them get into compliance and suggest a pathway forward. We also know that everyone's not advertising every month their short-term rental. So we see an ebb and flow every month. And I think that's helpful for us to know exactly who's in compliance and who's not. And it's actually made the workload far more manageable because we aren't seeing a ton of new short-term rentals coming onto the market currently. We also had some commentary on public invited to be heard with regard to one of the short-term rentals. There were a bunch of complaint calls, I believe for a property on a Rappahoe. And one thing that we discovered recently with our host compliance folks is that short-term rental is no longer renting as a short-term rental. And they are in fact renting at 30 day or longer time periods. So they would no longer fall under our short-term rental definition. So on the 14th, council did give some direction that was very specific to removing the allowance for Longmont residents to have a short-term rental license on a second or investment property. And staff will be moving forward with that unless otherwise directed tonight. We do have a series of questions for you at the end of the presentation, which is only 14 slides, by the way. I know that's going through everyone's head. So next slide, please. So some of the other items that we took notes on and I went back and watched the last meeting a couple of times to try to make sure that we got a general feel for some of the questions council had, but also some of the common themes. And I think really some of those themes were frankly around compliance and asking applicants really to be accountable for submitting documentation to us. I believe it was council member Martin who spoke about putting some teeth into the ordinance. So at the end of the 14th meeting, the other direction we received from council was to bring back staff recommendations. So we do have three recommendations for you this evening and a few questions as well. Next slide, please. It's hard to keep up with us here and there. So in looking at the requirements for verification for someone to apply for a license, we went ahead and looked at five other communities, both in the front range and mountain communities to kind of see what they were asking for so we could understand how their compliance submittal documents were perhaps stronger than what we have in our current code. And we do believe that the adoption of some additional criteria will be helpful. Next slide, please. For instance, one of the communities we looked at is Denver, Denver has recently updated their short-term rental ordinance around compliance. So in addition to a state of Colorado licensor ID, they're asking for two or three of these other types of documents to be submitted at time of application. Staff really does believe that this will provide some higher burden of proof from the applicants. So if we did get a complaint, we would actually then have some documentation to go back on should we need to actually go to compliance or issue a fine or a summons to court. Next slide, please. So let's see. So the other item we talked about is currently when someone applies for a license, they really have to meet what's in the current code in order to be granted that license. If they don't submit the documentation, they don't pass an inspection, then we can fail them. Next slide, please. However, when a license comes up for renewal, one of the things that we spoke with it on the 14th was the fact that our revocation criteria were, we think lacking. And I believe council agreed with us that there's some room for improvement. And we looked at some specific language that we found in some other ordinances. And we put a couple of examples on the last page of your council comm, which included things like when we went to renew looking at any evidence that we had of non-compliance throughout the timeframe that the permit was in effect or a pattern of nuisance behavior that we feel that having some of those criteria will then allow us to have a stronger case for revocation. And we also included in your council comm kind of a scenario of how that revocation and investigation into complaints would work. We have talked briefly to public safety and our dispatch staff about how we might put some markers on addresses so that code enforcements and the permitting system which is tied all to one licensing and the planning and land management system could then tie that same data into CAD so that we would be at, so the police officers would know when they go out there might be a marker on that address that would indicate. And then when we go to pull records to do an investigation, we'd have an easier time of doing just that. And finally, the third recommendation, next slide please, was really kind of a verification of council's direction. The code currently allows us to license someone who owns their home under a different mechanism, be it a trust or an LLC. And that's been the case all along. And we really wanna verify that council, whether you did or did not want to strike that for a homeowner who had a short-term rental within their current residence. Those are really our recommendations. I have put these into question format if you'd like to go through each question. I'm also happy to stop here and we can respond to questions. So I'm gonna, the one thing that I do not want to do, I don't know if I've seen these questions but I do not want to, a lot of times when staff compares to questions, we get stuck in a cycle of there's no way for seven of us to, I mean, the form of emotion. So if it's not a staff recommendation, I'm gonna be really hesitant to really wanna discuss anything because we get caught up in these, I mean, we're just about ready to be set up for a conversation that's not going to be able to end well. And I don't know what the questions are but I've said this before after council meetings, I do not want staff on an agenda putting on questions where we are not in an environment where we can all come together and have unless there's consensus on every question, it's impossible for staff to get clarity from seven of us. So I'm hesitant to go into this but does anyone have any problems with the recommendations? Only the recommendations at this point. Okay, council member Peck and then council member Martin and then council member Christensen. I was just gonna give my input on the recommendations. Not necessarily a problem. Sure, go for it. Oh, I would say yes on the additional verification. Yes, on revocation, if it includes noise violations or neighborhood nuisances. And just an FYI in your brochure under ADUs, there is a misspelling on the word unit. So that would be good to correct. And then I wasn't sure about, because you explained it prohibition being held by an LLC but that doesn't apply really from what I understand that you just explained because that would only apply on the second investment property, which we, did I understand that correctly? Mayor Begley and council member Peck, that is our question. We just wanted to verify that you didn't have any issue continuing to allow homeowners who own their home in a different mechanism, be it an LLC or trust to continue applying that way, that you really just wanted the trust or LLC with the second investment property to not happen anymore. Okay, then I don't mind if my marry is in a different name. Councilor Martin, you're silent. I just have a question about the teeth. I liked it very much. I liked the plan, but what wasn't clear to me was if at the time that the tenant gets ticketed for a noise violation or a noise violation or too many exceeding the occupancy or whatever that would be the party house kind of infractions. Does the property owner, the lessor also get a notification at that time or do they not find out that they've been accumulating violations until their license is revoked? Callie? Mayor Bagley, Council Member Martin. Sorry, go ahead, yeah, that's the question, sorry. I believe that the way that this was laid out is that currently it would be the person who's creating the violation who would get the ticket. And so I think that is something that we have to think through. Obviously code enforcement can tie in address, but we could also send an NOV to the property owner letting them know there had been a violation at their property. So we could kind of do a couple of different things. That might be something we need to work out a little bit more. I would like to suggest that, that the notice of violation sounds exactly right. Okay. Council Member Peck, I'm sorry, Council Member Christensen. I've done that, I just keep looking, sorry, John. Yes, that's the third time you've called me, Council Member Peck, tonight. You should be flattering, she's awesome. Yes, well, we are different people. I think this is very good. I think you've gone through a lot of different things here. And I do believe that we should restrict STRs to natural persons. For one thing, a limited, an LLC means a limited liability corporation. So then they are not liable for anything. We have to hunt down the actual entity and if there's a problem. And because of the way the Secretary of State has stopped any way to find out who is actually involved in an LLC, I think that would make it impossible. And these are actually supposed to be for just people who live in Laugmont to rent out something for 30 days or less. If we open it up to any kind of LLC or trust, it complicates things and makes it considerably more difficult to understand and to prove who's involved and whether they live here or not, and whether they have any insurance or not. I think we really do need to limit it to natural persons. Councilor Waters. Thanks, Mayor Begley. Joanie, the way this is laid out in the Council of Communication, you've got the investment properties as a heading and then with the decision or the vote that was taken back in July. And then the recommendations in each intersection. So I wanna say, I would say yes to the recommendations that you bring in terms of validating or requiring greater verification of residents. I think we ought to maintain the current status of allowing somebody who's in their home through a trust or an LLC to be able to use their home that way. I mean, I agree with all your recommendations. However, it looks to me like you would bring back an ordinance that would include those recommendations to add teeth to the ordinance and prohibit somebody who owns a second investment, a second property as an investment property to be utilized as a short-term rental. We would take that out of the ordinance the way Council's communication looks. Is that correct? Mayor Begley, Councilor Waters, that is correct. That was the, we had a five to two direction at that 14th meeting to proceed that way. Yep, and I was, regretfully I was on the, I was among the five because I thought we were putting on something else. And so I'm just gonna say now, I'll vote against the ordinance when it comes back, even with the teeth that you've added, because I think that's wrong. I think we've heard from residents. I don't, I think we're trying to solve or fill a fly with a sledgehammer. I think there are other ways to solve that problem. And I don't think we ought to deny the opportunity for people who are responsible homeowners in Longmont have a single other property. You might have a lot, but only one of them they can use as a short-term rental. And I'm gonna, and I'll be, I'll feel badly about having to vote against the ordinance and I'll probably be the only one to do it, but I will vote against it if that, if it comes back that way. And I regret it because I like the rest of what you've done. Councilor Martin. Okay. Yeah, I did vote against the five to two. I had to go back and check, but I voted against prohibiting people from having more than one short-term rental property. And I still feel that way. And I think that we have seen with the data that we have about the number of short-term rentals that we have and the number of them that are in the objectionable categories and so on, that this is maybe killing an ant with a sledgehammer and that maybe we don't do it. And I would like to suggest, is it would it be possible to bring, to sever the two provisions and let the council consider whether to place restrictions on how many short-term rentals an individual property owner can have? You wouldn't mute it again. I'm sorry. Yeah, I saw that happen. I was gonna suggest that maybe the language about revocation of licenses and notifying property owners when their tenants commit infractions and all of that could be in a separate ordinance because there seems to be complete consensus that that would be a good thing. But we may or may not have a problem about, the original bugaboo of short-term rentals changing the character of long months. And I mean, we've got 30,000 plus households and fewer than 80 short-term rentals. So that doesn't seem like it could change the character of a city to me. So I would move that they come back to us as two separate ordinances. All right. The motion, let's don't, we're not gonna talk about that motion. There was no second, none. So. I'll second it. Okay, now it's been seconded. All right. Mayor Protham. Thank you, Mayor Bagley. I was also one of the five that voted originally and that was primarily based on the concept that I didn't know what recommendations count, the staff would come back with for regulation. I don't feel that we went above the call when we originally 18 to 20 months ago said that people could have one additional property outside of when they lived in be a short-term vacation rental. I feel that the real issue here is enforcement and seeing this list of enforcement suggestions from the staff gives me the ability to say, I think some of those are really good recommendations. I'd really like to explore those more before we just hit the ant with a sledgehammer as was stated by my colleagues previously. As far as the LLC trust thing goes, I can understand the argument about LLCs. I also understand folks that have small businesses would prefer to use LLCs. I have an LLC myself. Trusts on the other hand though, are extremely common for owner occupied homes as well as many different things. But generally speaking, you do not see trusts being involved with small business transactions in homes. So I definitely don't see that problem. I wouldn't, if the requirement for property owners to come up with additional documentation for ownership, much less residency is put into place that suggests the recommendations. I see less necessity for restricting LLCs and trusts because I think they would have, the other would essentially equal out that problem. I would rather us move to better enforcement and more documentation and see how that goes before we do drop the band hammer as some on social media call it with the second property. Especially realizing that there is a density limit in concept where a second one per block would have to go as conditional use before planning and zoning commission. And I know specifically there are a good number of folks that would prefer not to do that. So I really would just like to see better enforcement of what I thought was a decent policy when we came up with it 20 months ago before we completely do away with it. Thank you. So let's go ahead before we, so Councilor Martin, can you please restate your motion? Let's have the discussion only about this motion. Yes, I mean, the position that Mayor Pro Tem Rodriguez articulated is mine as well. I don't think we need to mess with the rules for what can be an Airbnb or not. I think we got those pretty close to right based on the numbers we're seeing. So my suggestion was rather than debate all of that tonight, we just ask the Assistant City Manager to bring back the restrictions on who can do what as one ordinance and the enforcement provisions as a different ordinance. And then we can debate both ordinances separately some other night. So that was my motion. Split them in two. So the motion which was seconded by Council Member Waters was to instruct staff to bring back two ordinances, one pertaining to what is permitted as far as short-term rentals go. And number two, the second one would apply specifically to enforcement. So the- Correct. So is Council Member Riedago-Ferring? What is your comment pertaining to the motion? This motion, yeah, I was just about, I was gonna say that what Council Member Rodriguez had said circled us back to what Council Member Martin had suggested of separating the two, I would support that because I feel these are two different issues. One is around enforcement of what we currently have and the staff's ability to, for oversight. The other one, I just, I feel like there needs to be more conversation around what that would look like if we, I mean, because we have multi-use zoning. We have different, you know, residential. Where could we maybe parse out and have a deeper conversation around where are the troubled areas that maybe we do not need to be having several RV and Bs. But, you know, again, I'm looking at the numbers and it's relatively low. What's seven, eight second home investment properties. You know, my concern coming in early on was around, what was it doing to the housing stock for people who just wanna buy a home, their first homes? And so that was one of the concerns that I had early on in this discussion. You know, I still wanna address that piece on another night, but, you know, I wanna focus more on the investment, or the enforcement piece, sorry. So that's where I'm at. Council Member Peck, the real one. Thank you. I'm confused by this motion because what Councilwoman Hidalgo-Ferring said that she liked what Mayor Pro Tem Rodriguez said, but I don't think that the actual motion addressed what Council, what Mayor Pro Tem was saying. I think what I heard Councilman Waters and Councilman Mayor Pro Tem say was that they wanted the ordinance to include owning a second home as a short-term rental. And that, in point of order, just so you know, I mean, not on you, but the motion was made prior to Mayor Pro Tem's comments. Okay, but I don't understand the motion. The motion is simply instruct staff to bring back and divide this particular topic into two issues. Issue one is what will we, what are the rules and what will we permit around short-term rentals? And then the second topic and second ordinance will be how will we enforce whatever it is that we decide is permitted? Just in other words, just dividing the topic into two, enforcement and what we will allow. So we will allow A, B and C. And if you break the rules, we will do A, B and C or X, Y and Z. Council Member Christensen. The whole point of this regulation was to be sure that people in Longmont could afford to live in Longmont. I have attended national conferences and then I'll see where people from all over this country are complaining about this issue. It starts off as a little issue and then rapidly turns into a big issue. And then we're dealing with those platforms like Verbault and Airbnb that have millions and billions of dollars. And it can't, we can do nothing once it becomes out of hand. I am not opposed to separating this into two different issues because clearly we're not going to agree tonight at 1030 on anything. But I have to say that we decided on this in July. It's five months later. And now people have seemed to have changed their mind. We decided when we voted on this that we wouldn't allow second properties, second investment properties. These where people could not even, would not even have to live in them. But now we've seemed to be changing our minds about that. And to me, this is, it's very frustrating. We agree on something and then months pass and then we decide on something entirely different. To me, this is a very strange way to make policy. I do like most of the things that they have proposed. Once again, I really dislike the idea of people. I know people have trusts. I know people have LLCs. The reason they have an LLC is so that they are not legally liable. And as I said, these are very difficult to find out. Who's in charge of the LLC? And I mean, who actually owns it because it's hidden from the state, from the state, by the state, secretary of state. I think that's a very bad direction to go. It needs to be natural persons so that this is normalized as to just local people. I don't think we'll have- Again, there's a motion on the floor, right? And so we're talking about, we're only talking about dividing it right now, right? I would love to respond, but we need to just divide it. That's the only issue. I don't object to dividing it because as I said, we won't decide that here. However, if we decide, divide that and then pass all these agreements and we haven't decided whether the major underlying thing, whether we're gonna allow second investment properties that people don't live in, then we'll have a whole different set of, we're creating a law that doesn't really cover the things that we might allow or just allow in the secondary thing. So I don't see how we can vote on that tonight. We could have it come back. That's a good idea. Right now we're just- I would vote for having them come back because there's two different things. Okay. Two different ordinances that we're working on. Yeah. Okay. So that we can actually have a sensible discussion about it. All right, that is the motion. Anybody else have any, Dr. Waters, do you have anything that you wanted to add? Okay, let's go ahead and vote on the motion is to instruct staff to bring it back in two different topics, two different ordinances. One being what are the rules of the short-term rentals and the other being what will the enforcement mechanism be? All in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. All opposed say nay. Nay. Nay. All right, so staff, that was a perfect example of what I was saying about how I'm gonna get frustrated because we are going, that was a pretty simple motion, simple question. And there's 14 of them. I haven't seen the questions, but what do you wanna do? Are we gonna just go through the questions one at a time or would staff like the opportunity to offer a suggestion at which point we then can discuss each suggestion? Thank you, Mayor. We did only have three questions that related exactly to the three questions of the recommendations. So I think you walked through that. If I could clarify something before we come back with two ordinances. So we understand that we can take a look at the enforcement and take a pass on adding that in and some of the changes. We still have a vote on the table that would remove the investment properties. I think what I'm hearing you say is to leave that in for now and you will discuss that when we bring forward the two ordinances, am I missing that? So I'm gonna move that we actually permit short-term rentals for Pete residents of Longmont who own a second home, whether it be residential or investment property to allow them to use that for short-term rentals. Point of order. Yeah, go ahead. I don't believe that you were in the prevailing vote originally. No, no, that's what, did we ever vote on that particular issue? There was a five to vote. You and I voted against it, Mayor Bagley. Oh, okay, all right, nevermind then. So Dr. Waters. Well, I wasn't the prevailing vote. I wish I wasn't, but I was. And so I'll make your motion. I'll move that we direct staff to bring back an ordinance that allows owners, home owners in Longmont who own a second property that wanna use it as a short-term rental to be able to do that and continue doing that in the ordinance that we see returned. Who seconded that? Marcia. Okay, it's been moved and seconded. Mayor Pro Tem Rodriguez. I'm just wondering if, because we haven't actually brought that ordinance, we haven't made a change. Right. I'm just curious. I'm sorry, it's just a procedure thing. Do we actually need that motion? Well, I mean, just to provide clarity. The only reason all I was trying to do is provide clarity to what I'm hearing. I was just trying to move us along. That's it. I understand. I'm just saying, is the motion even necessary? I can even make the point that, sorry, Dr. Waters, your motion is out of order. It's not the regular council meeting after we made the motion. I mean, we could, I mean, I could do that all day long when I wanted to procedurally just be a jerk. I'm not trying to do that. I'm trying to be accurate. No, I know, but I'm just, so the reality is, we've heard tonight from my thought more than four people that said, let's go ahead and do this. That's all I was doing. And so the real question, so the question and motion on the table is to instruct city staff to bring, when they bring back the ordinance to permit residents of Longmont to use a second home for short-term rentals. Dr. Waters? I just, for the purposes of clarification. So we do have a motion on the, we have a motion on the table. It's been seconded by Councilman Martin. But then I'll just, I'll just be quiet and we'll let this go. Councilman Christensen. It seems to me the simple thing to do is just bring it back. We already had, it is already legal right now to have a second home. So there's no need to have, as Councilman Rodriguez says, there's no need to do this, it's already legal. The whole point of bringing this back in the first place was to take that out. So we can do that at another time. I'm gonna vote for it because I think I've heard from majority of the eight people who have short-term rentals like this. I'm gonna read you what I said. I hope you're well, sir. Just wanted to let you know, we gave up on our city council because they scared us in the middle of lockdown revisiting short-term rentals. So I am now selling my short-term rental and home and I'm heartbroken about it. I will land okay, but I'm sure I'm, I will land okay, I'm sure, but still heartbroken because I had a good business going. I hope you don't back down and then they go on and say some unsavory things. But she says, but quite frankly, I don't care anymore. I'm just so upset. So we need to, we need to provide, I mean, there are people out there. I mean, I know ironically, we're talking about, you know, providing stability of housing and providing affordable housing. But what we're doing is interfering in the property rights of people who have, we are, yes, we are. We are, we're telling property owners what to do with their property. And there's eight people. I think that's eight, yeah. Eight people in Longmont who those are the only people we're impacting by saying, and then we've also heard, and this all came about because there was one nuisance property that we're hearing other things that they kind of put fuel on the fire. And so right now there's a motion on the table to permit this. And so let's go ahead and vote and then we can discuss it when it comes back. Council Member Peck. I would like a clarification before I ask for an amendment from Joni Marsh. It was mentioned that LLCs, and I also tried to find out who the owners of LLCs were, but the only one that signs it is the agent. How would you know if someone buying a property under an LLC to use as a short-term rental is actually a resident of Longmont? How would you know that? So we would, you can go to Dora's website and you can look up the registered agent for those LLCs. And then we would also could, as we proposed tonight, be asking for additional ownership verification information that would be able to tie that back. So we feel confident we have the ability to ask for the right verification. And again, the Dora website is available. How do you spell that? Every day. Dora, D-O-R-A. D-O-R-A, okay. And I just wanna chime in, but a limited liability company is not to prevent liability in a criminal sense. It's just to protect you from debt. If you take out a loan from a bank, it's just to isolate the individual investors from the property itself or the business itself. You can still ask who the owner, you might not be able to go to the Secretary of State, but you can get that information, as Joni said, when they sign up. And if you're gonna hit an individual or you're gonna hit an LLC with a penalty, it's all gonna be financial. If somebody's on the property, is an attorney and they're sitting there making noise, you can't hold the, I mean, you can say, you're in a city, you can say you've got a nuisance property after a while and take it to court, but you're not gonna be able to hold an owner LLC or otherwise criminally liable for any crimes that someone conducts on the premise. I mean, to be kind of like if Joan kills me in a hotel. Hotel's not criminally liable. Joanne's like, oh, that'd be awesome. I was like, yeah, that's awesome. No, but I mean, my point is that you don't escape criminal liability. You don't escape the problems, I think that we're concerned about because it's an LLC. But those are all questions for another day. So let's go ahead and vote. And the issue is the motion on the table is to direct staff to bring back in the ordinance, making it permissible for Longmont residents who have a second home in Longmont to use such home as a short-term rental. All in favor, did I get that right, Dr. Waters? You did. Okay, all in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed say nay. Nay. Okay, I didn't hear a lot of ayes, but I heard one nay or two nays. Okay, two nays. Susie, are you a nay or an aye? She's an aye. And then Dr. Waters, you were an aye. Mayor Pro Tem, are you an aye? Aye. Marcia, were you an aye? Okay, I was an aye. So the motion carries five to two with council members Christensen and council member Peck, a post. All right, Joni, what other questions do you have for us for clarity? There was a third, did we get them all? You did get them all, thank you very much. Okay, cool. And we will be back and we will try to do that promptly. Great, council member Christensen. I would strongly suggest that you, Joni, you're gone. She's like, I'm so out of here, 10, 40 at night. Trying to get out of here. That you are, that two of, at least two of the mandatory proofs be voter registration and federal and state tax returns. Okay. And the chair would remind everybody that without a motion, it's just a suggestion. Yeah. But yeah, okay, that's okay. All right, so let's go on to, all right. So the next question is, before we started tonight, Harold told me that we could take 12C and 12D and put it on a future agenda. Are we at 10, 40 at night prepared to launch into an update on the 2019 greenhouse gas inventory and climate action task force recommendations, along with the solar feasibility study? Or do we want to, I'm seeing no, but I'm going to leave it up to you guys. So do we want a motion to carry these two? I don't do it. Council member Martin. Who? I will postpone C and D to a future meeting. Second. You know what? That was so powerful. Can we just have the motion be council member Christensen? Because that was, that would know. Council member Martin made the motion. Council member Christensen seconded the motion. There's no further debate. We're going to vote on postponing or tabling the solar feasibility study and update on the 2019 greenhouse gas inventory climate action task force recommendations. I see a Susie until future meeting, which we'll get together with Harold. We'll put that on quickly. It won't be, it's not going to be weeks and weeks. It's just, it's 1040. Council member Adagio-Ferni. I'm going to ask to see if it's not, if it's not indefinite. It's not indefinite. It's going to be on the soonest agenda that Harold can get it on. Right, Harold? Okay. All in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed say nay. All right. So the ayes have it unanimously. Okay. Let's move on to final call public invited to be heard. Let's take a quick two to three minute break and come back and hear from the public. All right. Do we have anybody in there? Mayor, we did. It appeared I let them in and then they disappeared. So they may have had second thoughts. Okay. So we have no one at this point. All right. We're going to go ahead and move on then. Let's go to mayor and council comments. We'd like to make some comments. Council member back. Thank you, Mayor Bagley. I'm going to give a really fast update on some of the things that are happening on RTD, if you don't mind. First of all, I want to thank everybody who called in or emailed, especially mayors and commissioners coalition and the Metro mayors on retaining that FISA account, the fast tracks internal savings account because not only did the board vote to retain it for two years, they put $17 million more into that fund, bringing it from 120 million to 137.3 million. So that tells me if they can do that, perhaps maybe their financial picture isn't as dire as they would like it to be. And also that the CFO is no longer with RTD. She accepted a job in California, which is good and bad. Our new director who's going to replace Judy Lubau is Eric Davidson. I'm going to have a conversation with him on Thursday. I'm real excited about this guy because he's been following RTD finances for years and he's very much up to date with what's going on and has some good ideas. We are according to Phil Greenwald going to have the Front Range Rail Coalition come to our December meeting and give an update and Harold shaking his head. So I think I got that point right. I'm excited about that for two reasons. Front Range Rail needs a conduit to Union Station. They're looking at two things, the Metro North rail line through RTD and the Northwest Corridor. The Northwest Corridor is a better fit for them because the North Metro line parallels I-25. It doesn't necessarily get as many communities along the way that the Northwest Corridor does. So they're looking heavily at Northwest Corridor. That's good for two reasons. Number one is that they have a grant, a federal grant that they are going for. They have an in into federal tax dollars through transportation. So if they choose the Northwest Corridor as part of their plan, then perhaps we can get some dollars that way through the Front Range Rail and through Amtrak which is the line that they are going to use instead of the regular freight, not freight, but the regular transportation, we wouldn't really have to buy rail cars is what I'm saying, if Amtrak does it, they have their own rail cars and they already have a really good relationship with BNSF. So the other good thing about it, they really like our peak service because Amtrak is not making money on their long runs anymore, especially through the pandemic, they are going to commuter as well and peak service. So it fits right in with our plan. What else was I gonna say to you really fast here? And make it done before 2050. Yes. I am pushing really, really hard on this and I wanna thank our mayor, Bagley, for being a very, very loud voice, the mayor's and commissioner's coalition. I've been there when he's let him have it and it's been really nice. And I also wanna tell you that even though it's been in the background, we have spent three and a half years selling this peak service plan and it was a hard sell at first with a lot of foot stamping and tantrums and but we had to get all of the lobbying groups, all of the mayor's and elected officials, all the commissioners, everybody on board and it took three and a half years. It's a lot of, just a lot of work. So I wanna thank everybody for your help and to see that it's gonna take all of us to push it. And if I can keep you involved and I'm gonna need your help. And as I think Harold will attribute to that, we also have a way to, DJ Mitchell is our BNSF guy that RTD has been talking to, communicating with. And for years, Henry Stoppelkamp has told us, when I say us, I'm talking about the people who are pushing for the peak service, Judy Luba and myself, Phil Greenwald, Harold and Mayor Bagley that we could not talk to DJ Mitchell that he only wanted to talk to Henry Stoppelkamp who's with RTD. Well, that wasn't really true. So I do have DJ Mitchell's phone number now and hopefully we'll be setting up a conversation with him, with Mayor Bagley, with Harold because what we really need, the one thing we're missing here is an engineering analysis from BNSF. They have it, they need to be paid for it. RTD is not willing to pay for it and not really willing to have that conversation. So because we now have $137.3 million in that FISA account, I think that FISA account can be used to pay for this engineering study so that we can get peak service into the Dr. Cog tip process. But in order to do that, you have to have some shovel ready projects. We can use this $137.3 million to build platforms, to pay for the engineering study, to make it a shovel ready project to get funding from Dr. Cog and the federal government. So that's what I need help with is to just be yelling at RTD that we need to use that $137 million before some other project wants that money. There's a lot of tentacles reaching like an octopus for that money. I think we need that money and we need to yell and scream about it and be more than assertive. So that's where I am, that's where I'm going. This is the third bullet point on our work plan, transportation. It is the biggest economic driver rail is and we have a partner now, hopefully with Front Range Rail and Randy Grailberger. So that's it, I'm excited about this finally. Finally, I think we can move. The time is right, the money's there. We have a new director. We're gonna have a new CFO. And that that's it. So thank you. Thanks, Council Member Peck. May I interrupt one minute? I can't see a face who's talking. It's Susan. Right before I went to go lock the meeting, two callers made their way in. Let's go back to final call public invited to be heard. Thank you. Invite them in. So I'm going to unmute the first caller. This is the one that dropped off previously. Caller 525, I'm gonna ask you to unmute. Your phone number ends in 525, are you there? I'm here. I'm here, can everyone hear me? Yes, we can. Okay, hi everyone. This is Brian Johnson of 926 Coughlin. It's good to see everyone. I miss the in-person meetings. And if Strider, if you're out there listening, I wanna tell you hi, you're my boy Strider. And I miss you. But I'm calling specifically, cause I had a couple of questions about this presentation on the Costco thing. I thought Jim Golden did a great job in presenting the numbers, especially when he used the maximum figures. This is what at the most is going to cost us. His predecessors that spoke, unfortunately, he kind of really did all benefits. You know, like listening to things like, it'll create 260 jobs in five years. That's an odd quantification. We need to know how many jobs in the first year, how many in the second, how many in the third, how many in the fourth. How about spending $13 million a year? Also, it needs to be clear that not all 260 of those jobs are going to be long month residents, if it's only employees of 100 or 150 long month residents, that needs to be included in that analysis. And it just kind of seemed too sales pitchy to me to include all benefits and not address things like the one to 200 trucks that they said that it will now be on 119. And the traffic congestion that will result from that. And I just asked that, you know, you're not, I sent you guys an email, you might see while this was going on to set this, but you're a public administrator, not the sham wow guy. So we need the full picture on jobs. We need the full picture on the negative aspects, not just the benefits of Costco. And I thought Jim Golden did a good job of that, but I think there's still a lot of questions out there as to specifics on other details of the plan. And I wish that we could get a more objective presentation on those. Thank you for this time. Thank you, Brian. All right, next caller. And Mayor, that second caller hung up. So we are done. We're going to continue with Mayor and Council comments then Councilor Martin. Thank you, Mayor Bagley. I guess you can say anything you want to in public invited to be heard. But, you know, I'd like to talk about free speech because, you know, when I write things in the newspaper, I am representing myself. It says that in italics, you know, right under my columns that my opinions are my own and don't necessarily represent the opinions of the city council or the city of Longmont. And so I think it's a little bit distant, genuine for people to call up and essentially initiate a debate about the personal statements of a member of the council at the city council. That said, you know, it would be slander if you could slander an elected official to say that I am against fracking. What I am against is what the people of Longmont are against which is paying for stuff that people in other cities get the benefit of in their taxes. You know, I think it's pretty impressive that Councilwoman Peck talked about RTD because one of the things that I hear about a lot is, you know, how long have we been paying taxes on RTD and we're never gonna get our train? Well, you know, I'm really excited too that because of the diligence of Councilwoman Peck and others that we may finally get our train but it's been a long time that we haven't had one and we've been paying for it. And similarly, you know, I'm not for fracking but what I am for is protecting the people of Longmont from it and the agreement that Longmont has with Cub Creek Energy and the assignees of the mineral rights, whoever they may be in the future is protecting Longmont from having drilling inside the city limits. And if Joe Salazar succeeds in forcing us to go to battle with those people because they're drilling underneath the city of Longmont and we lose that battle then it could have us back to a situation where we have a well pad five miles from the swim beach at Union Reservoir inside the city limits. And that might just be the beginning. So what Joe Salazar is really trying to do is set a precedent so that other cities can have fracking bans even though Longmont doesn't need any anymore because Longmont is already protected from fracking inside the city. So I don't like it when people lie about what I say and I'd also just like to end this little rant by saying that the sponsor of Senate Bill 181 which is the law that not very good lawyer Joe Salazar is trying to use to get fracking bans for other cities. Point of order. I don't think it's important. What is your point of order? If we're talking about slander, I think you just, you just slandered Joe Salazar. So points of order can't be used just to interrupt somebody. You have to have a real point of order. So it's overruled. Okay. I'm pretty sure it's not slander to say I don't think somebody is a very good lawyer. But I would like to quote Steve Fenberg who is the hero of the Colorado version of the Green New Deal about what he said about Senate Bill 181. He said, Senate Bill 181 doesn't actually mention bans. It doesn't give municipalities that authority because the existing case law would still stand. So I don't know what Mr. Salazar is doing but I do know that I don't want Longmont to have to pay for it so that somebody else gets a fracking ban. And that's why I wrote that column and it has nothing to do with city council business. That's it, thanks. All right, we're gonna go with Mayor Pro Tem than you, Dr. Waters. Thank you, Mayor Bagley, just as a consideration of my colleagues as well as the city staff, I would like to let you know that I did participate in a panel for the Community Foundation of Boulder County Leadership Fellows Group this afternoon with State Senator Steven Fenberg, State Senator Elect Hackez-Lewis, County Commissioner Matt Jones as well as Boulder City Council member, Ginny Joseph. And I did my best at all times to only relate council positions that were voted on and then making sure that all other positions were clearly my own as well as avoiding disparaging any staff members or council members even when baited directly. Cause that did happen and it was trying to avoid a bunch of landmines, I'll tell you what. But I just wanted to let my fellow colleagues know that I did participate in that event this afternoon as well as the staff members and that there were Longmont specific topics that did come up in that. Outside of that, I would say that I was very encouraged by the other elected officials in what I felt to be synergy among the city, county and state level elected officials as far as to some really good things that are going on at the state, county and local levels for Boulder County at large. So thank you. All right, Dr. anyone else? Dr. Waters, you wanted to say something? Okay. Well, I'd say good on Mayor Potem for not disparaging other council members or representing council positions that he unchecked with folks. I just want to, I'm going to go back to a couple of the themes that council member Martin brought out in her comments since we were both featured in the public invited to be heard comments tonight. And I just would just a couple of thoughts. One is that I think the public invited to be heard portion of the agenda is one of the most important parts of the meeting. I mean, it was way more fun when we were in person and it's limited in this format. But I do think it's one of the great aspects of local government. It's the form of government closest to the people. And it's like every Tuesday night, it's a town hall. I just think it differentiates or distinguishes local government from other forms of government. So the last thing I'd want to do is squelch that. It is people exercising their first amendment rights in the purest form of democracy seems something. So when I get the chance to do that as a resident by writing a letter to the editor and people using their first amendment rights to criticize me for using mine and labeling it as whining, I just think that's an interesting commentary on how the process gets used just for the record. Nobody's listening to this except the people on this screen I suspect and nobody's gonna care. But just to set the record straight, I did write a letter to the editor. I didn't think anybody'd read it. And I'm not certain that people commented on it actually read it, because it was really what I said was a total distortion what I heard tonight. So for the record, I'm opposed to fracking inside our city limits and within 2,500 feet of our city limits. I voted for the 2012 fracking ban. I would vote for it again if it was on the ballot. I support the mission of Colorado Rising. I was proud when we signed a contract with Cub Creek and top operating to close down wells to move up surface operations outside the city limits. Cause I think we did what we fulfilled our first obligation to Longmont residents. And that is to act on the health of their health and safety, which is what we were able to accomplish through that contract. I think we made a good decision as a council to remain neutral in this lawsuit when it was filed. But it wasn't without expense. We remain neutral, but again, we used resources in a time of some austerity to defend ourselves in a lawsuit where we'd already been through this process. No one, we didn't ever hear anybody, but would you like to be a defendant in a lawsuit and defend yourself again? Basically to put it potentially at risk for our citizens by putting us in a position to breach a contract that we signed. But my real opposition that I tried to assert as a resident, not as a council member, and I was explicit as well that I wasn't representing anybody's views about my own as a resident of Longmont. My objection was to a fundraising campaign to cover the cost for an appeal that would keep us as defendants in a lawsuit and have further deplete Longmont city resources to accomplish what we've already accomplished in a time of austerity, that was the concern. So if anybody's listening, the callers were right. I ran as a candidate in opposition to fracking in Longmont, that hasn't changed. I think I would continue to do whatever we needed to do to protect the health and safety of our residents. But I'm not gonna give up my first amendment rights to write a letter to the editor, whether people like what I write or not. So I'd love to be engaged with residents where we have a chance to go back and forth. It's interesting to have the comments where we can't respond when we're called out individually. And maybe there are other places we'll be able to do that. So thanks for the opportunity, Mayor Bagley. Well, you're welcome, Dr. Waters. Anybody else? All right, I don't have anything to add. Oh, Council Member Doge will fairing. Yeah, so I just, I wanted to add, so last Friday I was in on that Zoom meeting. I don't know, I think we all got, I don't know, I'm on the emailing list for the Colorado Municipal League. And it was the special meeting for municipal officials with Governor Polis's response advisor. And it was really just, it was concerning to see the numbers, to see how we are progressively getting worse with this virus. I do get frustrated to hear, you know, national level pushing it on states, states pushing it on counties, counties and, you know, being an employee of the school district, putting it on the district. And then everybody's kind of pushing it to other entities, but really it comes down to each one of us and our behaviors, our actions, washing your hands, taking this virus seriously, wearing your mask. You know, in the matter of a week, we went from having in my own building, 35 kids in quarantine to 164. We went from one teacher in quarantine to 13. And this is happening in all the schools nationwide. This is not sustainable in meeting with the criteria for what constitutes quarantine. What we do in businesses will look very different in schools and in the classroom, but yet we're following those same guidelines. And, you know, I keep asking questions about the sustainability. Let's look pinpoint specific for daycares, for schools, for different businesses that would warrant a different kind of structure for quarantine that can keep people safe, but still sustainable. And I think, you know, I get frustrated because I do feel like we're kind of making it up as we go along. But again, it's gonna come down to each one of us and our behaviors, wearing your mask, social distancing, limit those gatherings. I'm all for a good rally. And wash your hands too, please. I'm all for a good rally and advocating First Amendment rights, but space out, wear your mask, you know, be cognizant because our actions have impacts for other people. And, you know, it could be just because I haven't slept in so many days trying to manage my classroom and planning, but, you know, this is something that it's hurting our kids. You know, and we need everybody to step up. You know, you think about World War II and, you know, do your part for Uncle Sam. You know, we're in that same position right now. Wear your mask, space, you know, do a little sacrifice on that end so we're not collapsing our economy, so we're not hurting our students, our children and our mental health. So that's all I have to say. All right, thanks. And all right, all right. And let the record reflect that Mayor Pro Tem Rodriguez gave Dan's hands, or Jazz hands, so thank you, Mayor Pro Tem. All right, Harold. No comments, Mayor Counsel. Eugene, you asleep? No, Mayor, edge of my seat, no comments for you. All right, can I have a motion to adjourn, please? So moved. Second. All right, it's been moved and seconded by Council Member Peck that we adjourn. All in favor say aye. All right, opposed say nay. All right, I'm going to assume that Council Member Christensen wants to go home. So the motion carries unanimously and we'll see everybody later. Thank you, bye-bye.