 All right, thank you, Faye. And I'm one of those that, this is the second time I've been in this building, which is sad to admit, but it's wonderful. Yeah, I'm Chris McGillvray, Chair of our Downtown Development Board of Directors. And we're always looking for opportunities to engage with you all, engage in the community, to have targeted, thoughtful conversations about how we can be better, better as a downtown as we progress forward. And as part of our Building Better Cities series, we've invited leaders from across the front range representing Greeley, Loveland, and Fort Collins this evening to have a discussion on ways that, based on their experiences, ways that they've built a strong, vibrant downtown where people live, play, have fun. They're going to talk about some of the challenges that they've faced in their roles as directors around just all the challenges that come with growth. How do we grow our communities while maintaining the character of our communities and our identities of who we are as a city? And so hopefully we'll have an opportunity to have an awesome conversation. And you all will be welcome to participate in that discussion. And so without further ado, I want to thank you all for coming. I'm excited about this. Thank you for our guests for taking the time out of their busy schedules to participate in this discussion. And I want to introduce Kimberly McGee, our executive director of the Longmont Downtown Development. Thank you all so much. I have the honor of moderating this panel today. And I have had the honor of working with these fine, wonderful, intelligent people since I have gotten here. So super glad to have them. And super glad to have all of you here. I know Chris talked a little bit about the challenges, but I think we're going to talk about the triumphs and the things that happen and the things that we've done. So I have a few questions that I'm going to moderate with the panel. And then we can open it up to questions for you. So if you want to turn to the next slide, I'm going to start with Bianca. Bianca, if you could please introduce yourself. That'd be great. Absolutely. Are you ready for me to just run through? Kimberly, fantastic. Would you guys like me to stand or am I OK sitting? Can everyone? OK, great. I'm going to opt for the cozy chair then. Thank you for having me. My name is Bianca Fisher. I am the executive director of the Greeley Downtown Development Authority. Our DDA was established in 1998. City Council didn't actually approve our plan of development until 2002. So 2003 is the year we consider our base year. But I have been with the DDA for the past 14 years, served as the executive director for about the last four and a half, and associate director before that, project coordinator, and administrative assistant. Literally every role in our little organization. So it's been great to touch and be a part of every piece of our organization. But our district in downtown Greeley is about 55 blocks. We extend to the south. We actually touch UNC's campus at about 17th Street. And then we go to the north to about 5th Street. So a pretty large area. We do have two historic districts within our downtown. We have an enterprise zone. We also have an opportunity zone. And then we are a part of the larger Greeley Creative District. In our district, we have a lot of great public amenities, like Lincoln Park, which is right in the middle of our core downtown. We have a great civic center. We have a recreation center, a senior center, an ice house. So a lot of great public amenities. Our library district is currently building a brand new library and innovation center in the old Greeley Tribune building. So a lot of great public spaces. We also are really close to, like I mentioned, UNC. We're close to the Puder River Trail Corridor and also the Greeley Weld Airport. So a lot of close amenities in our district. As far as our business mix, we have about 300 street level businesses, a really wide mix of businesses. So yeah, and then in 2011, kind of a fun fact about our district is we were the first in the state of Colorado to take advantage of the Common Consumption Legislation, which we really were able to activate a Friday Fest event, which is our outdoor live free music series and starts in the middle of May and goes all the way through middle of September. We have thousands of folks that come out every Friday night to enjoy live music and the Go Cup. So I don't know if you want me to keep going, Kimberly, or I can. OK, wonderful. I think that's great. So next slide, and we'll turn it over to Matt. Yeah, to Matt. Good evening. Thanks for having us tonight. My name is Matt Robin. I'm the exec director of the Fort Collins Downtown Development Authority. One of the questions is my past work experience. I've been in Colorado now for almost a quarter century, and my work here has been entirely in the public financing realm. Prior to Fort Collins DDA, I was with the city of Loveland and established their urban renewal authority. And before that, I was in, I've been in redevelopment my entire career in Knoxville, Tennessee as a downtown business owner at a brew pub and restaurant, and then in Michigan, an environmental remediation firm that focused on brownfield redevelopment. Fort Collins Downtown would describe its character as it's our historic commercial core. It's our historic industrial zone areas, which today comprises a lot of our craft brewing, large craft brewers, and also our entertainment district It's the center of government, as well as we have three museums. So it's culture, living, downtown living, and shopping and entertainment. We've been around since 1981, so just a year too older than Longmont DDA. And we have had struggles recently with regard to the live, work, play trifecta. It's becoming harder and harder to live in Fort Collins because of rising housing costs, which I'm sure you don't escape that issue here in Longmont either. But we've taken some steps to really direct some of our resources as a DDA into addressing that issue with workforce housing for downtown employees. And why we do that? Because downtowns are important. Downtowns are the soul of a community, and they represent the past, the present. And if you're doing it right, you're also looking forward to the future because downtowns don't ever stop evolving. And you've got to embrace all of that if you're going to do it well. Thank you so much. Next slide, and Sean. Hello, everybody. My name is Sean Hawkins. I run the DDA and also the Loveland Downtown Partnership in Loveland. And I've done that now for about four and a half years. And Loveland is much newer to this game than all of our neighbors here. We formed a DDA in 2017. So in advance of that DDA, Loveland had a 15-year period. Sounds like a Great Depression, where from 2002 to 2017, it took 15 years to get that sales tax level back to 2002. So it had a very, very long, tough period there. But for me, that leaves a lot of opportunity. So I've always worked in small towns. I started doing this in downtown Missoula, Montana, where I went to school. A great downtown, I think it's actually one of the best small downtowns in the country today. I worked in a little, I'm from Louisville, Kentucky. So I worked in a little town called Cordon, Indiana, for about seven years. And then I did a little bit of consulting work for a company called Urban Place Consulting, based out of Long Beach, California, before I landed in Yakima, Washington, for about 12 years. So I've always worked in these small towns. It's real special to me to get to integrate and really my boots-on-the-ground type of approach. I'm very hands-on in doing this. And there's a wonderful opportunity in Loveland. And one of the things is, is so many of the old buildings have just not been touched. No bank would loan on them with lower rents. It's hard to make them pencil. So now having a DDA that also has sales tax. Most of our fellow DDAs get the property tax. We also get the sales tax. And so we're finding a way to make these older buildings pencil. And I think downtown is really important in Loveland. My perspective of being fairly new to northern Colorado is it's pretty homogenous. Lots of things that kind of look the same, or it could look like it could be some of these neighborhoods could be in Cleveland, Ohio, or some other place. But our downtown is really special. And it's not only just the buildings, it's also the people and the stories and the memories. And so we try to hold that very closely as we do our work. We are challenged because we don't have that many people that work in our downtown. We don't have any big office. Larimer County had a facility that moved out of town a handful of years ago. The city hall in Loveland, it's four or five blocks from the heart of downtown, which is enough to make people maybe get in their car sometimes to go out to lunch instead of walk into downtown. So we are challenged with workers. But we also have a number of new residential projects. And so I really like that part. It is the building of a neighborhood and making people feel comfortable and safe. But that also means that the lunchtime can be pretty quiet at some times, especially this time of year when we don't get all the Rocky Mountain National Park tourists coming through it. So but it's important. I really take our work very seriously. We are getting ready to redo 4th Street. If you would drive down 4th Street today, it might look like one of these mountain roads that you're going down. It's very rough. There's many potholes. And we're getting ready to do all five blocks of it. And to do that is literally the city's main street. We have to take it very serious so we get it right. So it's a fun opportunity. I'm very, very lucky to be where I am today. So thank you. Awesome. So just to let all of you know, if anyone is new to DDAs, they're downtown development authorities. They're meant to be in the heart of your downtown and your central business district. And they're meant to make sure that you're preserving that character that you're promoting and that you're growing the core of your town. We like to say that downtown is everyone's neighborhood. Although now we're expanding into having neighbors of our own and it is a neighborhood of those who live there. When we talk about the live, work and play triangle, those are the three things that we really need to keep balanced and keep moving to have people coming and engaging our downtown day, evening, and then sleeping here at night. For our downtown here in Longmont, we have, I just did a presentation this morning to our business owners and we have a little over 1,600 residents. And so that's probably kind of a smaller neighborhood but we are seeing people that are starting to live here. Which is a wonderful way to kind of engage as we today in our industry, rooftops bring retail. And so it really supports those storefront businesses that everyone wants that makes the character of your downtown that makes people wanting to be here. But I always say, it is the hardest business and these folks put everything that they have in it, their hearts, their money, everything into making these work. So the more that we can get those supported, the more that we can continue to get the things that we want. So it's really wonderful. I think we all look at our jobs as managers of place. And so this sense of place that you feel when you're here goes well beyond what the buildings look like or well beyond what's going on inside of them. It is the character, it is all of that. So one of the things that we often cite is that historic nature of our downtowns and people often take great pride in that. As we're maintaining that, I would just like to ask each of you how you maintain the character or the authenticity while you're investing in the future. So I'm gonna start with Sean. And if you, next slide, that'd be great. The slides, by the way, are just giving you a feel of the downtowns. They may not necessarily equate with what they're saying but just so you can kind of see the downtowns, so. What I really think about being newer to our community was really just doing a lot of listening. And I wanted to get a sense of how people, what the memories were, what type of events people attended in the past. And there weren't many historic preservation success stories in Loveland. We are going to change that. We are probably working on a dozen older buildings right now. And so I wanted to do a lot of listening and unfortunately a lot of things have been torn down. You start hearing these stories of what was there, what was there, what was there. So we recognize that we have to save what we can but also make new development as compatible as possible to. Loveland, unfortunately, I don't know if your community is this way, but a lot of the brick work done in the 30s and 40s is very poor quality. So to preserve a lot of that old brick is really hard. So we're trying to find ways to bring new brick into older buildings. And that is an option to us. So an example right now that we're working on is our Elks building. The Elks building is about 30,000 square feet. It was the hotel when people came to the National Park back in the early 1900s, because it's right across from the depot. It's in horrible shape. It literally would never ever pencil. And one of the reasons we're putting, we'll put it probably two and a half million dollars to get this done is that the stories people have, the Elks had 2,500 members back in the 80s. So it was the social hub of the community. And so we're trying to really honor that. I really believe, and we're putting a rooftop deck on it. They didn't have a rooftop deck on it, but we found a way to do it at the National Park Service who owns the easement on the facade. They're comfortable with it too. So we're trying to modernize it into new uses that people will really respond with. And then another project is happening is our old feeding grain project. The state of Colorado is putting 5 million into this. I'm actually very surprised that this building hasn't burned down, given the amount of wood in it, these large wood beams. But what's interesting is the community is like, sure, this is great, but there isn't the celebration that's gonna be with working on the Elks. And it's because no one has memories of the feeding grain. They didn't go there. There was no reason. They didn't have these community celebrations. And so we're really trying to honor that pass with the special buildings. We don't have a lot of newer buildings popping up just yet. I mean, the whole foundry complex, if you've seen that once you hit first street is newer. But we're trying to make it blend in the best we can. So we just try to listen a lot. And because of that, I think everything is very peaceful. We have a lot of wind in our sails and that's very enjoyable for me to be working in a very peaceful community conversation where people are saying we like what's happening. So. And next slide. In our downtown, like I mentioned, we have two historic districts. And so a big impetus of those districts is really preserving. It's the same, is true in our community as we're sitting in this theater. I was thinking about all of the pictures of our old chief theater that, I mean, people absolutely lament its destruction and old post office, all of these beautiful memories of the past. So our historic preservation office through the city of Greeley is very active in preserving the historic structures. But another great example is 8th Avenue, which is the main corridor into our downtown, into the city itself and into the university. The city actually commissioned a study to figure out which buildings are historically significant. They may not be on the register and it is not a district. But we still wanted to recognize the buildings, like Sean was talking about, that have these significance, that whether it's memories or in its use. And what's great about that is a great example is we had a developer that came and purchased, it was the old, we call it the Garnsey building, but it was an old Ford building where they actually used to build model tees in the basement and drive them out of this building. It was like Fort Knox. There's so much concrete in that building. It wasn't on the historic register and really it wasn't incredibly beautiful except for this red brick facade. And what was really fantastic is the developers really honored this historic building and so they actually had a mason that brick by brick took down that facade. It was the most, it was a very slow process, but incredibly beautiful to see. And so now you have this very modern, it's a 55 resort apartment. So it's 84 residential units for the 55 and older crowd, but they've got this historic red brick from the original building and you actually see the Ford logo, the original Ford. And now that's the entrance into our new Austin's restaurant. And so it's a really beautiful way that they honored the past without having to do it because they were a historic registered property. The other thing I will say is that we have to figure out ways to support these projects. Like Sean said, it doesn't make sense on paper. No developer is going to willingly come and want to maintain or restore that historic character. So we have a variety of, there's historic tax credits, just different opportunities. There are TIF that we can support projects with our facade grants, our building improvement grants. The city has a couple loan programs as well. So really looking at ways that we can help fill that gap because it's incredibly costly, but incredibly important. And then lastly, I would just say is, from an architectural standpoint, I laugh sometimes in our district, we have periods of time in architecture that I don't think we're so well preserving. We've got a building that's entirely concrete. I mean, it's literally just a concrete behemoth. You know, but it represented a moment in time in history. And so I think just figuring out ways to tell that story and let it be a part of the fabric and landscape really honors your history, your culture, and your story. So. Great, thanks. And Matt, next slide, please. So in Fort Collins, the way we maintain character and still recognize the need to invest in the future, Sean said it really well that it's the people and the businesses that really make up, make a downtown vibrant. And so paying attention to the health and wellbeing of the business community is very important. But from a physical standpoint, the way that we address this in Fort Collins is certainly investment in the rehabilitation of historic buildings. Our organization has probably partnered with 90% of the historic buildings in our core, the building owners to help rehab those buildings over the years. So following Secretary of Interior's standards and so forth are really important when tackling those types of projects. We also pay really close attention, not just to the vertical architecture, but the horizontal architecture in our downtown when it comes to conveying our history. We've taken great effort to pay attention to fine grain details like coal shoots for old buildings. We maintain those in the sidewalk. So we've got a couple of blocks where those have been preserved and are part of the new sidewalks. Light wells for historic buildings. Those are what used to let light into the basements of buildings. We've painstakingly paid attention to keeping those intact when we do horizontal improvements. And then also Fort Collins, we have an old municipal railway, streetcars, and we've got several blocks of our downtown that we've preserved the trolley tracks. So it's that and also segments of historic sandstone sidewalk and everything. So those are just some of the punctuation marks of fine grain details that we pay attention to as a way to keep our connection to the past. But one of the other ways that we do that is recognizing the different eras of construction. And our downtown, we view ourselves as having two main streets. U.S. Highway 287, which is College Avenue, but also Mountain Avenue, which is East West Street. And when you stand at the intersection of those two streets, there are four buildings on each of the corners and each of them is separated by about 30 to 40 years in time span. Total of 70 years separates all of them. We've got a mid-century, 60s era bank building on one corner, a late 1920s era bank building on the other corner, a 1910 era old Woolworths commercial block building and a 1890s Richard Sonian building. And we geek out about architecture in Fort Collins to the point where we made the community and whether it was the city planners or decision makers, we made them have to become geeks about architecture to understand that when we're designing for the future, we're open to contemporary design because we were getting stuck in a rut where our community was, we were approving buildings and we've got some bad examples in our downtown where an effort to make a building that's being constructed in 2015, 2016, making it look like something that was from the turn of the 20th century. And we were coming up with some things that look like fake historic architecture. So we worked with the city to develop new design standards for the downtown that recognize contemporary architecture has its place. It's not so much about paying attention to the style. It's about paying more attention to the typology of buildings, recognizing that a commercial building in an urban setting has certain features to it and it doesn't matter how you dress it and style, but it has certain elements that make it work in an urban context and engage the street and sidewalk. So those are the ways that we pay attention to the past but recognize we've got to look towards the future and create those historic landmarks built today for the next 7,500 years. Thank you so much. One of the most fun walks I ever had in downtown was when I first met Matt and we were walking around and he was just in awe stopping at these buildings, talking about these different architecture structures and it was really cool to see kind of all of the things that meld together. And so I do think there's just lots of room for lots of periods of time when we're looking at that. So we've talked a lot about partnerships or tax increment financing which is how DDAs are funded. So as we get property tax growth, we get a portion of that to reinvest in the district and we can use those dollars to make projects better, to make them work and to make them kind of mesh in. So there's a number of things we can use them for but when we talk about that TIF or our investments in projects, that's how we're able to do that. We call them public private partnerships when we work on these larger scale developments. It's a tool that allows the public sector to partner and collaborate with private sector company to implement certain projects in our downtown. It's widely used to keep downtowns viable. And so I'm gonna ask each of our partners here to walk us through an impactful private public partnership they did in their community. And Matt will start with you again and if we could have the next slide. So this is one of the buildings in our river district. Downtown Fort Collins is 750 acres and it includes our commercial zone, historic commercial zone area and our historic industrial zone area. And this is part of the industrial, former industrial area. The river district was 15, 16 years ago, had no sidewalks, it was dirt edges on the Hasphalt streets and the question was who goes first? The public sector or the private sector? And the public sector ended up going first. So we worked with our city to develop streetscape design plans and we started building the infrastructure and shortly thereafter we started seeing the private development occur. It's been, I don't wanna say it was overnight, but it's been fairly fast paced. We now have a multitude of commercial buildings and residential in the district, but our public-private partnership, I'm gonna give an example. We have also in this industrial area, right on the edge of it. We have a company called Woodward, Woodward Governor. They're located in Loveland as well. They've been a business in Fort Collins since the 1950s and today they're an aerospace technology manufacturing company. Every Boeing and Airbus aircraft that flies in the skies has components from Woodward in it. In 2012 they were contemplating leaving Fort Collins because they needed to do a major expansion and wanted to build their global headquarters. In our district was a 100 acre golf course on the Puder River and that project, that site became the home of their new manufacturing facility. The community's concerns at that time was that with the DDA we were kind of stepping out of our role of participating in the traditional classic retail historic building renovations and getting involved in doing a major investment in a manufacturing facility. But what that facility is, what that facility did was not only provide a large employee base that comes into our restaurants and our after work entertainment venues and everything on a daily basis, but it allowed us with the partnership that we structured with them was they committed to donate 30 acres of the 100 acre site for reshaping the flood plain along the Puder River. So the DDA paid for, we contributed 3 million to shift the patterns of how the Puder River comes out of its banks during flood stages and it became a city natural area. We relocated some high tension power lines that were running through the middle of the site and moved them to the edges of the site so that they could construct their buildings and we funded a significant amount of street improvements along the frontage of the facility. The partnership is, again, is this something our DDA should be doing? It's not the traditional sense, but today people look at it and go, why would we have ever avoided doing that? It fits into the context of our industrial area and the people that work there are part of the downtown business community. So nobody bats an eyelash at it today and thinks it was a bad idea. Great. Sean, and we'll go to the next slide. Just real quick, this is an affordable housing project that Matt worked on, right? Just opened two weeks ago, kind of like our spoke. And then next slide. The next one? Okay, one more. So this is the project I want to talk about here. This is just completed the planning commission process and now they just have to submit their building permit to get this started. This is 4th and Lincoln, so 4th and 287. Locally known is the Heartland Cafe corner. There was an old cafe on the corner. And also on the corner, there was a building that in 2015 the facade just caved in. And if you look at it today, there's a mural on basically a plowwood filler. But what makes this project really exciting for us is we took three different runs at it. And maybe I'll just get up and point. And it was just this part here that we did and we realized it had to go bigger. And what was in the way, which is a great opportunity, is this building, which is the Odd Fellows building. And when I met the Odd Fellows, they had 30 members and average age of their board was in the 70s. Actually the president was actually 91 of their board. And they had no means to take care of this absolute gem of a historic building. And in my opinion it has, because it was so out of code, it was an old JC Penney's. On the ground floor, the restroom height is 5.5 feet. I don't even know how that was possible. I've never seen that before. I'm 6'3". But the brickwork, the 10 ceilings, it's insane. It is one of the most beautiful historic buildings just sitting there right on our main street. So today this block is pretty dead. There's no reason to walk because all of these spaces are vacant. And then the developer bought the next historic building as well. And that was a local food company called Wild Zora. You may have had some of their products. And the ground floor retail space was their locker room. So you would look in there, you'd see their employee locker room talking about activating 4th Street. It was not happening. But what made this project come together was the developer was able to buy and expand the footprint of the project. So it will be 96 apartments, about 15,000 square feet of retail. We're going to fill these retail spaces really quickly, I believe, because they are very transparent. They're really going to enliven the ground floor experience. But the constraint was, where are these folks going to park? You can't build this many residential units without having a place to park. So behind it was a very dysfunctional city-owned parking lot that we're putting a 4.5-story parking garage on it. So it would be 277 spaces. The top 106 will be dedicated to the residential units. So we're adding some better retail-friendly parking. If you've been to the foundry before, you've seen that on 2nd Street. That garage doesn't get enough play. I park in it every day. And I can literally come in and go to the first level. So it doesn't get a lot of use. It does on the weekends or a movie night. So our DDA, we get property and sales tax. This was producing no sales tax. None of these were when we were formed. And then the odd fellows, being a non-profit organization, they paid no property taxes. So it becomes pretty lucrative. So we're putting about $500,000 a year into to build the parking garage. And that's still not enough to build the full cost of it. But we like... I negotiated it pretty hard. The city would take the downside of the deal. We would just put the increment in if somehow the costs go up, or it doesn't perform as well. So we'll hook for it. So we like that too. But in terms of public improvements, it's everything. We have to redo literally everything. Water, sewer, electrical, all the streetscape, everything to make this project work. But we're real excited for it to come. And I think it's going to really add a lot of character to our 4th Street. When we brought it to City Council, I'm not used to this. The community I came from in Washington, we would have very large crowds whenever a downtown item came. We had three people speak. Kind of made me mad. I just wish there was more. I was like, this is it. That's the only opposition. And the opposition to the project was simply the height of it. So it exceeded the height limit for 4th Street about six feet. But you'll never notice on the ground floor because of the way the setbacks work. And so we could live with that, to make this project pencil. And then what happens when you add 106, excuse me, it's 96 total units. You can have an extra 150 people living in downtown, and they've got to get their hair cut. They've got to drink beer. And then they invite friends down, all this type of thing. So we are really in favor of adding more residential. We really think it adds a lot to the character of our downtown. So watch and see. And they've passed this, and they've seen nothing but a rundown corner for about 10 years. And as one of our developers said, this is kind of the mountain and college corner. It's a really visible corner in downtown. So we've got to get it right. So this is the fun stuff, I think. And so I look forward to seeing this get done. Awesome. Thank you. And Bianca, next slide. All right. So the project I'm going to talk about is our very first redevelopment project, which was the Double Tree Hotel. We broke ground April 2016. That top picture there on the left is a picture of the site, which is basically an entire city block that housed the library, Fire Station 1, municipal court, and city council chambers. So again, an absolutely nonproductive tax parcel, but this is an incredible project for a number of reasons. If you go back and look at all of these old organizational plans from back in the 80s, one of the big things that was stated over and over is that we needed a nice hotel in downtown. We needed conference center space, and actually that site specifically was called out in a plan I found from the 1980s. You know, sometimes we're slow learners. It takes us a little bit of time, but this was such a fantastic project. I have to give huge kudos to Becky Savrick who is the city's assistant city manager because you can imagine there was a lot of moving parts here to clear the site. We had to move a fire station, municipal court, you know, the library, all of these different very important uses, and she was just an absolute mastermind. She had a, it almost looked like some type of game board that, you know, moving pegs and parts just to try and figure it all out. So this ended up being a three way kind of partnership, public-private partnership where we came alongside with the city. The city put out the RFP since they were the land owner and said, hey, we need to have a nice hotel downtown. We currently have one hotel, and it is certainly not a property that we're incredibly proud of, unfortunately. But we recognize the need. Also our proximity to Island Grove and the Civic Center, we have a lot of visitors, and they were all leaving our district for lodging. So this was a great opportunity. It is six stories, 147 rooms. The really unique thing about this project, too, is when the city put out the RFP there were two responses. One was an out-of-state development group, and the other was a group of 13 local investors who just said, we need to get this done. And this is a mix of, you know, the Dick Monferds and Bob Toytons and, you know, just people in our community who had a heart and a vision for downtown of what this property and project could mean. So it's incredibly significant to our district. It's been fantastic to have the additional visitors in our downtown and also to have that conference center space. So we at the DDA were able to put up a million dollars up front toward the parking. The parking is all behind the building. And then also commit to for an ongoing period of time until 2033 for the public improvements. The city also up fronted some of those costs as well. So it was kind of this three-way agreement. To me the huge, huge win on public-private partnerships is our ability to maximize resources. It's so smart. We can only do so much. We're a small DDA with a very small budget. If we tried to do a project, it wouldn't be significant. But when we can pool our resources with the city and then with our private partners really fantastic projects get done. So this was really the start of our redevelopment cycle. And since then we've had the MATI apartments built. We've got the 55 resort apartments done. A couple projects in the work. And so it's really been this great opportunity to catalyze redevelopment and growth in our downtown. Awesome. We have one more quick question for each of our panelists and then we'll open it up to questions for you. And I'm going to say two minutes or less because I know this is a topic we can all talk about forever. All of us have our downtowns on a state highway in one way or another. And there are different challenges and triumphs by trying to navigate a pedestrian friendly environment and everything. So I'm going to start with Sean and any discussion next slide on doing business on a state highway. One of the things that we were told very quickly when I started was that CDOT would never work with us on these things. And of course our folks have, well, we've been to Fort Collins, we've been to Longmont. There's some mid-block pedestrian crossings and different things. So we opened up a quick conversation with them and they were open to new ideas. And that's been really exciting to us. What is not exciting to us is that we're going to have to design all these improvements. The city has got other projects they want to work on and it isn't necessarily open yet to doing some of these pedestrian crossings. But the first project we're working on, we let the contract out, we're designing it right now, it's just a third in Lincoln and third in Cleveland. We're going to narrow the lanes on both of those. We're going to do bulb outs to make it much more accessible to make it for pedestrians. But how do we do this? I call it a greatest hits video. We set up some cameras and so you would think that they would want to see a certain amount of numbers of crossings. We actually wanted to show people video of how people were and how dangerous it was. And once they saw that, they were like, yeah, we've got to do this. Someone is going to get hit and killed. So we found them really open to deal with. And I think that's a fairly new, from what I understand, that's a fairly new thing. They have programs now. CDOT actually has programs for pedestrian type projects where they are awarding grants. It is a nice change. I think you'll see a lot of changes in Loveland. We're a little bit behind the curve from these folks, from both Longmont and Fort Collins on 287. But it is probably the number one thing that is brought up is how we want to narrow, we want to calm some traffic, and we want to make the pedestrian the focus of both Lincoln and Cleveland. Great job. Okay, Matt. Next slide. So like I mentioned 8th Avenue, which is the main corridor into Greely and downtown is State Highway 85. So it has been somewhat of a challenge. We haven't had too many instances. We actually did a wayfinding project. So a cool piece of that is, like Sean mentioned, they are doing a lot of grants. So we were actually awarded a CDOT revitalizing Main Street grant for $96,000. So we worked on some wayfinding some monuments to really create a sense of place in our downtown. So that was great. It was a little bit more challenging as we went through the permitting process. You know, we've always heard it from the private sector and we got to experience firsthand and it was definitely challenging. But I will say, when we found kind of the right folks to work with and really were able to start casting that vision with them, it was really incredible to see just that willingness. I will say an asterisk, though. Our city is currently in the process of trying to gain local control back of 8th Avenue and also 10th Street. And really the reason being is we have these additional outlets. We have Business 85 and then Regular 85 and same thing with Highway 34. We have Business 10th Street. So again, you know, for two different modes of transportation and moving people quickly, we want the opposite. We want people to slow down. We want cyclists. We want pedestrians to feel safe. And I think we can do that a lot more efficiently. At least our city can just with the resources and that vision for 8th Avenue. And obviously CDOT is glad about turning that cost over to local government as well. But they've been really good partners and really receptive also to pursuing that for the future. So we'll see more to come on that. And Matt, and last slide. So having a state highway, federal highway in your downtown, it's a blessing and a curse, right? How do you want to fill your bathtub with a drinking straw or the bathtub filler spigot? So if you've got the state highway and the federal highway, it's a conduit for bringing lots of people in. So that's the great thing. You can balance the fact that you want to make it the most pedestrian friendly environment that you can. Fort Collins, we do that a couple of different ways. We have at a regulatory level, we refer to we have designated pedestrian priority zones. We have two of those areas in our community. One of them is our downtown and the other is some of the commercial areas around the Colorado State University campus. And that basically says we're going to at our crosswalks, we're going to give priority to pedestrians to be able to activate their crosswalks, or we time them so that there's actually a really long period of time for pedestrians to be able to cross the main intersections. We do it also with dismount zones for bicycles. We view that it doesn't matter how you arrive, what mode of transportation you arrive in downtown Fort Collins on, whether bus, bike, automobile, skateboard, scooter, whatever at some point you have to become a pedestrian. Everybody must get off. So we don't, we designate those dismount zones so everybody becomes a pedestrian. Then at the fine grain level we support a lot of sidewalk cafes and dining opportunities and that happens on the U.S. highway. College Avenue has a huge number of restaurants without door dining. And then at the finer grain even more, we invest anywhere between $350,000 to $400,000 a year in partnership with the city for annual flower displays. So as you're walking around, you're surrounded by these wonderful beautiful flower displays. Nice budget. Awesome. Well thank you so much for telling us a little bit about your downtowns. I'm going to have Chris come out. Now we'd like to hear from you. Questions that you have, comments, anything that you'd like to talk about. It is a discussion more than just one-sided. Thank you. A great presentation. I really appreciate it. I'm wondering how your conversations about the future of our downtowns intersect with more holistic thinking around issues like homelessness, affordable housing, equity, sustainability and climate change. Kind of opening up to big picture thinking and our people addressing downtowns from that systemic holistic approach or we kind of targeting practical short-term solutions. Thank you. So homelessness has probably been one of the number one challenges for downtown Fort Collins in the last decade. But during that 10-year period we've learned that we have two permanent homeless shelters in our downtown and they have been there for many, many decades and we also typically are home to the seasonal overflow shelter. So the challenges that come with managing that really are just another management issue. But we've learned that we have a lot more in common with the shelter operators than we do than we ever thought we did. The challenge becomes how do you manage that issue in the public spaces. And we found that if we take a page from the shelter operators, they have an expectation for behavior and decorum in their facilities that they encourage us to ask the city to enforce or maintain on the public sidewalks and spaces. And the way that we help to facilitate that is we established in partnership with the city and some of our social service agencies, some of our philanthropic organizations we've established a street outreach program. And their customers are the downtown businesses, the people experiencing homelessness, the police department and general patrons and customers of the downtown. They serve all of that constituency and their role is to basically maintain a safe environment, a good behavior environment in the downtown. Affordable housing, and I'll stop with this one, but affordable housing we've realized that one of the biggest challenges that we face today is for our downtown businesses to be able to employ people that live in the community and not have to have them, you know, driving in 30, 45 minutes from more affordable communities. So we have taken an approach to actually funding affordable housing with our local housing authority and one of the projects that was on the slides was a 79 unit project that just opened two weeks ago and we contributed about 9.8 million dollars to that project and form a land contribution and cash contribution. Yeah, what I would just add to that is absolute community partnership, right? So our city just hired Juliana Kitten who is the director of She Overseas Homelessness and Housing and serves as an assistant city manager and really it's about convening all of the stakeholders. So we have a cold weather shelter and a housing navigation center just a couple blocks outside of our district. We have a number of low income housing projects in our downtown, a couple geared toward the elderly and then a couple, actually one recent project that's a potential in the work. So I think so much of it is about coordination. United Way of Well County just their office is a couple doors down and so we work with them and they have a small street outreach team but we've recognized that it's insufficient it's not enough. So actually the city is going after some grant funds to actually support a team. But part of that is actually having resources to offer people. It's one thing to have a street outreach team it's another thing to actually be able to offer some kind of pathway to housing and so that's been a big emphasis. So I will say we are definitely behind the curve. I loved getting to visit in Fort Collins with their street outreach team last year and learning a little bit about downtowns which is pretty remarkable. On the just general sustainability again I think about downtowns as a whole I feel like we're just even our emphasis on redevelopment and using kind of the existing structures and infrastructure that exist is so much more I think in my mind efficient and environmentally wise as opposed to sprawling and spreading out those resources we can actually maximize and you know we do that through density and through redevelopment and some of these brownfield sites but it's worth it and it's more productive. And then lastly it's just the emphasis especially around transportation we've been having a lot of conversations around just even the shared economy you know we don't have a ton of you know Ubers and Lifts and Greeley it would take you a little while to get that shift at this point unless it's late in the evenings. But just looking at some of these newer models that really do help in those efforts again from a transportation and multimodal transportation so those are things that we're looking at again in our connectivity to the Puder Trail and moving people the way that we move people as well so those are just a few thoughts. Thank you for your question I absolutely agree in redoing is a wise move. We want more density in our downtown we feel like that is really important. Love one is certainly sprawling right now and I think a lot of Northern Colorado is and so there's a lot of issues with that and we are promoting how can we make ourselves more dense in our downtown. We are we have a major homeless challenge in front of us right now and some of it is we are in experimental mode that we had a lot of folks through covid they were in the big Thompson River area and really established themselves and when I say established themselves some folks were digging three or four feet deep down below they had solar power they were really building themselves into that environment and we were very much afraid of the fires that could start and all the things that you saw that could happen in that area so we have removed those camps and we are putting people in hotels and so that's bringing these problems really quickly to places that didn't have them in the past our infrastructure is very old when we just took down Christmas lights and love when we turn them red and white for Valentine's Day so we get a little more mileage out of them but the main thing that people tell us when we take them down is all of a sudden we lost all the light in downtown we haven't updated our infrastructure we're fighting a major perceptions problem too of how do people feel comfortable in certain spaces in downtown so that's something that we it's going to take us a lot of time we are like I said we're working on redoing all the 5th street excuse me 4th street and that's going to take two years to do that so to really update all the lighting and make people comfortable is going to take a number of years to do it so we're quite worried about it actually because we used to have our 15 or 20 homeless folks we knew them the police knew them on a first name basis now we're seeing people we don't know we don't know where they're coming from fully and that's really worrisome to us because there are business rights too so we really think about that too there's a lot of people that have their livelihoods tied to it so we are working and we are asking our police for better police foot patrols to help make people comfortable so it is a challenge to us the last thing I will tell you is that through our TIF grants we look to do any energy efficiencies we will fund those energy efficiencies through windows, HVAC systems anything we can to make our older buildings become more modern by doing that as well so and then I guess one last thing is we also in terms of equity we want to make our rents reasonable so we are open and to working with developers that we will put more money into it if they will agree to keep the rents in the 18 to 20 dollars of foot range which is the town I came from was like 12 to 15 so we're cheap, I don't know what your average rents are but we are trying to also make it as approachable as possible so a small business can get started too thank you first of all thank you for coming to Longmont today over the past two months I have been in all three of your downtowns and I like them very much my question actually is for Kimberly could you talk a little bit about what the plans are for our rail station at first in Maine between the LDDA and the city thank you so I can touch on it just a tiny bit they are acquiring the land to be able to build the bus rapid transit station so hoping to start on that 2024 and have it ready 2025 and bus rapid transit will go out of there through RTD and then there's no timeline for any rail if that was your question so the LDDA is not in that area it's the Urban Renewal Authority which is another entity that's run by the city Tony Chacon is the one that's running that project so I can get you his name and maybe we could hook up and get some of those answers from him this is a greedy question just greedy please I'd like to know what experience the Double Tree Hotel has had in a running vacancy rate or occupancy either way you want to talk about it thank you obviously the pandemic month's notwithstanding they fared really really well I think where they have struggled I think the last one I talked to their GM they were running low 90s obviously it'll flex in northern Colorado actually one of my staff members sits on the Visit Greely Board and the occupancy rates in the region are incredibly high and so I think sometimes even you know with I think about Loveland near I-25 where you have the Embassy Suites and some of these other facilities that are being built out that are bringing huge tourism groups like in Windsor for example their big sports facility complex you know we're getting inquiries of folks who are staying in Greely it's also a dog friendly property and so it's interesting and unique some of those things but it's had incredibly great occupancy the struggle I'd say the slower part to rebound since the pandemic has been on the conference center side but that said already they've started to fill up they've got some new folks in place and that's already kind of picking up pace I couldn't tell you exactly you know their rental you know rates and occupancy at this point but on the hotel side it's been really great and honestly the crazy thing is they are the ones asking us like oh we'd love to see another hotel downtown you know so I think it is that recognition that when we actually can have a few great hotels we can actually start attracting a little bit more of those conferences of those different type of events and actually it's very complimentary so you know if any of you are hotel developers we'd love a second one but it really has been positive the reason I asked it's not true at least it's not true in northern Colorado we'd be happy to share the figures that we receive from Visit Greeley but it's incredibly high yes there you go okay well absolutely hello I'm Don Rogers from Longmont and I have a question for all of you really as you're redeveloping your cities I've been in all your cities very nice they're all on up and coming and Longmont are more familiar with them of course because I live here in terms of having activities for downtown whether it be festivals or whether it be places to to go for recreation or for the arts what what efforts do you have personally and I know we have a lot in Longmont but what are you people doing in your positions and with your boards to work with things to bring people downtown excellent question so you know for us we have truly found events to be an economic driver our downtown was fairly quiet and we used to put on just a couple we had four Friday Fest during the summer and like I mentioned in 2011 when we took advantage of the common consumption we really expanded Friday Fest to every single Friday and we see crowds of a couple thousand people every single Friday night and that has been huge we also program a Blarney on the Block which is actually this Saturday for our St. Patrick's Day Festival October Fest is our big fundraiser actually for the DDA so we've put that on for decades we support Trick or Treat we do a Trick or Treat street we have a holiday open house which is our small business Saturday to support small businesses and we have a big parade that comes downtown but so a lot of event programming which is really fantastic obviously events take a lot of time and energy and effort so the second piece of that too for us was how do we focus on businesses that really will create experience right so that was something at the board level we sat down and tried to identify and it's actually been really neat like I mentioned we have a public ice skating facility and we have a rec center and a civic center and there's a lot of live music and shows there but really expanding upon that so since that time we now have all arcade we have an axe throwing bar we have a nerd store where you can play board games we have an independent movie theater the Crest Cinema so a number of venues and then what we really encouraged our other businesses to do is hey create things that will draw people so a lot of live music trivia nights just these other events that the businesses are now starting to program themselves that is so very important in programming civic center been around or open if you will oh great question I should know the answer to that question I want to say it was I'd have to look back I want to say it was the early 90s but I could be wrong yeah I'd have to look back so out of respect of everybody's time we're going to have two more questions and one response per question hi everyone my name is Pam Davis I'm a resident here in Longmont question for you it strikes me that it's amazing to see regional DDAs come together for a conversation like this because I can imagine a tension between competition and collaboration right you're all in the same business and yet there's also a regional draw to each of these locations and three of the four of us represented here essentially share the same main street between college Lincoln and main so I'm curious about among the four of you what's kind of the regional conversation around differentiation in downtown I see a lot of amazing projects that in some ways sort of are similar to one another and so I'm curious is there a conversation about how is Longmont's future differentiated from Greeley from Fort Collins so that you all sort of attract a specific interest and yet also support one another in the overall economic vitality of the front range well one of the things that's interesting is we do have developers doing projects in both and you know some of our communities and we don't our board I mean I hang out in all of these districts and I really enjoy that opportunity it adds to my quality of life but we really are focused on just trying to make us unique and so there I think when I started there there was all this conversation of well we don't want to be old town it was like well we're not going to be it's impossible we have a much different layout we have different buildings and so we were just really trying to capitalize on redoing our buildings doing events that feel true to us we're always featuring our local and small businesses and I just think that's the way to do it but we're not really having this conversation like I don't feel any competition from any of these downtowns at all if anything we're starting to draw some of Matt's people because the thing that we do here is that downtown leveling feels like what old town was back in the 90s or something like that but we're just trying to be unique we're trying to be us and so that's keeping our eyes on what we feel like our assets are so I don't feel any competition at all alright our final question of the evening it's going to be the best question right? well I thought of one just kind of a fun question all four of you have a very unique position and I think probably because you have a passion for cities and everybody has something that they're passionate about they have like a favorite or a hero so my question is to all four of you is there a city that you are very inspired by doesn't have to be in the state just somewhere you've been and for some reason you really like that city and it just has inspired you this is my question I had the great opportunity when I was in high school my father was a member of the US Air Force and I lived all four years of high school right outside of London in the UK and that was my stomping ground and I love that city because it represents as I started off the comments tonight it represents the past the present and the future and they figured out how to do it really well and they pay attention to the big picture but they also pay attention to the finest grain detail when they're planning that city I would say San Antonio which is fun actually I'm headed there on Friday it's kind of an odd story though we went with friends to Austin of course Austin's so cool, so hip it's like the Fort Collins of you know the cool cities and we went and it was so great and then we said hey you know what let's just drive down to San Antonio so we did and of course we stopped at Bucky's on the way which we're counting down the days of the Bucky's arrival but it was so surprising to me because of the history the character obviously the river walk was wonderful but we came upon the coolest redevelopment project I have experienced today and it's called the Pearl Brewery back in the 1800's it was a brewery and now it's this incredible redevelopment project there's a hotel, there's some retail this open kind of grassy area really fantastic redevelopment project which now connects to the river corridor as well and I just love the story and I likened it to Greeley as well because it was unexpected to me we didn't come there for San Antonio we came there for Austin and yet we fell in love with San Antonio and that's kind of my story with Greeley I came to Greeley for school and thought I am not staying here, I'm going to a big city I love culture, I love big places and yet I fell in love with it and people are wonderful and so much to celebrate as well I would say Missoula that's where I started doing this work it still has its old funky dot bars but it also has modern new dining they've used tax increment to create and restore a lot of old buildings but also kept a lot of their legendary businesses they're all there and they're thriving as well they've added things such as a hotel in downtown, they've converted some of their old funky drive kind of these old 50's and 60's into unique either new hotels that have a lot of character but I just think they've really kept that feel that was unique to them and so in some ways it's changed a lot in 25 years but if you had been there in 25 years and had some memories you would still see all of that so it is a really special place in terms of sense of place and just wish I could find a way I wish the winters weren't so cold there I would consider doing it working there one day so so mine would be San Diego I think San Diego is fantastic talk about a compact urban form you literally fly right into downtown you can get an Uber and then you can walk from district to district to district and what I love about San Diego is its character changes I've been in San Diego little Italy, that's my favorite that's my jam and I just think it's an amazing it's an amazing exercise and how they've done it the one thing that I would just leave you with as we're talking about how you grow a downtown and how you remain its character I came here from Akron, Ohio it was a town of 200 and some thousand people we spent every day begging people not to leave trying to glue their feet to the ground that was, as they said the largest small town in the world anywhere is the largest small town in the world because it's about the people it's about how you feel when you're there as much more than it is about the size so I've come here and since I've been here everyone's like, I'm the last man in that is it, you know what I mean so they're two different problems they're just kind of two different challenges but again I believe that a lot of the character of your sense of place is what you make it it's the people, it's the conversation and it's how you feel when you're there so I just want to thank all of you for coming so much and I hope you enjoy your days and I hope we can continue the conversation. Thank you to the theater as well for hosting us