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I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the I'll be right back. Call the order study session for what is today Tuesday May 28th, 2024. If we can take our seats in the back, wrap up conversations, and we'll ask Councilmember Green to lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance. All right. Thank you, Tom. First item on our agenda is the RTD update City Manager Martinez. Will you call our guest up? Thank you Mayor. Good evening Mayor Mayor Pro Tem members of Council. Our first item up for bid is RTD. At this time I will ask Deborah and Michael to come on up. Have seat up here at the table with the two mics. As you ask City Council, we have asked our friends here at RTD to come back and give an overview of all things happening at RTD and answer any questions. And so with that, I will turn it over to our friends with RTD. Is that a friend? Yeah. Oh, we're off be a good evening. I'm going to be a good evening. I'm going to be a good evening. I'm going to be a good evening. I'm going to be a good evening. I'm going to be a good evening. I'm going to be a good evening. I'm going to be a good evening. I'm going to be a good evening. I'm going to be a good evening. I'm going to be a good, and I'm glad he's a member of your city council. So Troy Whitmore, I'm your RTD board member for District K, which includes Brighton, Thornton, much of Thornton, I should say, all of Commer City, Henderson area, and a teeny bit of well county that happens to be in the District near Luck buoy. So we have our CEO, Deborah here with us, Deborah Johnson, who most of you met the last time we were here, and Michael Davies, who are VP of governmental affairs, and both of them are pleased to be here, and I will turn the floor over to them, and shut my mic off to the pleasure of all. So good evening, Mr. Mayor, members of the Council, staff and all those that are virtually assembled is introduced. I'm Deborah Johnson. I serve as the general manager and chief executive officer of the Regional Transportation District. It's my pleasure to join you this evening. Thank you to Director Whitmore for the introduction and is introduced Michael Davies, my government relations officer is also here. Going to make a quick logistical inquiry is that the device to forward the slides? All right, thank you very kindly. So without much delay, I will provide a quick update relative to some pertinent issues that are happening at the regional transportation district and at the conclusion It's said presentation. It would be my pleasure to field any questions or have any dialogue as this body sees fit Yeah, where? I tried that as well. Thank you. Acting IT director Martinez. I appreciate that help. very much. So what I plan to do this evening is quickly provide an orientation to our strategic initiatives, which are part of our five-year strategic plan, then talk about our financial outlook and what that means for the regional transportation district, especially as relates to TABER, and then walk through our partnership program. So first and foremost, I want to start out by saying the RTD Board of Directors in August of 2021 approved a five year strategic plan. Incessed strategic plan, there are four strategic priorities that consist of community value, customer excellence, financial stability, and then employee ownership. We're recognizing it's a five year strategic plan. What we do each year is ensure we're taking a pulse on the environment in which we are operating. And in doing so, there are a couple of elements that spawned when we got community feedback, customer feedback as well as feedback from our employees. And what that pertains to our back-to-basics, more or less what we need to do here at our agency is focused on what we qualify as a state of good repair. RTD basically has a relatively new transportation network as relates to rail unlike most other agencies across the country, like on the Eastern Seaboard, we're on the precipice of change, recognizing we have to invest our infrastructure to ensure that we can have it for 30 more years going forward. Quite naturally as we look at any transit agency but more specifically this one, for all intents and purposes, 70% of our budget is generally geared toward people power. We are a labor intensive organization and cannot deliver transit services without the power of people. And most notably, people are quick to ask a question relative to, you need more bus operators. It's much more than that when we look at where we're positioned in the state of Colorado. RTD is the only intermodal transit agency in the state. It's difficult for us to find maintenance of way. Personnel individuals that have familiarity with overhead cantonary systems, electro-mechanics and things that alike. And so while oftentimes the forward-facing public sees our operators, be they light rail operators, be they bus operators or commuter rail engineers, there's also other entities behind the scenes that ensure that we have our vehicles readily available to deploy service. And then last but not least is the welcoming transit environment we have a laser-like focus on. Recognizing that the operative warden what we do is public and we engage with a myriad of different individuals and cross sections of our communities. As of late, the operating environment has been less than stellar due to adverse circumstances. And in doing so, what we've heard from our employees getting back to the people power and back to basics. There's a clear cut nexus with all of that. It's difficult to retain employees in these conditions nowadays that I think have been really brought closer to the forefront with the adverse impacts of COVID and things of the like. So really quickly, as I talk about back to basics, succinctly here with the three bullets on the slide, we talk about redoubling our efforts to maintain our assets and a state of good repair. And that's critically important because we have been in this mode for the past, I say 15 years where we're trying to build out systems. But now we have to ensure that we are maintaining the investments that we're making. And we're seeing the age relative to the infrastructure. And that includes our bus facilities. Some of our newest bus facilities are like 40 years old. And when there's talk about emerging technologies like zero emission vehicles that have a multitude of different propulsion systems, our facilities aren't adept at taking on those technologies just due to the fact that we have not invested in the infrastructure. More importantly, if we talk about leveraging sound asset management principles, really utilizing transit asset management to ensure that we are capitalizing on our asset maturity information and then enhance the reach and impact of our internal communication, so let people know what we're doing to support our workforce. And so one thing that's notable, this has been in the media as of late, And so one thing that's notable, this has been in the media as of late, we are commencing on our rail reconstruction project in the downtown core. Our inaugural light rail line opened on October 7th, 1994, but recognizing all the work that took place prior to that revenue service date that rail was laid nearly 30 years ago. And so we're at a point where we have to invest in that rail. Also, it's notable that our alignment is not one that is exposed in reference to our track. It's paved, so we don't necessarily know what lies beneath. And we do know that also traversing those intersections in the downtown core in Denver that there's an abundance of vehicular weight that has impacted the infrastructure and of itself. So this summer we are undertaking five critical in their sections that will undergo reconstruction as the first time that this actually has been done with the RTD light rail network. This is just a graphic depiction of that area in and around the downtown and close proximity to the convention center. Moving on as I talked about people power, I talked about the impediments to employee recruitment. It's really a fierce market out there for talent, but more specifically as we talk about the retention piece of it, we want to ensure that we are fostering the culture of learning and development. We want to ensure that we're providing our team members with the tools and resources we need to ensure that they can be successful in an optimal fashion. And then the opportunity to support the employee retention. And so this is a quick snapshot of where we are. It just speaks to what I was talking about earlier that we're bringing people into the organization. Just this morning I participated in a new higher orientation and saw a plethora of people that was spanning the gamut in reference to the roles and responsibilities throughout the organization. But this encapsulate our first quarter ending March 31st of 2024, whereby with bus operators, we're at 80% of our needed people power. And then maintenance general repair, service and cleaning as we talk about a welcoming transit environment, our maintenance and body shop, and then bus operators on a part-time level that we do use for certain aspects of our transit service delivery model. Going on, this is light rail and you can clearly see the lowest percentage is the bottom portion of the screen in the middle where we're talking about maintenance of way because it's very difficult to find individuals with the skill set. We train and have robust training programs, but for all intents and purposes, individuals may not be familiar with maintenance of way or what that entails, as we're not in an area where we have 25 different transit agencies operating within our same metro region. And then commuter rail, for all intents and purposes just to orient you, this is specifically as a relation to the in line with our other commuter rail lines. Being our AB&G line, there is a concessionaire agreement with which we have with a third party that provides the people power and maintenance of our vehicles to at least back arrangement, but this is primarily with the in line. And you can see that we have greater success as relates to our people power retention here on this light rail line or excuse me, commuter rail line. As relates to welcoming transit environment, I'm quite natural, I gave you that brief introduction about us just being adversely impacted by where we are just as a society, as a whole, a couple of things that we have done this far last year. The board basically approved and updated our customer code of conduct, which basically gives more teeth, I would say, to everybody that is utilizing the system because we're trying to ensure that our transit network is being used with the intention of which it was a design and constructed. And then as relates to improving community employee concerns quite naturally, as we talk about bringing people into the RTD workforce, I can offer all kind of signing bonuses in different elements, but it's difficult to actually put money aside in the sense that all money isn't good money when you're thrust an environment where you're in your own mobile office since subjected to the myriad of elements that are prevalent in our communities. And then last but not least, what we're really trying to do is provide a safe, convenient, and enjoyable experience for customers and most notably employees. Because if we don't have anybody to deliver the service, to the community. And so, I think that's the most enjoyable experience for customers and most notably employees because there's if we don't have anybody to deliver the service, then we can't provide service to our customers. And so what's been important for us over the course of the past year, we've really honed in on leveraging RTD's sworn police department. And we have created five sectors with the leadership of Dr. Joel Fitzgerald who serves as RTD police chief. And for each sector, we have a commander that oversees each one. What that really does is enable individuals to see familiar faces where we're not relying on third party contractors. And there's a mixed baggy to every day. And that way we can make informed decisions, use viable data sources as it relates to how we deploy trying to create that welcoming transit environment. The map that's depicted, if you were to go to the reference underneath the map there and of itself, you can click on different sectors, you can see who the commander is, relay information and things that alike. And just familiarize yourself with the command staff that's associated with those sectors. And for this sector in particular, it's Commander Philip Englishby. As relates to leading the efforts here with the welcoming transit environment. Moving forward, the Transit Watch app is something that we are using. We have been using for some period of time. It's available in English and Spanish. And as one of our board members likes to say, when you have this, you never ride alone. And the sense that you can take discrete photographs that goes into the command center. And if available, there could be deployment as it relates to real-time interaction perhaps with law enforcement or contingent upon the nature of the inquiry or request for service it could be a supervisor relative to our service delivery mode if it's buzz or if it's rail. Now transitioning to our financial outlook wanted to share that in a myriad of different areas when you look at the legacy systems on the eastern seaboard and some of the agencies in California that many U.S. transit agencies are facing a dire immediate financial outlook due to the fact that if we looked at the eastern seaboard and looked at Metro North going into Manhattan, that traditionally those commuter rail lines were bringing people into the city to work. Looking at my former agency, the San Francisco Bay Area, Rapid Transit District, which is heavy rail regional system being part of that system was designed to bring people into San Francisco's financial district. While recognizing that a large portion of individuals now have remote work policies. They're facing some dire times relative to needing a lack of a better term bailouts. While we have seen upticks going forward as it relates to people utilizing the system, what we have noted is that folks aren't just utilizing the system for places of employment, looking to use a means of transit to get to various activity centers and I qualify activity centers as higher institutions of learning, sporting event venues, theater, dinner, things of alike, because there was that craving for the human interaction after for such a period of time, we were basically not encouraged to do so due to the adverse impacts that we saw a couple of years ago with the pandemic. The one thing for certain is I touched upon earlier as we talk about our back-to-basics initiative and the need to invest in our state of good repair that we do have a back log of deferred maintenance and with the competitive labor market and supply chains issues. It's taking us longer to do things and that's just not indigenous to RTD. It's something that I've shared. I've been privy to sharing with my colleagues across the country as we're all facing this. One thing's for certain with our limited financial capacity for additional or expanded service, what we're really trying to do is hone in what we have right now as we are doubling down on trying to create that environment where we can retain employees. But quite naturally, if anything, I'll delve into this a little more, but it has a lot to do with our revenue sources and the limitation in those. And so right here on this slide, you can see this graphic depiction where our primary revenue source is our sales and use tax, which constitutes about 70% of the revenues that the agency takes in. 25% we get in grants, and that's primarily from the federal government, be they form you'll a based grants for the federal transit administration or discretionary grants in which we compete for and then as relates to our fairs we recoup about 5% to 6% contingent upon the time of year relative to our fair box recovery ratio. And so I wrote all of that as it relates to the taxpayer bill of rights and where our agency is currently. We project that approximately 50% or it could be anywhere to 600, maybe 700 million of RTD's revenues will be subject to table in 2025. And as you can see here on the slides before you, I'll revenue except for four tents of a cent of tax, federal funding investment come from federal funding as I outline, and then we could potentially, the rat to down impact, can further lower annual table caps. And then last but not least, we are contemplating, when I say we, I as the leader of the organization in conjunction with the board of directors to decide whether or not they're going to go forward with a ballot initiative, and there will be discussions that ensue in the very near term being in a couple of weeks in June. And so as we talk about what it is that we're doing at the organization, we've been involved in a multitude of conversations with people at the state level. There were questions about whether or not we could create an enterprise fund as it relates to fares as you could clearly see from the previous slide. That's a small amount of money when you consider the RTD budget and what we are actually taking in from fares. The voter approval, as I just mentioned, recognizing the need potentially to de-bruse may be the best option. The board will contemplate that in the very near term and recognizing what's written in statute relative to tape or refunds. Unlike different entities, there be no way in for us to give cash refunds. Perhaps it would be through a different means, fair rebates or something of the like where people could utilize the system. So all these things are in a sort of exploration phase and more definitive direction will be provided from the board, one staff, we put forward recommendations relative to what might be optimal. And so a close out with our partnership program, which I think is critically important, recognizing that RTD is a regional transportation district. And I know coming before this body, previously we've engaged in conversations, and I've done this with the multitude of different entities within our service area relative to the need or the desire to have more localized services that could address the need or the desire to have more localized services that could address the needs of the community in which you all are overseeing. And the reason the program came to fruition is because we do recognize that there's limited services to serve both as a regional and a local transit provider. And so what we did in 2022 with the support of the board is created a partnership program. And what's great about the partnership program is there it's not a cookie cutter approach. It's up to the jurisdictions working through the various subregional service councils to really identify what is needed. So it's not for RTD to say, this jurisdiction doesn't need that. It's the collaboration with those within that subregent discern, this might be optimal going forward. And RTD pays 80% of the new local transit services. And so basically, we're in the process of doing a call right now. Let me forward to the next slide. Well, 2023, this just gives you what was selected last year when we look at the map with the different subregions and they utilize some entities in the Northeast subservice council, flex ride optimization, flex ride being really micro transit a micro mobility hub network. And what we need by micro mobility is any type of will conveyance you could use for a shorter distance where you wouldn't use a standard transit vehicle. So micro mobility could be bike share, it could be scooters, it could be a small vehicle that's being used such as a jitney. Boulder did a long, they did within long, micro transit. There was a shuttle and gun barrel northwestern proposed any projects. But as we look at where we are and there's a continuation with more of them, West Denver Connect, Ringo, which Raleigh expansion and then the lone tree link. So we're in the midst right now of our call for projects. The board approved in its 2024 budget, $4 million to leverage. And there's two million to fund the ongoing projects, additional two million for 2024. The application period is ongoing, it ends on Monday. And the selected projects will be awarded in summer 2024. We have really borrowed the process from Dr. Cog in which I stated that the subregional service councils discern which might be optimal. They put forth the projects. RTD staff ensures that the projects meet the eligibility criteria that's called out, but really there's representation from all the subregion and Dr. Cog staff as well to ensure that there is a level playing field going forward to discern what might be optimal for the varying communities. So with that, that concludes my presentation and I am happy to engage in any conversation or dialogue that you all see fit. Thank you very much for your attention and once again, I appreciate the opportunity to come before you this evening. attention and once again I appreciate the opportunity to come before you this evening. Thank you Deborah. Um, anybody's got questions to comment? Council member Green. Uh, I just have a couple things. I don't mean to attack anything else, but when you're talking about the downtown loop we're only on the first phase So what when do we actually expect the 16th Street Mall? Ride will actually go down the 16th Street Mr. Mayor if I may. Yeah, thank you very much for the question councilmember green so Just for everybody's edification the 6 Train Street Mall is a project that's being undertaken by the city and county of Denver in conjunction with the federal transit administration as well as RTD. And as relates to the construction, recognizing the last update I received from the executive director of the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure looking towards early 2025. They're looking to expedite that somewhat. I don't know if everybody's aware that during the course of the construction relative to finding some historic pipes for plumbing and things of the like, that there was some mitigation that had to be done with the state our preservation organization. And so I provide that context intentionally because oftentimes recognizing that transit way that was first put in in the early 80s that there needed to be some upgrades done. And so quite naturally as we look at where we are with the downtown loop, that's a separate project that our TD is doing, but recognizing we have to coordinate with the city and county in Denver because we don't own any infrastructure. So the main emphasis is on the 16th Street Mall and getting that done. Having just walked that just a couple of days ago, there's been a lot of progress with that. And so I'd say probably within another nine months for that to be operable. The other thing is, and I'm trying not to be critical there, you characterize it as strong near term financial condition. But really, you're just one catastrophe away from being bad. You got deferred maintenance, supply chain issues. You can't get the employees that you need, and you're asking to put an issue before the voters to help you so you won't have to get back table refunds. It seems like to me, it's a little bit more dire situation than saying that you have a strong financial situation right now. And we can't build Nordic extra tracks. We're getting complaints from everybody that the service isn't there. We have no bus service hardly at all here in Brighton. I guess I'm struggling to hear or see where you have a strong near term financial position. Mr. Mayor, if I may. Thank you, Council Member Green, for your comments. I can understand the position from which you're speaking. I will say, as I talked about, where we are collectively looking at transit as a holistic entity, recognizing the important piece of transit in American society being in a robe into the fabric so the communities that we serve, my comments were intended to outline that RTD is in a better financial situation than other transit agencies across the country. Recognizing that there are mechanisms put in place relative to having three years of, oh my god, I just, the word just left me reserves. As we go forward in recognizing the level of service that we are providing, we are in a pretty good financial outlook in the near term. As we go for talking about the different investments, I understand that that is more or less than Albatross that we all carry. While I wasn't here during the time, I own that, recognizing that I took this job in August of 2020 and have tried to be very diligent and wrapping my arms around what one can do to mitigate, what was done going forward. To that end, recognizing that the FastTracks program that came to fruition with the support of taxpayers in 2004, there's been the vast majority of projects that have been completed. As we talk about the level of services relative to what's being provided. There's a myriad of different factors that come into play. As I indicated, the system in and of the itself is funded by tax pairs and when we look at the levels of service that we're providing in reference to the monies that we have gotten, we have been very diligent in reference to being good stewards of we have gotten, we have been very diligent in reference to being good stewards of taxpayer dollars. And so more specifically, as we talk about the in line that opened in 2020, it opened in the midst of a pandemic, we've seen an uptick in the ridership, we are exploring ways relative to increasing that throughput, but recognizing on the in line in particular particular the stats that I showed you, that is one of the most heavily people-power-oriented modalities that the agency has. So providing that context, I'm not gonna give you an answer that I know will be of pleasing to this body, but just wanted to provide a little more context and color to understand the nature of the comments in which I made. Again, I thank you. My own other comment was and I understand it was a legislative trade-off. I was really sad to see the zero emission fares. Even that short time period go away, I think that was a real positive way you could bring people to be exposed to the RTD system and get them comfortable with riding it. In a matter of fact, I know I used it several times during that time. The only other thing I had about that is the unreliability. When at 10.30, if you're not on there, if you're at a Rocky's game and it went a little late, if it went into extra ratings or anything, you did not have a ride home. And so there's this trade-off of RTD is great. It really has some opportunities there, but there also is some defined periods there that make it unreliable for people to go downtown and to utilize and save their automobiles and use RTD because of that fine cutoff. But again, I'm not asking for you to respond to that. Thank you. Mayor Brotem. Hi. Thank you very much for coming tonight. I appreciate you being here. I really wish that the presentation had been a little bit more focused on us. I realized that you're looking at the system as a whole, but we were really looking with some specific questions that we put in front of you a couple of years ago around how do we address the needs in this community? We're dependent on RTD and we don't have a choice, but to make what to us is a significant investment into it. And I was hoping that we were going to actually see a little bit more about what you've learned in the time that you've been there since the last time you came and spoke to us and what may actually help to address us. I know that we have a project that received some funding and has a pilot for the BRT, the line along highway seven between Brighton and Boulder. I'm really as shocked as could be that that wasn't in your presentation to say, hey, we're addressing some of your needs and here's the partnership we're undertaking to accomplish that. So I guess I'm starting a little bit with, I'm glad that you're here, but I'm feeling that we already missed the boat on the conversation that we needed to have. I was looking at the routes that serve Brighton and the number of buses and the number of round round trips that are available at relative to the amount of money that we as a community put into RTD every year and we're putting about $12 million into RTD. And for that, we're getting about 8,000 ground trips between our local line, the express to Denver that runs once an hour and the express that runs to the airport twice a day. So we're spending about $1,500 for each opportunity to get onto a bus effectively. It's not proving to be terribly cost effective for us to do that. It's a lot of money to us. That $12 million may not be a very big element of your bucket, but sometimes that's obvious with the bus stops that don't get serviced and have big signs that say, hey, no bus actually stops here. With the fact that it's a half mile walk from the closest bus stopping near the Justice Center for people who need to go and see somebody who is appearing in court. It's not, we don't have something that's close to adequate service, we paid into and got nothing back out of fast tracks. The online, which comes somewhere north, is from my house roughly an hour and 15 minute bus trip, a combination of things starting with a 42 minute walk to get to the nearest way to get to the end line. I know that there's talk of it going farther north, but without some assistance and some participation in another grant program that helps us to extend that BRT all the way into Brighton, extending the end line to Iowa 7 and Colorado does nothing for this particular community without an ability to get there from from here. So I'm disappointed in that. I'm disappointed that we haven't seen communication about what we're going to try to do to address this or why we're not. When I asked this question the last time you came here, I was told that the reason there was not more significant investment in Brighton is that we didn't meet your diversity requirements. I'm still trying to understand what that meant. I haven't been able to come up with a good explanation for it, but we don't have more service. In addition to not having more service, we're under more threat from our own general assembly. There was a bill this year aimed at reducing the number of parking spaces around apartment complexes. And our lobbying team is probably chuckling because I've been a little bit focused on this particular issue. But the basic premise behind this was that we need to encourage people to use mass transit. And our answer was that's fantastic. We would love to encourage people to use mass transit. Can we have some? That bill ended up having a carve out for the fact that we don't have bus service that can get people anywhere from here within a quarter mile walk without having to wait more than half an hour for the next bus to come along. And I guess you helped us to dodge a bullet on that one for the next bus to come along. And I guess you helped us to dodge a bullet on that one for the fact that we don't have that here. And then there's a 42-minute walk from my house to the nearest possible way to get downtown. So when I am looking at we can't participate in the means the city the state is trying to use to increase affordable housing and to reduce Single passenger vehicles commuting downtown To realize that I have to go downtown before I could go to interlock and buy bus from from here If I wanted to use the service to to commute to work or to get to the tech center I have to go to the city to get to the city. I have to go to the city. I have to go to the city. I have to go to the city. I have to go to the city. I have to go to the city. I have to go to the city. I have to go to the city. I have to go to the city. I have to go to the city. I have to go to the city us any effort to work with us, any effort to increase the service to the community while we're under threat from the state legislature. And then the presentation tonight was effectively saying we need more money and we need to figure out how to get a public vote that's going to give us more money. know possible way for this community to likely vote to debruse you as much as I cheer for debrosing at every possible venture. I don't see any way for this community to actually step forward and say, yeah, we'd love to make sure that you have more money instead of taking those table refunds. So that there's an increase in bus service to Greenwood Village. We don't see where that partnership and that investment is coming back in us. Hopefully, we will have that opportunity because I know that we have a grant application that's in progress to make that BRT line extend here. I'm hopeful that if we're able to build a terminal here, farther into the core of the city, there will be some chance that we'll get a bus that leaves from that and goes to the airport or leaves from that and gets to Boulder to Interlocking. Something more than one bus station at Civic Center Station, which I think is where the express line takes us. And less kind about this and Councilman, Councilman, under green was, I'm glad that you came here tonight and I know that we have representation from Mr. Voetmore and I'm very happy that we have our representation there and we didn't lose that and become one of five regions that really doesn't care about Brighton. But I really would like something better than you coming here every two years and telling us that it's very difficult to do your job. And I would much more appreciate an explanation of how we're going to study what the actual needs here are for mass transit and how we're going to study what the actual needs here are for MEST Transit and how we're actually going to address them. Those dashboards are pretty, but they don't tell me anything about how you're going to make it possible for somebody to live in Brighton and work in Brunefield or live in Brighton and work at the airport or all of those things that help us to develop the community. And that's what I wish you would talk to us about. Maybe that's an opportunity for some dialogue. Maybe I've just shut the dialogue down because I'm so disappointed. But I, I, I, I, mass transit is important. We need, we are part of, we're the far end, the exorbitant end of the Denver community. And when it's convenient for organizations like C.Dott, we get lumped in with Denver, even though we're too far out to receive all of that. When we're not convenient, when they don't want to repair HIV7, whatever else, then we're not. The same thing is true with RTD. We're at the very edge of your service area and we're putting money into it and I'd just would like to see Good study of what do we need here and good answers as to how we can actually address that need? So Mr. Mayor if I may Thank you very much Mayor Pro Tem. First and foremost, I appreciate you standing in your truth and you did not shut down the dialogue. Let me be clear, my, I wouldn't say my job is hard. I'm a public servant because I believe in servant leadership. And oftentimes I have to carry messages that may not be well received. But I would like to respond to some of the comments that you made. You indicated when I was here previously, I talked about I couldn't present by service due to diversity. So just to educate and inform everyone, assemble first and foremost, I believe what you're referencing is Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And under that title, there's two aspects as it relates to transit service delivery. One being service equity and the second being fair equity. As it relates to service equity and the second being fair equity. As relates to service equity, we are required as being a recipient of federal dollars that we have to look at origin and destination. That means we have to look at a 2,342 square mile service area. I can't just basically carve out bright and look at what that need is holistically just because of the way the district has comprised, hence the R and RTD is regional. And so with that, as a backdrop going forward, when we did have the system optimization plan, we were looking at what might be optimal holistically. As relates to the dashboards, that's important to bring forward because when you don't have people recognizing that comprises 70% of my budget, I'm not able to deliver service. So recognizing that there's different components of the whole service delivery model and reference attack spare is paying into the system in itself. Some of the key drivers as it relates to ridership, recognizing that there's the 120L, there's the 520, the RX, the 145X and FlexRide, we look at what those numbers are in the boardings per hour. And in being a good judiciary of the monies that we do take in, we're providing the level of service that the demand meets going forward. Hence the impetus behind the partnership program, as to see if they're a greater desire for additional service. It's like one could graduate going forward if folks are utilizing, say, a micro transit service that later could lead to a 60 foot or an articulated vehicle recognizing if there's a demand there. Considering the cost it is per revenue or to deliver service, what we're looking at right now on the 120L in 2023, we had 11 boardings per hour. And so, and that's, I'm just stating facts, I'm not trying to get into a debate, but I think it's important to provide context to what you're saying, because it's not as if we don't want to provide the service, but on the flip side, when we talk about having the needs that are readily available, it's making those decisions to deploy vehicles to be out and about in an area. And so recognizing that there are different regional services in which there's a potential to provide. If in fact, we have the resources and the people power and that's on both sides of the fence relative to people having a desire. There is FlexRI component and what we saw in 2023 that there are only 2.4 boardings per hour going forward. And so there's opportunity, I know my staff, we, when we left here before we wanted to ensure that we opened the door to have constant dialogue and I'm not going to get into the details behind that but while I may have been here year before last that doesn't mean that I'm the only conduit in reference to having communication. There's a mirrored of different avenues as well. So I just wanted to state that for the record. So thank you. Good. I appreciate that and I do know where staff tells me they are trying to have conversations. What I do question and I'm certain that you manage this. I'm certain that you look at it, but there are two sides to a story on what is the ridership per hour. One is what is the demand, but second is the service meeting the actual need. So if there are only 11 people getting on the bus, is that because that bus is not going where people need it to go when they need it to go? And it's therefore not an option for them? Or is it because nobody is interested in taking the bus? So I realized that's a terribly rudimentary approach to the question, but if I look at the places that there are no longer buses and there are people, or if I look at the places that people are using the scooters, or we're using the scooters when they had the micromodal option in town, it was people who worked in service-level jobs who used the scooters because there was no bus that went to where they needed to go at the time they needed to go there. So either we're not providing the buses that people need or nobody's interested in, I don't know which one is the correct answer. And I realize that you're looking at a full system, we're looking at what our investment in that full system is and what is the return or what is the supplement to some other part of that system. So clearly we're looking at it from a different lens, but it's an important lens and it does matter what is the service that we have available to our community, particularly when we have to defend against things like statewide one-size-fits-all determinations of what parking needs to look like or what apartments need to look like. And if we can't provide that, if we hadn't carved out that exception and the answer was that, well, people are simply supposed to get on the bus that isn't there. We have an obligation to look for that. And partnership is probably the right answer for where we're going to go with that. And I think that our community development team is focused very heavily on making that happen and trying to add our portion of that investment in and say, here's what we can put forward. But I know for the people who are in this town, we need to do better. And so hopefully we can figure out how to get there. But thank you again. Anybody else want to comment? Any rest questions? I'll go ahead and comment on a couple of things. So I noticed you talked about employee retention. And what does that compare to from say two years ago when you're here before and talked about the employee retention challenges that you had? So thank you very much, Mayor Mills, for the question. Our employee retention has increased. I would say this, I'm pulling the number off the top of my head, but I would say our employee retention has increased. I would say this, I'm pulling the number off the top of my head, but I would say our employee retention has increased. Well, let me not say retention, just holistically in reference to our head count. It hasn't increased probably about 10%. Recognizing that we had an ample amount of positions that were open and the reason I can't give you the retention stats is because we have just looked at a framework whereby we're comparing year over year from October of 2023 to October of 2024. So we'll have those numbers in the very near term going forward because we need to ensure that people have made it through probation so we can have an apples to apples comparison going forward because we need to ensure that people have made it through probation so we can have an apples to apples comparison going forward. Have you looked at other metropolitan transit systems and how they're improving employee retention and can you apply those best practices into your organization? So thank you very much Mr. Mayor Mills excuse me for the question. One thing in particular I will provide some context and I will address your question. I am involved at a national level with a myriad of different transit CEOs and having had conversation with Rich Davies who overseas New York City Transit, Durable Card of the Dover Seas, Chicago transit authority, LA Metro Stephanie Wiggins, I could go on and drop more names, but the point of the matter is that those cities are having more prevalent problems than we are relative to what's being what's happening and with the service delivery models recognizing that there's been a plethora of different issues that have played communities as a whole unhauselessness, newcomers, drug usage, and things of the like, that often spills over in public transit because they're public rights away. And so the reason why I've wrote that is because that impacts the retention element of people in frontline positions. And so as we look at it holistically, one avenue that I was personally pursuing with the help of staff. And I kept talking about this. And the board is very aware of this. We were looking for enhanced penalties for assaults on transit workers. There's a myriad of different states that have those. And here on the state of Colorado, we don't. So if there are somebody who's impacted in their day to day job while operating a transit vehicle, I had one such instance where I had an individual head that didn't even clear pro-dip vacation that was assaulted by an individual with a bowling back full of rocks turned out that this person was also pregnant. So we're not gonna be able to retain individuals coming into the organization. And so the reason why I'm giving you specific examples because this is something that plagues me not being able to provide an optimal work environment because it's not going to be for RTD alone to address recognizing that there's a myriad of different issues. But what we have done is increase our presence with RTDPD partnering with the myriad of different entities where we have unhouthlessness coordinators so we can get people the services that they need. But that does not limit the adverse impacts that employees are faced with each and every day. So when you talk about best practices, some of the best practices are enhanced penalties in different parts of the country and the state of California where I worked at three different transit agencies. There's a reporting mechanism that the state legislature put forward in reference to the 10 largest transit agencies in the state, but we don't have those mechanisms in place here. Well, I appreciate you sharing those challenges. And you know what, I ask these questions because every year it's talked about we have employee retention issues. I mean, I know the last four years have probably made that even worse, but we've got to find ways to improve the safety so you can have employees that want to stay, improve your employee morale. And if you do all those things, you can have more employees that can help actually run the routes that we're lacking. One route area that I've been advocating for the whole time on bid on council would be, and I don't know if you all remember this, Mr. Davies and Whitmore. But I've talked about having maybe a route that goes brightened down into the reunion Buffalo Run area of Commerce City, make their way down Tower Road and connect down at the 61st in Pena area, and then you're connected into a rail line that'll either take you up to the airport, down into downtown Denver, or connect to the Aurora lines that will get you into and shoots. Right now we have people that live here that work in and shoots interlock in in all these kind of places that can connect into those areas faster than three hours and 17-minute transit time. I'm a Google Maps assistant right now which is right now a 30 to 45-minute drive. So there's no incentive to take transit when obviously you can get there and back faster three times before You know make it up the time in in transit. So Improving those times with having maybe an efficient route like that would be very beneficial for our community and the neighboring community to the south That's my comment on that Thank you. You got one more council member, Green. You know, we're 20 years into fast track. That was 2004 when we passed to fast tracks. And we haven't even delivered the promises of fast tracks. And now they're asking us to build a train to Boulder. And you're asking us to give you more money in the taxes and take away your tape refunds. It's really tough when we haven't even kept the first promises to make new ones all the time. And it's just seems like every time we get close to reaching it, somebody pulls that out and says, no, no, no, no, let's do something else. And again, we're 20 years into it and they're talking about finishing the end line, could be another 15, another 20 years. It's really hard for us to get buying into RTD when we're constantly ahead of a history of getting that prize pulled away from us every time. Council member Ploskey. Thank you, Mayor. Well, I appreciate you being here tonight, but listening to some of the comments that have been made, it would just be so much fun for you to come in and say, we have one really wonderful hit thing to do for you in this area. I was part of the 2004 S mayor that passed the fast-tracks issue. It's hurtful. It's my fault. Yes, it isn't. And I'll take the blame for it too. So there, I'm going to say, for as mayor that passed the fast-tracks issue. It's hurtful. It's my fault. Yes, it is. And I'll take the blame for it too. So there. But anyway, the thing is that promises that were made back then, we were going to be totally built out with everything by 2035. Well, obviously that doesn't happen either. And at that time, for me to ask the Brighton citizens to vote yes, the promise made to me was we would be buying right away along our railroad tracks so that we'd be prepared should the time come that we could have actually train access throughout the whole system. So maybe you can understand some of the disappointments that we've all have felt and we're not attacking you because when you were here two years ago you were just new and you've had a chance now to kind of settle in and kind of view the whole area and everything. So just listen to some of the comments that have come forth for tonight. And Peter is very analytical and numerically based or whatever. But he's always, he's always very much on top of things. But anyway, just if we could just get one home run would be so wonderful if you could figure that out. So anyway, thank you for coming tonight. I appreciate it. Thank you. Council Member Snider. I think I heard this right. 95% of R2D's budget is provided by sales tax and grants and only 5% is ridership. Fairs. Yeah, fairs. That concerns me. That says to me that there's no chance that R2D will ever pay its own way and that they will always be back asking for more money and more money and more money. I don't know if you know the answer to the question I'm about to ask, but I don't ride RTD. It's not efficient for me in my type of business. It's not that I have anything against it. It's just not efficient for me and what I do. But as I drive around town, which I do a lot, I see a lot of light rail trains that are empty. I see a lot of buses with two or three people on them. So my question is the efficiency of it. Is that what's making it impossible for them to raise the funds without coming back to the taxpayers over and over again for more money is because it's really an inefficient system. That's an outsider looking in. That's what I'm seeing. Mr. Mayor, if I may, thank you Mayor Snyder for the goodness gracious. Excuse me, y'all, it's Tuesday. Councilmember Snyder, thank you, Mayor Mills. Yes, thank you for the question. And it's one that I've heard several times. Let me just be clear, when we talk about public transit agencies, primarily transit agencies across the country are heavily subsidized. And when we talk about efficiency, there are certain parts of the service area where you can go and you will see more or less standing crowds on vehicles. You're not going to see them all the time. It's contingent because back in the day when I was coming of age in this industry 30 plus years ago, the saying, what's your only good is your last rush hour and you would have crush loads. It's changed somewhat because we don't have that traditional peak period any longer so there could be certain times of day in which you see different individuals. But to hone in on your question, there's some elements where we could be more efficient but it's often difficult and I'm not trying to put my board member on the spot or anybody going forward, recognizing what we've been discussing here. When we think about the very the service area that we provide. There are revenue costs per hour to deliver services. And in certain instances, let me just use this as an analogy. Say it costs $100 an hour to put a bus out on the street. And one route may yield only 10 people per hour. And in a different part of the area, it could yield a hundred. And then we can see that the an hour to put a bus out on the street. And one route may yield only 10 people per hour, and in a different part of the area, it could yield 100 individuals per hour. But the way this system has been created, we are regional in that. And so you could have less effective service delivery relative to a revenue service hour in certain areas, but they could be feeding in to a more productive route. And so recognizing the models that we currently have, that's why we're trying to leverage the partner ship program, because there could be different throughputs utilizing micro transit and other micro mobility options to feed into the larger transit network to get people where they need to go when they need to get there. And so just broad brushley, there's a myriad of factors. And so I can't give you a definitive answer, but what I will say is that there are certain aspects of our service delivery model that could be optimized. But then again, just as I'm sitting here having this conversation with all of you and you want to ensure that your constituents have the services that they have been paying into the sales tax on the flip side, you're faced with that dilemma whereby it may not be as cost effective as you look at a different portion that may be more densely populated, but that doesn't negate the need for transit services. Thank you. I just have one follow up question. Do you have a sense approximately 2.5 million people in Metro Denver in the transit area? What percentage of those people actually utilize RTD? Do you have any kind of data on that? Yes. I would say, it's about maybe 15%. You're welcome. Anybody else? All right. Just one moment, we'll go to direct, or you may approach them and then direct a wet one. Sure. I was understanding the diversity question until that last comment, because if your view of this is always going to be on density and efficiency of service, the excerpts are never going to compete. We're never going to hit the ridership that a bus up and down Colfax is receiving. So if that effectiveness and that is the view of providing equality of service, then we shouldn't even be part of this. So, that's where I don't get it. With 50,000 people in the city and a bus that goes up and down Bridge Street, we will never hit the ridership that you have Highlands Ranch on the train into downtown. We're never going to hit that kind of number. But if you want to look at effectiveness and you're talking about articulated buses, if we're 11 people per hour, you'd be better off serving this area with a pile of 15 passenger vans instead of articulated buses and having the buses go to somewhere that matters. I don't know. I'm not making a good new coherent point, but if density of ridership is the qualifying factor for what is your diversity requirements and you need to provide a quality of access. And the need to provide a quality of access. The need to provide a quality of access. The need to provide a quality of access. We'll never ever be able to compete and never ever see service adequate to the needs that are here. Maybe I missed that entirely, but that's what I heard in your answer there. Mr. Mayor, may I address so Mayor Potem, thank you for that. What I was sharing in the example that I provided to Council Member Snyder, I was saying there was a myriad of different factors. When I'm talking about Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and we talk about service equity, it's origin and destination information. We have to look and ensure that we are not causing a disparate impact to low income populations or a disproportionate burden to minorities, right? And so as we talk about it, it's a myriad of different factors that play in because while there could be that 15 that somebody's trying to get to here, we're looking at where they're originating their trip, the destination, and there's a lot of different other factors that come into play. I was merely saying from the vantage point of efficiency when councilmember Snyder raised the point, I said if we were merely looking at it from a density type perspective, and looking at the throughput with the revenue cost per hour, which we're not doing, they're the other factors. And so I just wanted to qualify that that's not the end to all be all, are we wouldn't be running service in a lot of the areas around here so You were correct in your statement, but that's not what it's about. There's a merit of different factors that come into play. So thank you. Okay. I appreciate that Because what I what I would speak to if we were looking at at those stories is the fact that Adams County human services is at 120th and Pecos or 118th and Pecos and the amount of time that it takes to get from here, Adams County residents in Adams County seeds to get to the Health and Human Services Department is long and for people who need those services who have hourly service jobs and don't get to take that amount of time off for it to take according to calculation on here they have to leave it at 415 to get to that there means that much unpaid time or unauthorized unpaid time in the loss of a service job to go and get human services. The same thing with returning here for somebody who lives in that area getting to the court here. So I would be very interested in seeing that to and from data for critical human services like the courthouse, like Adams County admin building, or if somebody who lives at the south end of Brighton, we're looking at an affordable development, affordable housing apartment complex there. If somebody there needs to get to the city hall to pay a water bill, can they use any mass transit available, option available to get from 120th and Potomac to the city hall to pay a water bill and keep their water from being shut off without taking two and a half hours to travel six miles. That those are the two and from things that matter to me for this city and they're the ones that maybe there is analysis on, but I'm sure not aware of it. And maybe you're sharing that with our staff members and they're simply not telling me, but as often as I complain about this topic, I'm certain that they're not just leaving me in the dark on purpose while you're giving them all of these answers. This matters to me enough that that's why we keep talking about does this service, does this district come close to meeting our needs or just while you're considering how do we go to the people and do a vote to retain funds? The question that comes before this council often is, is it, are we to the point that we would have to go to the people for a vote to say we can't manage the services for people who need Adam's County Human Services using RTD, which is our only mass transit option, we need to pull out of that and come up with something else. Starting something from scratch is clearly not practical, much more expensive, but if we can't come up with a method of meeting the needs of the people in the community, we have to keep raising that question. So in a community that where our area median income is 25% below that of surrounding communities in the metro area. In a community where 41% Hispanic, in a community where most of our jobs are service level jobs. And when you look at the set of services available here in this community, including looking at our Walmart and our target as the regional areas for people to go grocery shopping, I don't see how we're not able to get more of that attention, how we're not able to get more of that attention. How we're not able to get more of that focus. And maybe we just need to go beat up Troy in the alleyway more often so that he can more aggressively state these things. But none of these are new stories to him that I'm certain that he's repeating them. We're just not getting the feedback from the rest of you that says that you're hearing it. Director, what more? back from the rest of you that says that you're hearing it. Director Whitmore. Thank you for your time this evening. I just had a couple of things to add because I think we got a little bit to use a bad pun off track on a couple of things regarding the state of finances. We are in good shape. Our midterm financial picture is as good as any transit agency in the country. But we have a table in Colorado and most local governments and many other districts have have de-brust and that's probably something that we've got to seriously consider. Well, we're doing it within the next 30 days in order to keep the status quo of this strange funding formula that we have. I mean, if you've heard this before, but we received virtually no subsidy from the state of Colorado. And most successful transit agencies receive a decent sum of money from the general fund or other transportation funds. It's basically zero. Now, this gentleman, my left worked feverishly at the capital on a number of bills, one of which you spoke to Councilmember Padilla, but many others regarding transit. And there's some, I probably shouldn't say it, but there's some quirky funding opportunities to assist transit throughout the state coming our way. And will it help somewhat, but will it build major lines? We will see. And one of the lines that was mentioned and one of the more prominent bills was the continuation of the in line. And that's something that we have not given up finishing our fast tracks obligations. But we can't do it right now. Councilmember Snyder, you brought up a good point about efficiency. Our geographic footprint is one of the largest transit agencies in the country if not the biggest. With that comes inefficiency to begin with. So that's a difficult management conundrum for Ms. Johnson, but she took the role on knowing full well that it is a bit quirky. When you look at geographically fairly large transit areas, you may have three or five different entities and they're providing different components while 20 in major cities. So that's part of our challenge. We're not giving up. We will continue to work. I'm enthusiastic about the partnership program. I wish we had quadruple the money in there because that's how we're going to build these remedies to the very classic examples that council member Pidiab so eloquently brought forward to us. It is the truth. So we need to work together and I would say that we need to continue to work with communications between city staff and city staff and Michael and folks in ops to look for these solutions. We did have a couple of wins. We don't get recognized for very many wins, and I get it. We did add another line late night for the end line because we have good ridership on the end line. If not the best in our entire system. So we add at least another half hour, but we have to do it in increments because we have to have the people. And it's very labor intensive in the in line because of regulations and how it's structured, but it's also a pretty darn good service. And hopefully someday we can add earlier and later lines to that. But we also got to get to the darn end line to your point. I live east of Brighton. I'm 15 miles from my end line stop, and there's one way for me to get there. And that's to drive my pickup truck. I don't have a horse, and I don't do motorcycles anymore. So I get it, but they're in lie some of that issue with that large geographic base that for some reason was designed back in 1969 and has been tweaked several times over the years. So just a couple of comments, Mayor Mills. Thank you for the time for all three of us this evening. Thank you. Oh, Council member Worth. Thank you, Mayor. And thank you for the presentation tonight. I'd be in one of the new guys on the block. It's all been very informative. I do have a couple of questions. It seems like we've had I will oversimplify it because that's just what I do. Kind of had a gripe session and a deflection section. And my question would be, what are the next steps? Or do we just going to see you in two years again and have the same conversation again? Keep hearing about a partnership. Is the city staff really involved in like any of the route design of the stops here? I really just don't know that. I'm not sure if you're involved in like any of the route design of the stops here. I really just don't know that. And that would be interesting to have. RTD and city get together and say, well, this is an important place to have a bus stop every once in a while. And just, you know, I know. It seems to me that again, I'm new. This from an outsider view, except I've been in the city long enough to know that in general we have I think Mayor Pro Tem alluded to it earlier we kind of got some crappy routes and nobody rides them. That's a weird thing. You know, it's just catch 22 that we need to work on it and then advertise it. I think the city staff, at least in my experience so far is really good about getting word out if we know we're getting word out about. But advertise this and let people know because right now they just know that it's not meeting their needs and yeah are we going to get something that's going to meet your needs and here try this and and you know maybe that ridership will pop right up there. I don't know maybe it won't you I think some of that stuff I think your point, you just have to put it out there and see what happens. And then if you don't, if it doesn't catch, then you then you let it go. But I'd be interested in something that would address, you know, how many miles or minutes is it from areas, any area to the nearest stop. And I understand not trying to build a system that goes out 15 miles east of town. But for the people right in town here, there should be something that is handy, is useful, and can get them, at least most people, can get around to the main parts of town. We don't have a super big town. But even if there was a route that just would be able to get you to the courthouse, to the grocery area, the shopping area, the hospital, things like that, that would be very useful. I think that's if I were really to look at Denver, the middle of Denver, that's what you do. You find these key points that people want to be and you build the stops so they're going by there on a somewhat regular basis. It doesn't have to be as regular as Denver, where buses come and buy every five minutes. But it would be nice to know that gosh, I can get anywhere in town within within the hour, when it, if I drive myself, it's gonna take me 10 minutes. It just seems like that would be, that would be nice if there were some steps moving forward, some process moving forward, some process moving forward to try to reach some of these goals. So at the next time we get together we're talking about some of these wins that I mean those are small to me they seem small and I understand they maybe it's a lot bigger I simplify over simplify. But it just seems like that would be some of the small stuff that would really benefit the citizens of Brighton is just being able to get around their own town. So heck, I mean, it'd be nice to be able to get into Denver and I'd be able to get over to Boulder all that, but I'd be able to get everywhere I need to be in town. So thank you. Right, thank you. Anybody else? I know this went a little long, but all of us are passionate about improving the services that our residents expect, you know. All of us also have residents that we live amongst that may not have adequate transportation and they rely on your services. And so we're really going to bat for them. I know a lady I've known for the 13 years I've been in this town who doesn't have a car and who has a son with heart problems that's gotta go down to Anne Schutz to have medical treatments done. Sometimes people like myself or people in my church gotta give her a ride there cause transit takes her over three hours to get there and it shouldn't be that way. I know transit's not gonna do it in the 35 to 40 minutes takes me to drive but three hours for a child to be on four transfers is just not acceptable and so we're going about for them. Anything else? Thank you all very much for your passion. Council member Worth, thank you for what you've outlined. There's more that entails a service planning quite naturally, but rest assured that we want to work collaboratively with staff as we look to what might be viable. There's a couple of things on the horizon. One thing I will share, and I know we're going a little long, so I will curtail my comments somewhat. But one thing for certain most transit agencies do was called a comprehensive operational analysis every three to five years. It's something RTD wasn't doing because opening up new rail lines and things of the like through the subregional service councils through different engagements. There's a mechanism in which we can look at various things. I want to say that I'm hearing what you all are saying and we will try to be creative as we go forward. The conundrum that's been outlined is that we are regional transportation agency in trying to provide localized services to the 40 municipalities often becomes very challenging for us. That's not an excuse. I'm just stating that we want to be open and that's why we have looked at different avenues relative to a partnership program to help with the localized services. That doesn't mean that we can't lean in and talk about what can be as we go forward. So just want to thank you again. Thank you for your passion. I'm sure that makes the difference for your constituents, recognizing that we'll try to be more creative as relates to the city of Brighton and the other municipalities that we serve. That's the best I can offer up to you. And I'm committed to try to see what we can do because no one wants another broken promise. So with that I thank you for the opportunity to be here and appreciate you all and standing in your truth and doing what you were elected to do. Well regional, regional solutions is why we're here and that's a lot of why I've been pushing for this regional route idea. I keep sharing because it's not just bright and it'll benefit. Okay thank you. I'm not sure if you're sure if you're not sure if you're sure if you're not sure if you're sure if you're not sure if you're sure if you're not sure if you're sure if you're not sure if you're sure if you're not sure if you're sure if you're not sure if you're sure if you're not sure if you're sure if you're not sure if you're sure if you're not sure if you're sure if you're not sure if you Thank you, Mayor. Give them a second on their way up is our esteemed lobbying team, Matt Lucrue and Ellie Reynolds. They've promised me that tonight does not count for billable hours, so I'm going to hold them to that. Oh, I could have called for the break and made them wait another minute. They have asked me to hand out a document, which I will, and I will turn it over to Matt and Ellie. Awesome. All right. Well, thank you, City of Magic Martinez. Good evening, Mayor, members of City Council. It's pleasure to be here. Thanks for bearing with us over the last 120-day legislative session. We did survive, thankfully, but here we are jumping into June and we're wrapping up the legislative session that ended on Wednesday, May 8th, so just a couple of weeks ago. So the handout that you're receiving, we won't go through everything entirely tonight, but we'll also send it to you electronically so that way you can flip back and review. But this is everything to date that has gone through and has been on the Governor's desk and whether it's been vetoed or signed that pertains to local government legislation that we've been monitoring on behalf of the city as well as taking action from the direction of the legislative committee. So just to some brief highlights of this session, a very robust as usual. It was the end of a, you have two general sessions. So this is the last general session of this general assembly. So we'll be going into a election year, this coming, we are an election year. So it'll be coming up in November. We have a primary this June for some members in the House and Senate, and then jumping into a new election cycle here in November that'll elect new members into the House and the Senate. And I think we're expected to see about 35 to 40% new members on both sides. So just to recap, so Democrats hold the super majority with 46 Democrats and 19 Republicans in the House of Representatives. Senate in the Senate, you have 23 Democrats and 12 Republicans. This year we saw a record number of bills. Over 700 bills were introduced this session. Typically we see between 650. So lots of late nights, we can work that took us all the way into the 220 days. To date, we have six bills that have been vetoed by the session. So. And a little, can I add a little bit, a little bit of politics before we get into the bills, just keeping in mind for next time when we come back to see you all, is that you actually your senator is termed out. And so you have obviously a primary. And then you will have a new senator for this area. And so that seat also could potentially flip back to a Republican. So those numbers of 12 could change. So we are expecting to see some things happen. But that being said, the Republicans are also very close to, well, or I should say the other way, the Democrats are very close to gaining a super majority in this Senate as well. So keep that in mind as we talk about a lot of these. The governor has already vetoed a good amount of bills this year, but next year we could be looking at a veto-proof chamber. Yep. So as you mentioned, we'll be here before you in the winter back in January. The theme of this legislative session was really around housing affordability and homelessness as well as some transportation issues, but it was mainly focused around housing. And that was on the back end of what they tried to pass in the previous year with the omnibus bill, or Senate bill 213, that was hundreds of pages long that had several policies that infringed on local government to dealt with affordability, it dealt with renters rights. And so because there was such opposition in the last few weeks of session that Bill ultimately died. And so they brought it back, but they essentially dissected it and introduced it in different versions in different individual bills and carried it that way this year. So if you would refer to page. Right, when it gets into the highlighted local government related legislation. Page nine. We're gonna specifically go through kind of the larger bills that we worked on your all behalf as well as some big bills that were decided in the last couple days of session. Those are the ones you're going to hear the most about, probably have the largest impact on your local municipality. And Well-Matt said that we survived another session, local control, really made it by the skin of their teeth. So it was another year that they really went after the municipalities. Yeah, it was definitely a big year. You know, for us as municipal lobbyists, as well as our partners with CML and CCI to really fight for, you know, home rule municipalities and local control authority on some of these big policy changes that really, if pass, would have affected a city like Brighton tremendously. So we're going to break it up by the bills that we tracked as a team on behalf of the city and we'll stop for questions at the end. So the first one was 1007 House Bill 1007. This was the prohibiting residential occupancy limits. This one started much broader and it was narrowed in a little bit and amended so that the municipalities do have more control and do still have the ability based off of housing and some multi-family, but it did take away a lot of their ability to control those limitations. The other one in line with that, and I'm going to spend a little bit more time on this one. This is 1313. This is the TOC bill or the transit-oriented communities bill. We spent a lot of time with your legislative committee working through this bill, most specifically because similar to what you heard in the past presentation from RTD is sometimes municipalities get lumped in with an idea that might work great for Denver, but it doesn't work for you. So this TOC bill was really a governor's agenda item that was supposed to create, have the combination of increased housing and more transit opportunities. And the idea was that it had, when it started, when it was introduced, it had carrot and stick. It's how the governor's office sold it. It was his baby. And the carrot came with funding dollars to be able to have more transit dollars applied to if you were permitting more, more dense housing. And then the stick was essentially that you got that funding taken away if you didn't meet those requirements that were put in the bill. This bill was ultimately with a lot of pushback from CML and other municipal lobbyists was amended down so that the stick was taken away. Does still have a lot of carrot in there. You can apply for more grant dollars as a local municipality if you're getting more of the dense housing near transit. And then this also kind of relates to some of the other bills. I'm going to go into one of the just off the topic of what RTD was talking about, which was the quirky policy solution, I think they said, which really was the oil and gas compromise bill. This is not it, it's in the larger packet, just not on this back page. And this was one that really came in the last 24 hours, two days, 48 hours. And it was a, it's 2.30, Senate Bill 230. It was, if you remember, we came to you all and there was about six oil and gas bills. One which would have Essentially gone away with oil and gas production by 2030 This compromised bill is actually a production fee put on oil and gas That is put towards transportation And there's some other things besides transportation, but I'm gonna break down where the dollars will be spent. 70% of that will go to local transit solutions. And there's a qualifications on how you go through. It's not necessarily a grant program, but how they will define what those local solutions. A lot of that, they do outline as light rail as well as bus. And then 10% will be towards a local grant program. So that's where local municipalities could have local projects that they could apply for those grant dollars. And then 20% of it will be the to start or to essentially accelerate, it won't finish all of it will be the to start the or to essentially accelerate. It won't finish all of it, but front range passenger rail the northern side of that line. So we'll get that going. And then the other thing that's often not mentioned is how did they come to this compromise and do away with those other six bills that would have essentially ruled out the oil and gas is really that there is also, which a lot of people don't talk about, a fee associated to wildlife and land mitigation as well. So not only is there a production fee for transportation, but they got the environmental groups to agree for this wildlife and land mitigation fee as well. And so that was also a compromise to get rid of those bills and to stand of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of on affordable housing is House Bill 1152, the accessory dwelling units, ADUs for short. This was also in that omnibus bill last year that they brought an individual bill this year for that essentially puts department of local affairs in control, but requires that municipality with a thousand or more residents must allow for ADUs in permitting. There are obviously restrictions, there's water regulations and all that into it, but essentially local governments will now be working with DOLA on this to fast track permits on ADUs. Another hot topic for some, I know it was for myself and Mayor Pro Tempedia, House Bill 1304, the minimum parking requirements. And so this was a big one this year. This is obviously another big one of the governor's agenda. He said it in his opening day speech that if this bill passes, it'll be the first one he signs and it'll sign it immediately and that he did. But this I'll tell you was introduced early on in the session and what this bill does is it in its original form would have restricted all You know new developments on apartment buildings nomad at the size Would restrict parking minimums from the city And it would would take away the authority from the municipality to put in those parking minimums in high dense areas and so after tons of opposition from numerous municipalities across the state, thank you to Mayor Portempedia for being very proactive with working with your legislative delegation and the sponsors and those that we knew that were on the fringe of the bill, by really putting out what Brighton is dealing with when it comes to high-dense housing and the community and the need for parking in a new development. I think it bode well. And so this bill was heavily amended at the end. It was very watered down. And I think over 70 amendments were introduced in the final days of session. We were working on this one up until the last day of session actually when it was passed in the final days of session. We were working on this one up until the last day of session, actually, when it was passed in its final form. Now, the way it was passed is it will not affect the city of Brighton because it applies to jurisdictions where, if you have a bus transit system, that is frequent within 30 minutes or more or 30 minutes or less, that frequent then you wouldn't have to apply those minimums. But because what we just heard with RTD, we're not seeing every 30 minute bus transit times. So I may lean on Mayor Pro Tem, but you have to talk more about that one if you'd like to share. First, I appreciate the help in figuring out who to talk to and where we needed to go and what we could do. But yes, this would have affected all of our new apartment complexes and actually Councilman Johnson assisted me by going at 11 o'clock at night to go take pictures of all of the cars surrounding the Brom currently at 50th and bridge, where there are 315 apartment units, 424 bedrooms, 484 parking spaces, but 78 cars that don't fit in this parking spaces that they have. And the compromise that it had been offered at one point or another was, well, we'll allow you one parking space per unit, which would have been 170 fewer than we have and would have put another 170 cars out there. So several things happened in the final amendments. The first one was proximity to mass transit. It had to be within a quarter mile and transportation available at greater than or less than 30 minute intervals. But also the reporting requirement where we had to tell them exactly when we would come into compliance went away. And the penalties associated with not complying went away because we would have then lost eligibility for every federal and state grant having to do with transportation for noncompliance. So definitely very helpful to have killed that one off. But as I was indicating with RTD, I'm certain that it doesn't just go away magically. Everything that fails is coming back again. And that's the problem of super majorities is that if they've failed one time, there's certain that they can come back in with a bigger army the next time. So I appreciate the help and figuring out how to do it. I may have written something like 40 different letters and made at least as many phone calls and be rated a few representatives for voting in favor of it when they were armed twisted the wrong way. Yeah. It was really helpful, though, because we sat in many stakeholder meetings and we would sit on behalf of the cities alongside with other municipal lobbyists and they kept saying it's just not happening anywhere. There is no issue with overflow parking. It's not an issue. They're over-parked. They're over-parked. We kept hearing that over and over. And so it was great to have a real-life example of that's actually not the case here. Yeah, and they were focused interestingly on RTD parking rides being overbuilt, which to me just highlighted the problem of RTD is building those in the wrong places and not necessarily in a useful, that was the piece of it. It would have been fine to look at the sea of parking outside of Target and Walmart and say we've got too much parking and commercial spaces, but they actually narrowed it down only to housing in the long run. And exactly right. But it was people from Windsor. It was people from Grand Junction. One of the people in favor of it was even asked, have you ever even been to Grand Junction? And the answer was, I don't own a car. I ride a bike. No. When you live downtown. But yeah, they hadn't seen. And I hope that it was helpful to see lower the stories and what was the traffic and show them the map of Adams crossing the, no sorry, Adams point is that the affordable housing development of 19th and bridge where there would be no available parking space because you've got the jail on one side bridge street on the other and a ditch on the other and all of the overflow parking would have to go essentially to Walgreens in Safeway. Yeah. I think this is going to say this is a good example of when it's on the governor's agenda, they will carry this to the end. I mean, this wasn't, you know, to most, it's not a huge deal, but to cities like Brighton it is. But to just show that when it's on, you know, there were bigger policy issues to be tackled, those died on the vine, but something like parking minimums, they made sure that this one was not going to die that we would go through 70 plus amendments to reach a negotiation point. And just to piggyback off that, when 213 was split up with the multitude of bills that, you know, came from 213, not one of them failed. Now they were very, very watered down, but the governor made sure that they didn't fail when they were separated. very, very watered down, but the governor made sure that they didn't fail when they were separated. That does lead us into the next one, construction defects. This is Senate Bill 106. If you remember, we brought it to you all mid-session, and we said, prepare yourself. It's been very watered down. When it made it through the Senate, it made it by the skin of its teeth, had a lot of amendments, and it was very water of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the case of the that will and I think we know that comes back next year. I do think there is a huge fight though from the trial lawyers. They are the ones that fought tooth and nail to get this postponed and so I would see a big fight in election season on construction defects that will impact what happens at the legislature. And then the next one is property taxes, always a fun one. So if you remember, they had formed, obviously we came to you. There was a special session on a temporary fix for property tax relief. And then they came into this legislative session saying that they were going to set up a committee to deal with property tax relief. They set that up and it was really a truly bipartisan committee and it was the only committee that was chaired by a Republican and so that was chaired by Lisa Fruzel and also Chris Hanson from Denver. So it had a good mix on it but they could not come to an agreement all session. And so within the last couple days of session, they did put forward property tax bill 233. Or yeah, 233. But this really was, even though it came last two days of session, it was worked on all throughout session, and they heard from every ballot initiative as well. What this is is it's a 5.5% cap on increases. And I think it's important to remember that the assessment values will continue to go up. This is not relief. It's not unwinding anything. It's not going backwards. It's just merely capping the increases that will continue to go forward, as well as being able to write off the first $70,000. And so the governor's office has said that this will lead to $1.3 billion in relief. We, you know, the Denver Chamber and others are calling on the governor to host a special session to really be able to have a compromise because well, this has came out of the legislature. At the same time, we have initiative 50 that has already made the ballot and there's another initiative as well that's still getting signatures and both of those are lower caps than this one. And so what does that do if we have something in statute and then we have something else that passes by the legislature? I don't believe the guy, don't hold me to this. I don't think the governor holds another special session on property taxes, but I do think that we will see the majority of the push on the ballot this year around property tax relief. All right, we're going to page 11 and we'll wrap this up here. But these are some of the administrative bills and long-forced items that we did track. We did put some more context in the in the previous pages that you can read about in public safety and law enforcement. It wasn't a big year for that. They did introduce two bills that essentially would apply more regulation to law enforcement agencies. There was one that dealt with prone restraint. There's also one that was for more accountability for law enforcement, age peace officers. Those bills ultimately were introduced but died in different areas of the legislature where there was a center of the house, but those bills were introduced. More, I think, the sponsor of the Prone Restraint Bill did address, that bill did pass, but it did, in its original form, the way it was, was not how the sponsors intended the bill. So it became more of a training and, and training and learning bill for peace officers and law enforcement agencies. The other bill was more accountability and protected whistleblowers within agencies, which would have been pretty, it would have hindered long force many. It was just, with what was passed in 217, it just was not, it did not, but well with what's been happening with public safety, which has had unforeseen consequences, and so that bill did die. But on the administrative side, I know that your city attorney will probably be happy to know that the equal access to public meetings bill did, you know, we watched this one pretty closely because essentially it opened the floodgates for public testimony and public meetings like this one. You all have your own policy when folks want to, when residents want to testify on any particular issue or just, you know, voice their concerns. This, however, would allow and take away your own policies, but would require you to open it to everybody and everybody to listen in to testimony. So your council meetings would go for hours. So that bill ultimately did die on the calendar in the last few weeks. There's just a lot of legalities in that bill that I think needs to be spent time over the intern that they wanna look at, exexibilities, obviously we understand that, provide needs to be spent time over the interim that they want to, you know, look at exxibilities. Obviously we understand that. Provide accessibility to those with disabilities, but this was the way it was written was just not good legally. And like likely this bill continues to come back in different variations until they get to a place where all stakeholders are okay with it. In conjunction House Bill 1454, this is just a good bill for if you already call back in 2021 after COVID, everybody did have to be in compliance with online websites and accessibility and digital accessibility. So this bill just extends gives it another another and the public health and the public health and the public health and the public health and the public health and the public health and the public health and the public health and the public health and the public health and the public health and the public health and the public health and the public health and the public health and the public health and the public health and the public health and the public health and the public health and the public health and the public health and the public health and the public health and the public This bill we did oppose and really went to bat for our business owners in the community. So it did try to align with the threshold of the petty crimes, the threshold which was $50 or more that can be a petty offence. But now they raised it to $300. So if an individual commits a petty theft of, let's say theft, it needs to be $300 or more in order for that conviction of petty offense. So that bill did was signed by the governor. And then the last one, you know, this one Senate Bill 65, we just put on here for for your all awareness. Driving with the cell phone, this bill has been brought back, you know, I've been doing this over a decade and every year it fails. They did reach a compromise a couple of years ago with 18 and under using a electronic device would be prohibited this year. They finally passed it. So anybody and everybody that is legal to drive and you have a electronic device. I believe it's after 2025, there are ramifications there, so be careful. Other than that, in this post session report, there are some talking points on the budget, as far as transportation and what we saw in other areas. It was the bills that we've seen that have been vetoed are really around business and employment protection. So those bills did die. I know with that, let's see here. Yeah, the wage, so wage claims construction industry and contractors, which was 1008. This one really allowed for if you had, if you were at any point in the supply chain and anybody had not paid a worker, let's say you were down three levels in the supply chain and that contractor had not paid somebody, everybody was liable in. And so they they could once again ran by the trial lawyers, they could sue everybody all the way up and down the supply chain versus just that one contractor. And so this was actually something that the governor vetoed as a bad business bill. Yeah. Same with 1260. This one would have applied to the city as well. That would prohibit against employee discipline on anything that dealt with politics or religion. I think the bill just went too far. There's a lot of legal ratification in that bill. So I expect you to see that in the coming sessions. But as for that, you know, I think we're fair and okay. As far as fighting, you know, watering down some bad bills that really would have affected the city of Brighton. But, you know, we are in the heat of a primary election season, so we're working with, to see who we're gonna be working with next year and then leading until November. But, now's when the bills start get crafted for next session. So we're gonna take some time off to, you know, I should say time away from the building, but we've backed this summer to start crafting legislation. So it's been a pleasure to work with the legislative committee and your city management team to really work on these bills. And even at CML, they had a new slate of directors there that we were all working together with. So it's been a pleasure to work with you all and look forward to the continue sessions. And I think we would be happy to come back probably in this interim and talk about new stuff coming forward as what maybe some ballot initiatives as well. I think this is really the year that you're going to see what happened at the legislature bleed over to multiple ballot initiatives and it should be a big ballot this year. Ballot book. Ballot book, yes. Quick comment on Senate Bill 65. You can almost argue that if you drive a Tesla, that is a mobile device. Electronic mobile device. Yeah. All right. We've got questions, comments. Council member Green. So what's the purple groups feeling on what's gonna happen this fall? Do you really, I mean, if we get a super majority in both, it almost really seems self-deflating here that if we're gonna even be able to have any influence on them, but what are your feelings on what's gonna happen this fall? I'll take the, you know, that's why we said purple. So I'll take the R side and he can give the D side. But I am unfortunately, I do think that we continue to lose some more seats. I think that we might pick one up and we might lose another. I think best case scenario, we stay at the Republicans stay at 12 seats. And they do the best they can to hold on with time. If you notice that's what the Republicans have right now is they have time and they get up at the well and they read bills at length and they keep reading them and lobbyists are feeding them pages and pages of information to read. That's what they have. I would say that that's best case scenario. Worst case scenario is we do get that super majority in the Senate and then its veto proof. I think the one thing to remember is I don't think crystal ball here. I don't think the governor wants a veto proof chamber either. So if that puts some ease I think as far as fundraising and stuff for the Senate on the dem side, I don't think the governor jumps in to help get their numbers so that they can override his veto. You know, I think in speaking on the democratic side, it's been a fight internally with its own party because there's multiple parties within the party. So this is the first time we've seen the you know, multiple caucuses, but this time we've seen the Democratic Socialist of America group have several members in the House that have run this legislation and so it's a they're all up for election this November so heated primaries millions of dollars are going into races specifically in the Denver area where those What a Democrat social of America endorsed members are primaryed by more moderate pro-business Democrats So I see that will definitely they'll flip those seats internally keep them Democrat But I think they're gonna flip them from a DSA to more of a Liberal pro-business Democrat keep them Democrat, but I think they're going to flip them from a DSA to more of a liberal pro-business Democrat. That's our best scenario, huh? Best case scenario. Well, it's Mayor Putem. What I'd say in response to that is that there are a large number of non-netro Denver ex-urban farther up the I-25 corridor Democrats who are far more moderate, particularly when it relates to bills that we care about because our city stance is looking to retain local control, is looking to avoid unfunded mandates, and is looking to make sure that we can operate this city as we need to, and those suburban and ex-urban Democrats end up working pretty hard to defend those same things that we are. CML has a pretty strong influence and is able to make sure that the municipalities as a whole are operating in favor of or in opposition to those things that come about that are problematic for us. and get into traditional red blue politics. And we've had some success, at least watering things down. If they are part of somebody else's agenda, it's one of those we're seeing Rachel Sanziger and Barbara Kurt Meier be arguing hand in hand in the well is sort of an amazing thing. I'm still shocked to my head, but I think from the municipality standpoint, a few things will be harder arguments, but they'll continue to be watered down because those areas that are outside of pure Metro Denver area, but definitely seeing what happens and what's likely to appear this next year and what's likely to be on the ballot, I think is definitely interesting to us. And I'm also going to lose Rachel Zindenger too because she's running for County Commissioner Jefferson to see where that monitor goes. Mayor, I was just going to say that I think that's that's the challenge with the Senate that I was talking about is the House to Matt's point might get better with the you know the Democrats still keeping the numbers but having more of those pro-business moderate Democrats but the Senate is going to lose some real stars. It's going to lose Rachel Zenzinger who has been great for local issues as well and has always gone to the well and stuff, right? It's going to lose Senator Pryola, which may be great. I don't know. We don't know. But I think, you know, so that's the answer. There's a power respondent as I spoke. That will, that seat will change. And I think that could also be a real positive for Brighton no matter who the person is in that new seat is having some new blood and to having some real representation down there oftentimes we were constantly talking to Senator Priola saying guess what city of Bright and registered the opposite on this and it's your bill That was us a lot so Yeah, he was never surprised So that could also be a real silver lining this next year You know, we saw a lot of bipartisanship so I you know even though some of these bills that get introduced are our scary at first I think you know if we get strong, you know, reasonable, no Republicans and Democrats come to the table, we can make it happen. So we can definitely make bad bills better. That's what our job is right now. We're not always in the winner's circle. We're just in the, let's make bad bills better. Okay. Is that a thing for the upcoming session? Let's make bad bills better. Thank you. Thank you for the upcoming session. Let's make bad bills better. I hope not. It's just a reality, unfortunately. Anybody else? Thank you. All right. Thank you. Thank you guys. Have a good night. Yes. Thank you guys. you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Next on the agenda is the 2024 sustainability plan City Manager Martinez. Thank you mayor before Tracy speaks I just want to take a moment and brag about Tracy's work the sustainability plan that's in front of you this evening is very comprehensive when we first set out to create the sustainability plan I honestly didn't know what to expect, but Tracy has exceeded my expectations on what a sustainability plan looks like, and how it addresses some of our needs here in Brighton when it comes to sustainability. So if you haven't had an opportunity to look at the sustainability plan that is in your packet, I strongly suggest that you do take a peek at it. Because as I mentioned, it's very comprehensive, very relevant, and it is actually a very well put together document. So thank you, Tracy, for your work, and I will turn it over to you. Well, thank you for that introduction, Michael, that is wonderful to hear all of those words. So I'm so happy to be here with all of you this evening. I've already received requests to maybe dance a little bit, sing a song, to wake everyone up. I don't think I have it in me, but I can promise that I will aim to not put you to sleep during my presentation. So as Michael mentioned, a lot of work has gone into this plan. It's taken about a year to develop the plan. It's been a lot of collaboration, a lot of analysis, but I think that we've done a really good job of capturing the needs and the priorities of the community in these final recommendations. So before we jump into the details, I want to provide you with an overview of the agenda for this evening. So first, I'm going to provide you with an overview of the agenda for this evening. So first I'm going to provide you with an overview of the sustainability plan. I'm just going to give you a brief definition of what a sustainability plan is and the purpose of a sustainability plan. Next I will go into the planning process and some of those key milestones that we hit throughout the process of creating this plan. Next, I will jump into the public outreach strategy that we used and the results of the public outreach that we did. I will then go over a list of the recommended goals that are included in this plan, as well as the monitoring and reporting apparatus that is included to make sure that these goals are measurable. And then I will leave time at the end of the presentation for feedback and questions. All right. So first things first, what is the sustainability plan? So to kind of put it really simply, it functions the same way that most of our master plans do in the sense that it provides a strategic roadmap for all of the projects and incentives that help us to advance sustainability over the next five years. It also includes measurable goals in the short term and the long term to ensure that we are meeting our requirements. It is also highly collaborative in nature and identifies priorities across multiple stakeholder groups. So this can include residents, businesses and external stakeholders as well. It coordinates efforts with other master plans to look for opportunities for synergy, and I will get into that more a little bit later in this presentation. It also prepares municipalities for federal and state legislation. So as you just heard, you got a huge update on that. There are a lot of trends in terms of things like energy efficiency and waste diversion that we're seeing coming up over and over again at the state and federal level. So this plan simply helps us to prepare for those trends in a way that makes sense for the community. And it also, by having an adopted sustainability plan in place, it also qualifies us for an increased amount of funding, which I will go into in this next slide. So as far as funding opportunities are concerned, I have included a page in the sustainability plan that kind of outlines all of the current grant opportunities that are sustainability related right now, but just kind of wanted to go over some of these key ones with you this evening. So first we have the Inflation Reduction Act, and this is basically providing us with just an unprecedented amount of federal funding across multiple agencies, including Department of Energy and Department of Transportation to implement sustainability related projects. Next, we have some state level grants as well, including Department of Local Affairs that is offering grants to help with the grant writing process for some of these larger federal grants and also to provide matches for some of these larger federal grants as well. And then there are also several grant opportunities through the Colorado Energy Office and Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment that could help us to implement some of our projects located under the Energy Efficiency and Built Environment and Waste Diversion goal areas. So next I want to jump into the sustainability planning process. Like I said, this unfolded over the course of a little over a year. So it was a long process, included multiple stakeholders. So first thing that we did was we developed an inventory of our current sustainability project. So the city has actually been managing and implementing sustainability projects, but we haven't actually had this kind of strategic approach that a plan would offer us. So we just kind of did current inventory to figure out what projects we wanted to include in this plan and what projects we wanted to expand upon. Then I got staff involved very early in this process to figure out what their priorities are and also what their capacity was to implement new projects. After that, there was the research phase that commenced where we looked at all of our master plans, including our B Brighton Comprehensive Plan and our Water Conservation Plan to identify overlapping priorities in areas where the sustainability plan could expand those efforts. And then we also took a look at all of the regional sustainability plans for cities that for comp cities to brighten. So that included the Adams County 2030 sustainability plan and the Commerce City 2023 climate action plan. We just looked at those basically to identify their priority areas and to also identify opportunities for partnerships. Next, in January 2024, the community engagement phase commenced for the sustainability plan. So that included several different activities and events and also a community-wide sustainability survey. And I will get into the details of that more over the next few slides. Then we conducted some data analysis and included all of those results in our final recommendations. So community engagement, everyone knows that I love it. I love getting people's input. I really wanted this plan to be a reflection of our community priorities. And like I said, I think that we were able to pull that off with this plan. So first outreach event was called Coffee with Brighton Sustainability Coordinator at Eagle View. So I just invited residents to come and have coffee with me and talk about sustainability and kind of interface with me one-on-one. After that, we hosted a sustainability plan open house and we had about 25 participants and they were highly engaged, which is the good thing because we got a lot of data out of that particular open house. So we basically asked participants to engage in activities that helped us to create our vision statement for the sustainability plan and to also help us identify projects that would help us to achieve our overarching goals in the sustainability plan. Over there on the right you can see a picture of one of the activities that we completed where we were asking them to give us examples of projects they would like to see under energy conservation, waste reduction and water conservation. Next, we sent out the city's first community-wide sustainability survey. So that went out as a mailer to everyone in the community and it was also posted on all of our socials. So everyone got an opportunity to take the survey, and I will go into more detail about the survey results in the next couple of slides. And then for the rest of this time, it was basically engaging in stakeholder meetings in interviews. So this is with the Brighton Business Community Council members, internal leadership, external partners such as DriveClean Colorado, and then regional sustainability professionals. So I had attended quarterly sustainability meetings to get input from sustainability professionals across the state. So jumping into the survey results, one thing that I was really proud of is that we got pretty high numbers of people to participate. So we got a total of 414 individual responses, which is fantastic for a survey. As many of you know, the community survey usually gets about 600. So we definitely got a good representative sample of the community for these, for the survey results. So this first question that we asked on the survey, what are your top focus areas in sustainability? Or rather, I'm so sorry about that, that is an error to what degree do you prioritize sustainability? We used a Lycord scale for this particular question. So as you can see here, 49% of respondents indicated to them that sustainability was a high priority. Then the next level down, 34% of residents indicated that sustainability was somewhat of a priority. Ultimately, where we landed on this was only 8% of the community said that sustainability was not a priority to them at all. And to give you a little bit of demographic information about who took this survey, we actually had a good representative sample of different age groups. The largest age group that took this survey, which was 29% of respondents, were over the age of 64. And then the remaining 60% or the next 60% were between the ages of 35 and 64. So very representative of the age demographics in our community. So another question that we asked in the survey was, what are your top concern areas in sustainability? So on this slide, I have included the top four areas that emerged on these survey results. I have included the full results in the appendix of the sustainability plan if you would like to look at those, but I just wanted to include the top four here. So here we have increasing energy costs, which is really no surprise because that is something obviously that impacts people on a personal level. It impacts them financially. Next we have limited access to recycling or composting options, inefficient water usage across the community, and then disruptions to ecosystems and wildlife. So we incorporated projects in the sustainability plan that we believe do address these top concern areas. Next we asked what are the top your top focus areas for sustainability? So there was a little bit of overlap with these top focus areas in top concern areas. The prevailing top focus area was water conservation and water quality, which is honestly no surprise. We have a lot of education in terms of water conservation already out there in the community. Next, highest focus area was waste reduction, recycling and composting, followed by renewable energy usage and energy efficient improvements, and then finally increasing regional transportation, public transit and multimodal options. The good thing about these survey results is that these priority areas overlapped with staff priority areas, so it made it very easy for us to then deduce what priority areas we needed to focus on in the plan. So this is our final list of recommended goal areas in the sustainability plan. I'm not going to go over all of these because it is included in your packet. But I did want to highlight some of these goal areas that were identified as being top priorities and top areas of concern for residents. First being water conservation and the objective of this goal is to protect water quality, encourage water conservation across all sectors, and proactively manage water infrastructure. Next on here we have energy conservation and built environment. This includes focus on reducing energy usage and the residential, commercial and industrial sectors, increasing use of renewable energy sources and increasing building electrification across all sectors as well. Next, we also included that mobility goal and really the objective of this mobility goal is to increase multimodal options and encourage active transportation across the community. And then lastly I would like to highlight that we have waste diversion in here and all waste diversion means it's an industry term but all it means is we're simply trying to divert the amount of waste that goes to landfills. So really we're just kind of looking at waste material management practices so we can expand services across the community. Once again, I'm not going to go over all of the plans or all the projects that are on the sustainability plan because they are included in your packet, but I do want to highlight a few projects that are included under these high priority goal areas. So under water conservation, and these are two of our key performance indicators as well. We have maintaining focus on expanding turf conversion and drought resistant landscaping throughout the community. Under Energy Conservation and Built Environment, I had presented to all of you before about completing phases one and two of the Street Light LED conversion projects. So, this plan actually expands those efforts to also include residential areas in the LED Street Light conversion. Under the mobility goal, we have a project to increase the number of electric and hybrid vehicles in our city fleet and then under waste diversion we have developing educational campaigns to increase recycling rates and just kind of provide tools for residents. Next I wanna touch on the monitoring and reporting apparatus that I talked to you about. I'm sure that Mayor Potempedia is excited about talking a little bit about the goals and the KPIs. And as everyone knows, I'm also a process improvement person. So under each of these goal areas, we have at least one measurable long-term goal that's going to basically look at how effective we are at implementing these different goal areas. Next, we've identified these key projects as key performance indicators in the sustainability plan. So this is basically gonna give us some more granular data on how we're doing in the short term to achieve these long-term goals. All of this data is going to be uploaded into a public facing dashboard so that the community can see how we're doing on achieving these particular goals. I'm already working with IT to build that dashboard in ESRI. Next, kind of similar to our capital project meetings, I'll hold quarterly departmental meetings that I can get updates on on how those sustainability projects are going. And then we will also be creating an annual sustainability report to provide council with information on what we have achieved in that year. So as far as next steps, staff recommends that we proceed with final adoption of the plan and I will turn it back over to the mayor for any questions that you have. Questions comments. I see we combined every tree in Brighton and put all one picture here or that's Tennessee. I don't know. Councilmember Snyder. the members tonight. Thank you for your presentation. You know, I was told before I met you that you were infectious and extremely excited about your work and that was an understatement. And then I appreciate your enthusiasm. What a great presentation. I did read through it as well and talked with you about it. I'm excited to see where you go with this. I did like in the waste we, the recycling you put educate people instead of single source. Education's a good thing. So I'm all for that. So yeah, yeah, education for people. Thanks. Anybody other? Oh, you got them in Justin. Thank you, Mayor. I wanted to say office. I'm going to go to the office. I'm going to go to the office. I'm going to go to the office. Anybody other? Oh, Councilman Johnson. Thank you, mayor. I wanted to say first that I appreciated your time individually. I don't know what I'm guessing you did that with all of us. But I really appreciate that. I appreciate your work on this. I want to make sure that when whenever add fleet vehicles and things as an electric car driver and now a hybrid driver. We don't have the infrastructure yet to support what we want to do and I want to be really clear about that especially in Brighton and me and you've talked about this. So maybe I don't mean to grandstand. I just want to re-emphasize it. It's very important that we have a way to create the infrastructure and then add the vehicles. Is something I really want to put as a main priority The a couple weeks ago it was impossible to charge almost any electric vehicle except for one apartment complex that we that was going on and I appreciate that you fixed the one Downstairs that my cars plugged into right now So I just want to make sure we head towards the infrastructure part before we start getting the cars to do it because it's just tough to charge unless we have the charging capacity. The other thing I want to say is to our deputy city manager, Marf Falkenberg, we haven't always gotten along to say the least, but I have to say on this we have. And I remember so many years ago, you speaking to me about this and for it to say on this we have. And I remember so many years ago, you speaking to me about this, and for it to get to this point where we have someone hired, you need to take major credit as this goes forward, and whatever this council and the next does with this, because you've championed this, and it's gonna be beyond helpful for the long term. And I appreciate it, and I hope all of council's aware of what Marv's done here to get it to this point So I really appreciate it and I hope the community does too, but well done and I'm excited to go through A lot of this Thanks Thank you. And if I can make a quick comment So all of your points are They're extremely valid you need to build out that charging station infrastructure before you can expand. That's an essential part of EV readiness. So we already have a project in our five year CIP to expand charging stations for our internal city fleet. I'm actually managing that project. So now that I have some time free depth after I presented this plan, I'm in the process of writing the scope of work for that. So we will be expanding the EV charging station infrastructure in conjunction with expanding, with increasing the amount of electric and hybrid vehicles we have on our fleet. And I also want to say it is wonderful to work with Marv and I'm so happy he's my boss. So well done. Thank you so much. Well, it's not only the charging capacity, but making sure our utility can handle the load as well. Councilmember Green. Sure, utility can handle that load. I would like to remind Councilmember Johnson that there are public facing electric charging stations in the United Powers parking lot. There's actually two of them. So you would never not just the same ones that are at the apartment complex are you know, parking lot too. You can I mean you'd be surprised it's their public spaces. They're designed for that. I just, you know, being part of these discussions and having several meetings, I'm just excited for what the public is going to get to see as this plan takes shape. I think it's something that they're really going to be able to take a lot of pride in in the change that they're going to see in this area, right? And thanks to the work Tracy is doing here. So thank you. Thank you. Mayor, Mayor Prattam. Thank you. I am tremendously excited about this. I'm so excited to see a year's worth of conversation and work and research and compiling come into an actual deliverable plan. It's huge. There's so much, I mean, there's so much more that could be done, but there's so much that's in here. Nine major goal and focus areas, there's a lot that needs to happen here. But I think my favorite piece of that is the fact that it's embedded into every single department. Every one of them has something to contribute to it. Every one of them has something to gain from it and it's not voiced upon them by you from your office on the sixth floor. It's something that they've all had a chance to participate in. I would make all of these things, priority number one and put them all on the top left. So that's going to be the biggest challenge is really, I want to make sure that this is deliverable long term and part of sustaining part of sustenance is also making sure that you don't completely burn out on that. So thankfully, the deputy city manager is not one to leave you out hanging in that fashion and you have the support of some of the groups out there. But I can't wait to see measurable things come from this because I think it's come from the best possible preparation. Thank you so much for that comment. That really does, that really does mean a lot to me. And I think being in sustainability and kind of being in the trenches and having it so focused on sustainability, it really is good to get that feedback. And I kind of just wanted to make a comment about staff support. So I remember in my previous role at the City of Brighton, the first thing that I did when I took on sustainability a special project was I developed an internal sustainability team and it was composed of representation across all departments and these were people in leadership positions. A lot of them are still on the sustainability team and some of them have never missed a sustainability team meeting. So that's honestly one of the things that I think I'm the most proud about when it comes to this plan is just the level of support that I think that I came across during the planning process. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Council member worth. Thank you, Mayor. So Tracy, how many in your department? Just me. One. It's me and Marv. Do you feel like you have the full support in your department? Just me. What? It's me and Marv. Do you feel like you have the full support of your supervision? I have Marv's full support. I mean, I have, I have, in Michael is very supportive as well. Absolutely. In Karen. Wow. Sorry. I did not mean that to sound like that. Absolutely. The entire city manager team is highly supportive. I would know, I would be a terribly supportive. I would be a terrible attorney because you're supposed to know the answer before you. I would hazard a guess that I have talked to Tracy more than anybody else in the city staff. And I think all your worries over here about whether she's got it nailed down from the bottom all the way up to the top or all for not. She's obviously got it well organized from the get go and I've got full confidence we're gonna have great great results coming forward so thank you. Thank you. Tracey's just better than Michael got rid of his Tesla. I know and he got a Bronco. Oh, no, those Broncos are great. They're pretty cool. Anybody have any, he can add? All right. I also wanted to ask Council if they would be okay with me adding this to the consent agenda for the next meeting. Anybody have any objection to that? Okay. Thank you so much for your time. consent agenda for the next meeting. Anybody have any objection to that? Okay. Thank you so much for your time. Next is a department update with information technology department. City Manager Martinez. Thank you Mayor. Before I turn it over to Assistant City Manager Borkowski-Serie, and I just want to be on the record to point out that I love sustainability. And I support the work that Tracy is doing. I've been to many of her evening meetings as well. Yes, thank you, Karen. Nice to see you. Even undercover. Yes. Anyway, and I guess I'll continue to go. Anyway, I asked if I could introduce Chris because he is our most recent hire. I'm very excited about him and his background. And we don't always get to hear from my group because we're not that glamorous. We're behind the scenes. And when something happens, our hair is on fire. So I wanted to assure you that Chris is the person for the job. Honestly, he is a University of Scranton graduate in International Business and Spanish, but don't get excited. He also went to Rutgers University Public Technology Institute and is a certified government information officer. To make it even more exciting that he has educational credentials, he's got some real credentials. He worked for the city of Louisville as their IT director during the Marshall Fire. He was there for 10 years and then the Marshall Fire. He went to private and he missed us, okay? So I was glad that we could recruit him. But prior to that, he was five years at the University of Colorado in Boulder as the assistant director of IT and Communications. So he's got great experience both in public and private. He's also a pretty interesting guy. Every time you bring something up rock climbing, bicycling, you know, he does it. So he robotics. So I think we have a really great well-rounded person. The staff was included in not only the questioning, but what they felt. We're strengths that we needed to work on in our next leader. And it's not just technical, but also has great leadership skills through the years. So, Chris, please take it away and hope you stay a long time. Wow, that was a fantastic introduction. Thank you, Karen. And I can't speak highly enough of this CMO team, all of them, really a lot of support. As Karen said, I was, what you did mention is the beginning of my tenure in Louisville, it was the 500-year flood. So I started on a five-year, 100-year flood. I got out. We had a plague in there in the middle, and then we ended with a fire. So I got out before Frog started falling from the sky, things like that. So I'm sorry. Where do you bring the bright man? I'm hoping no. Well, a lot of experience obviously in instant command. So you get really good instant command. And honestly, I don't know if I'm lucky or not lucky, but seeing those kind of events are once in a lifetime events. And it really was a growth experience. It was interesting to see. I learned a lot about incident command and have obviously great skills. So I'm going to kick in. My first slide, I don't want you to go through now. This is a quick update, IT update. I tried to keep it really high level. I'll try not to use any acronyms. I'll try to spell everything out for you. So good evening, Mayor Prattam, Council Members. Happy to be here tonight to share a quick update on IT. Karen pretty much, that was a great introduction, so I appreciate it. I thought I'd start with probably the most, definitely the most important piece of IT, which is our staff, which is incredible. The staff I inherited are top notch. The, just a few updates, I'm not sure, the last time maybe last year you got an update. In 23, we had some changes to our org chart. And 22, we also had some changes. So going back to 23, we had some changes to our org chart. In 22, we also had some changes. So, going back to 2022, we had decentralized GIS across the city. I like to term GIS as spatial reporting. It's a type of data. It's something everyone understands. When you look at a map, you tend to get it. I'm a huge fan of Esri and GIS. And I'm really proud that this is something I had tried to do in Louisville for the whole 10 years I was there as create a unified GIS department in IT to service the whole organization and you guys did it. So Kudos to you for getting that done. We basically brought in a GIS resource that was embedded in community development. One that was embedded in utilities, we had a senior resource already in IT, and we got a position as a GIS manager, approved in 22, and that all came into realization, and they really have done some incredible work, pushing mapping and spatial forward. And I can tell you from my incident experience, the first person that's at an incident at the table with me is a GIS mapping person. Marshall Fire was the first technological resource we brought to the table. We were working with county and everyone wants to see the map. Was my house on the map? Was I affected? And it is one of the most powerful data reporting structures ever. So really psyched to have a really powerful and competent GIS department, great planning on your part. So kudos to you. The second piece we hire two positions in 2023, IT security analyst, because as we all know, cybersecurity, the major part of my world, it's what keeps me awake most nights, cities, municipalities, counties, federal government, we're all under attack constantly. And it's really, I didn't also mention that. I did support an incident that was ransomware for city of Lafayette. So while I was at Louisville, I ran the incident for when Lafayette was ransomed. So I've kind of seen firsthand how bad those situations can get. They lost all their data. They wound up paying a ransom. It's something I hope to never have to do. It was interesting to see it as a third party supporting them. But cybersecurity, high on the list. So we've done, we hired it. We moved up and hired a 90 security analyst last year in 2023. It's a critical piece of our team to keep things secure data sets. The second piece is we hired an IT business analyst last year, we're running close to a $1.5 million worth of software right now on an annual basis. Huge spend on software. We need resources like our business application specialists to be able to handle those applications. And I have a short slides here, but the two things I really want to go over is kind of our goal, a structure of our department, our goals, and then really our projects. We're deep in a lot of really big meaty projects right now. So I'm going to, I just were at about 17 FTE in a department right now with two recent additions in 23 and then a consolidation in 22. And we are fully staffed. We have one GIS analyst position we're about to hire for. So pretty excited to get the full boat here and hopefully in the next six, eight weeks. So on this slide, I, a lot of people call a lot of things different, strategic plans, roadmaps. I like to call them playbooks. We play a lot of defense in, in IT. We also play a lot of offense for strategy of getting out in front of things, trying to dream up what's going to happen 18 months from now in technology world. That's really difficult to do. Trying to predict what the next crazy cyber event is going to be and how to protect against it. So, I like to think of technology playbooks as the short term strategic plans of how we're going to handle things. So I'm not going to read all these out, but just for you all to understand how our department is broken out. Most of you deal with the service desk any time you call or create a ticket for IT. The service desk are frontline tier one support. I think you've all had the experience and pleasure of working with them. They're an awesome group. They get you hooked up. They get you to keep you working. They work on phones. They work on laptops. Our second piece of our team is infrastructure. These are the kind of the unsung heroes of our team. I mean, they're all unsung, but you see the service desk, you don't normally see infrastructure. They're the folks behind the scenes, running servers. They're creating the resiliency that keeps things running and creating a stable, available environment so that we can all do business and US citizens can all enjoy those services. So those folks are creating a high level resiliency behind the scenes. Cybersecurity for reasons I mentioned just a couple of minutes ago, super or under fire constantly. So it's creating visibility, seeing where our attackers are coming from. And then enterprise software, which is a huge component of what we do. We're in the process of one of the projects I'm going to call out is our ERP project for finance and payroll, huge undertaking. It's going great. I mean, they're ahead of schedule, they're under budget so far. These projects are long, they're tedious. They go on for a year to two years. A lot of work involved and it's technically is extra work. It's not the day to day work, you normally do when you're doing a finance project on an ERP project. They're really doing some heavy lifting above and beyond their normal jobs. So that's what Katrina's team, Kevin's team in HR, they're really doing a lot of work around process improvement, changing the workflows, changing the way we do business. And you know, software can really, it can really automate and can make things more efficient, but it's just a huge undertaking to do those projects. So those, these are our goals, you know, very high level. And then projects. So we've got some big projects that you all have approved over the last few years. The biggest, I just call out a few here. I arrived in January. We weren't running multi factor authentication. Big deal for, I can't emphasize enough. It's your number one way to protect against cyber incident. Multi-factor, it's not a cure all, but it definitely is a deterrent of getting ransomware or any other bad malware. So the service desk has really been pushing getting multi-factor out and we're almost complete getting the whole city on multi-factor authentication. What's that? Yeah. It's it's some it it really is the lowest hanging fruit and I and I encourage you as as regular citizens. It's the it's the one thing you can do for your bank accounts for anything that's holding any critical data is put multi-factor authentication on it. It will save you from from real bad things. Infrastructure, the word of the year is Cisco. It was probably Cisco last year. It's Cisco this year. Big. It's like doing a heart transplant for our network. It's going as smooth as to be expected. We've ripped out course switches, put in new course switches, we're working on firewalls now. Big, big project. The team simultaneously is also running a bunch of physical plant projects, which is upgrading power, upgrading battery redundancy within the data center. Also doing a lot of infrastructure work within the data center. Very intrusive disruptive work. They're really lining up a lot of big projects in one year. I can tell you in my 30-year career, I've never seen anything like it. And they're still standing, which is impressive. Security, the big, we engaged in a 24 by 7 by 365 sock a secure operation center this year that is essentially a partner externally to monitor our what we ingest all our logs from everything that goes on in a cyber data environment here We're using a third-party provider who is monitoring and taking all that noise all those files and trying to break it down into something simple that they can say, this is the important stuff, this is the critical stuff, this is the stuff you need to pay attention to. So that's very exciting. I know a lot of municipalities and counties aren't engaging secure operation centers, so we're kind of ahead of the game. So that's a pretty exciting component of my job. And then Enterprise Software, I mentioned the Tyler, the Finance and Payroll project, which is going to go on for at least through the middle of next year. We've also had some pretty big wins with our Esri GIS. They essentially really rebuilt the environment, and they're putting the finishing touches on new infrastructure for spatial reporting, which is really going to help us. You heard Sustainability mentioned it. Anytime people can visualize data, it really goes a long way to having them understand what's going on. And if you give them a spreadsheet, a lot of times people scratch their head, they just don't get it. You give them some spatial, some good pictures, they get it. It's so really excited about the GIS piece. I think I touched on everything there. That's the end of my formal. I tried to keep it short and sweet knowing people are gonna have some questions about some of these projects. So happy to answer any and all questions. Go as deeper as shallow as you want from a technical standpoint. Well, I will buy it in the presentation there. Well, I know we've got different levels of folks and some folks are intimidated by technology and I'll do my best to break it down and simplify it. Mayor Pro Tem. Thanks so much. I love seeing what's happening with IT. I actually do understand these projects, but the first thing that I would say organizationally is you really do need to be beating up on the city manager. You need project management staff. There are so many of these things that are not the day to day and great engineers don't automatically make great project managers, great people manager don't automatically make great project managers and you've got a lot of discs spinning, a lot of balls flying in the air and really having somebody who knows how to keep all of those moving at the right time, get all of the dependencies between them in the right place. the right place. It's expensive to move that back towards the city council hat. It's expensive to outsource that each time. And it's expensive to take the risk of not having a good project manager on top of it. So. When it comes to discussing personnel and coming comes to discussing budget, I think that's critical. Because these projects, and here's the feedback on the projects, they're all critical, they're all necessary, but my favorite thing about them is that none of these are IT for the sake of IT. They're not gold plated technology, they're not purely for the sake of IT. They're not gold plated technology. They're not purely for the purpose of cool stuff and newest cutting edge. This is about our security. This is about the ability of residents in the community to be able to do business with the city, to pay bills, to register businesses, to apply for permits, to research, core requests to understand what's being built in the city where, and why IT is affecting every department that's out there. And there's an equally long list of things that departments would love to see. When we talk about the police departments and the ability to track license plates from stoplight to stoplight, because we don't chase after people, because those high-speed chases always result in an accident, that's requiring our cameras to be able to tie into that particular network. When we talk about security, it's building security and fishing and multiple factor authentication, all of those pieces, nothing you're doing is just for the sake of technology. It's all for the sake of pushing this city forward. And I'm so glad to see what you're doing and the fact that you're in this and that all of these systems increase our maturity. The water treatment plant isn't just new activated carbon filters. It's all of the reporting. It's all of the knowledge that we have to have against it. And that comes from good IT systems. Knowing who's going in and out of the Rec Center and what things are being used. All of those things, I'll stop and not continue to beat that ed horse, but it's critical to support all of those and it's critical to know that you not only need to run what you've got, but you need to always be able to expand it and always be able to add to it and every time a department comes to you with another need you need to be able to address it. So this is a great list, and I'm sure that you're you're to the list for the next year is just as long. So thanks. Thanks, Councillor Member. I appreciate your support. And as far as project management, I know city manager's office has been talking about getting us some training. Hopefully in the summer, I'm also, I've got a lot of experience in project management myself. So it is a deficiency that we've identified and it needs to wrap some alignment around. But as you know, with highly technical people, project management, it's more of one of the softer skills. It's an area that it really takes some work to get folks alongside for project management, but communication and project management in two areas we've identified to work on. And it's not a lack of, I've got super talented individuals. It's just given the opportunity to learn how to communicate really well in the context of project management. And I'm really excited to be mentoring this group because it's something they've been running a million miles an hour just trying to keep systems up. And I really want them to take a little step back, learn some new skills to be able to really hammer really take these projects to the next level. So it's kind of exciting to watch. new skills to be able to really take these projects to the next level. So it's kind of exciting to watch. The other piece that my background is in ITIL, which is its information technology infrastructure library. It's a methodology that's very project management driven, is to create catalogs to really define services, to say, what are we actually, what's the expectation by these services? And how are we providing it, how are we scoring ourself on this, are we meeting expectations. So that's relatively new to the team and just in the last six months we've had two people certified on. I tell one of them being teagant in the back room here, which is fantastic. So we're getting folks certified from the desktop level all the way up through our senior team and just really to adhere to a methodology, understand project management and communicate better to the organization. So I'm really happy that you pointed that out. If you're managing all of these projects, then there's another problem too, but because again, you've got too many things to do to run the department to be responsible for each of those. No, I am big fan of ITIL before, and I'm glad to see ITSM in all of this. But the management of technology and management of technology projects is really a separate and partner piece to it. And you're so key to so many different things. It's important to have the right people and the right skill set to make that happen. So great. I got some number green. Thank you, Mayor. A great presentation. And again, really what we want to command you about is you really look at what the user needs. You know, this isn't, as Peter said, I teach this for the sake of IT. Again, really what we want to command you about is, you're really looking at what the user needs. This isn't, as Peter said, I teach us for the sake of IT. It's that end user, it's the online form that makes it easier for people to interact with the city. It's a community development map which allows people rather than ask those questions amongst themselves, they can just go there and find it out for themselves. And even on the backside of it, it's so the employees can and the other thing that I appreciate is that we have a lot of work to do with the work that we have to do with the work that we have to do with the work that we have to do with the work that we have to do with the work that we have to do with the work that we have to do with the work that we have to do with the work that we have to do with the work that we have to do with the work that we couple technical things with the the thing that I really appreciated you initiated that duo thing here. I hate it Anyway, but I'm but I'm getting used to it But because of you guys and the training you've given me in this IT I did not buy the mayor the $500 Amazon gift card that was requested on my email. It was so difficult. So thank you. I know. Well, he was busy in a meeting and he couldn't talk right now and he needed a gift card. I got it right on my city email. So thank you for the training. I'll send you another email next month. Well, if I would have know it was from you. It's good. You're looking for a research too. You can make this one. Oops. Before you fail, the more you get this one. All right. Anybody else have any comment here? All right. Thanks for the department update. We definitely want to secure our systems. My comment about DOE, that's the only one I use for getting into my computer. Everything else I use for a two-factor authentication is through Google, so I had to figure out the DO thing while back, but yeah. Paul C. Items. City Manager Martinez, All right, um, policy items. Um, city manager Martinez, does you have any updates on policy items from this, uh, form that you created a couple weeks ago? Every morning I wake up and I look at my email, waiting for a policy item. I have not had any policy items submitted to me yet. So please, if you have policy items, use the link that I sent you. Wow. And submit a policy item. We're waiting. Something better dark. So please, if you have policy items, use the link that I sent you. Wow. That's a bit of policy item. We're waiting. Something better dog cart. I mean, that's... That exists. It does. Probably listening to that. No, I have not had any new policy items as of two weeks from the last two weeks. Okay. Well, I mean, submit them or if you have anything urgent, you can say now. Otherwise, coming up next month, the third week of June is Normally a regular meeting but that's the week that CMLs have in its conference So we're looking into canceling that week but moving to the 25th to have an irregular and a study session that week and We'll probably start at 5.30 if anybody, if everybody can accommodate that. So what about the Saturday? What? Oh, I'm talking about meetings though. There's always an activity like summer fest coming up this Saturday. Thank. Brighton summer fest. Not to get it confused with the other community fest that are around the area. What does the plan for the expectation from us for some of the questions? There's no expectation. I will be there all day. Come and enjoy or not. There's no official duty to it at all. All right. If nobody else.