evening i'd like to call to order the lakewood city council study session in the city of lakewood colorado on august th two thousand and eighteen at seven p m in council chambers will the clerk please call the roll paul johnson folks who came out tonight and for those who may be tuning tuning in at home or kind of weighing in later on online or on channel eight this is a unique opportunity this is a study session but really tonight is dedicated to public comment and public input there's a lot of issues in the community that are of great interest so this is the opportunity i'm going to ask we have item three which is just general input so that's going to be anything non tabor related and so if you're here to speak about anything non tabor related i'd ask that you please sign up right now if you haven't if you'd like to speak and then we'll have a short presentation our finance director larry door and then we'll have a public comment period directed to the the table discussion in and of itself so we'll wait a couple seconds if you haven't signed up for a general input please do so now and while we're waiting i will just mention the ground rules i think most of you are familiar with but we certainly ask that all in attendance observe the decorum and the city council chambers and refrain from applause or audible support discord with the speaker all comments should be directed to the city of council there's a three minute limit per speaker the indicator lights on the lectern will be yellow at two and a half minutes and red when you're three minutes is up and i will gen try to move you on after that three minutes so we can keep keep moving and get other people up here to speak and if for some reason you signed up on the wrong sheet just let me know  all right so first up i have chris christine jackson government overreach this would be a classic case this is you clearly have a perfect market there you have competitors that that you can pick and choose from it determines the best price it's i don't you know what i'm saying is that i can't even imagine what kind of an ordinance you could pass to tell people dealing with the private contractor that you couldn't use them anymore to me this is really a step too far it seems to me there's better ways to handle this i heard about i heard about violations who driving up and down the street wrong clearly the city has all the arminius they need to deal with somebody driving down the street the wrong way you give them a ticket if they're making too much noise you probably have a new look noise ordinance but to change this whole thing and go down a road that my opinion is really where the city shouldn't be if you should not be interfering with your your constituents and their private contract and i was really kind of taken back when they said this might have been an objective and i thought wow that's whistling dixie but it but it does seem to me that constituents really the rank and file they want the normal city services that you provide and provide quite well  right now but that what you provide but i don't think they really want some kind of a body like this kind of organized in their lives i mean we i think we are all capable of taking care of ourselves we can make those decisions when it comes to matters like this and i and i just think that's a road too far and i think i think we could week price to do better and this this to me is is really kind of a pie in the sky and i'm not so sure it would really work you might even have issues even dealing with it but anyway i appreciate the opportunity to talk and wish you well right thank you thanks for coming out and does your whole team want to come down are you all speaking individually okay if you just want to be ready and come on down that's fine i'm a very poor exterior extemporaneous speaker so i've prepared my remarks and i'll read them my fellow neighbors and i who are here tonight live in the area immediately north of the westland shopping center area and we have a petition asking the city to put park in open space in the area around the westland shopping center area this area is a park desert in lakeland sue and harlan will be speaking after i speak i'll be speaking about what the residents said to me when i went and knocked on seven hundred and sixty doors sue will speak about the value of a park in a neighborhood and harlan will speak about the parcels in the area that could become parks first a few words about we start why we started this endeavor to get the city to provide more park and open space in this area after the west link apartment complex was built which is where the old target was on colfax we learned about plans for the avenida and oak street apartments they're currently under construction all three of these apartment complexes together are going to result in seven hundred and seventy one new apartments this area has been a retail wasteland even before the rise of internet stores we were a little concerned that the sears is eventually going to go bankrupt the lowe's there is not as busy as other lows it might also become vacant the gardens has gone vacant so we are concerned that we have all these new residents there's no parks to balance out where these people go for green space there might be even more apartments built there and also we learned that the city owns almost twenty acres the westland parking lot so what would happen to the westland parking lot area okay we started this petition in may of this year and i knocked on seven hundred and sixty doors i went to west link apartments i went to saint moritz apartments i went to quail ridge condominiums and i went to single family homes on nelson more th and th right behind nelson seventeen seventy two percent of the people who answered the doors were in favor of more park open space since it seems like to be in favor of parking open space is kind of like being in favor of motherhood and apple pie i was really interested in the reasons of people who would not sign petition most people you know just said they were not interested you know go away why'd you knock on my door but some people told me why they were opposed several people said they just didn't sign petitions they thought more parking open space was a great idea but they just did not find petitions several women said their husband wasn't home and they would have to talk to him before they signed anything a lot of people did not have a good command of english and they did not understand what i was asking a few people told me they were just visiting and didn't actually live at the apartment they were just visiting maybe short term rentals i don't know several people told me they were moving real soon so they weren't signed the petition a few people said that there was already adequate park space one woman told me that it was three people all of the people i talked to one woman told me she went to daniel's park she was in favor of more single family residential because she wanted to buy a home couldn't afford it increase supply would drive the prices down one person told me she had friends who owned the pet boy on col x and she was concerned that if she signed this petition pet boy would be to place one person said the apartment complexes should be providing the green space that the city shouldn't have to  that one person said parks would attract the homeless one person told me that parks drove too fast on miller street and she'd been trying to get the city of lakewood to put up one of those electronic speeding signs the city hadn't done it so she wouldn't sign this city park so a lot of residents at west lake thought it was a city park several of them complained to me about what a lousy job the city was doing keeping up that park most people thank me for the efforts people who th street i'm a long term resident of lakewood i've been in the house that i'm in now for forty years and before then for five years one block over so i've seen a lot of changes in the neighborhood progression which is great but when my children were young we had the ymca on th and quayle and there was green space there there was family activities there things that would bring a family together we don't have that anymore we have all these new bills for no new park spaces nothing to bring the families together in our area and i think we have a special area we really do work we've got the lakewood library we're close to light rail we're close to federal center we're right off of west co to the foothills it's just a really special area and we want to bring families in and the way to do that is to have a neighborhood that's family friendly and to bring more parts that's what we need parks and green space so we can have recreation especially for all these new people new builds coming in they need some recreational spaces so i really ask you to look at the petition that maryanne put together it's very well done and really consider the options that we have family for the acquisition of sixty acres of open space near morrison road and wodsworth that's a great addition to our community and i can't wait to explore it closer to home our neighborhood near westland shopping center is experiencing the addition of new high density apartment complexes as you heard a total of seven hundred and seventy one new apartments that will bring in well over a thousand new residents we really need to add some new open space or parks to the mix the city has stated in many forums that open space and parks are a priority for lakewood residents and that the city has been able to preserve a quarter of lakewood in parks open space and trails we're not seeing that ratio in our neighborhood and i respectfully like to request that you make that a priority for our area now and as other developments are considered in the near future in our neighborhood as marianne mentioned in her presentation many of the two hundred plus neighbors that we surveyed are very enthusiastic for more open space and parks within walking distance people have asked where park in our area might go i'd like to briefly in general generally lists six areas that might work for a park or open space without naming any present owners except the city you all have more detailed information on these parcels and petition results both in an email from maryanne and then hard copies this evening so just very quickly  mentioned parking lot at westland shopping center twenty acres owned by the city of lakewood if at some point westland owners decide that brick and mortar retail is no longer viable there and present or future owners of westland wish to build more high density apartments the city could possibly exercise rights to secure some or all of this parcel for a park and north and east of oak and th one point two acres please take action to add open space or parks to this area of lakewood we stand ready and willing to help the city in this effort along with many of the people we surveyed on behalf of present and future neighbors and residents and we'd be grateful if you could recommend a city staff person for contact and follow up on this matter at some point in the near future thank you for your consideration thank you very much we'll come back to that for those folks that may have come in late this is just the general public input section so if you want to speak on anything non tabor related please sign in at the back and we'll make sure we get you on this docket i have paul mountain jenna mountain did you sign them in did your group sign them in you um so although we've made a lot of progress with the house of rats there's still a lot of progress that needs to happen and the world aware that we had the ward five meeting on saturday one of the things that came out and that meeting was that the owner may be moving back in and we're all very very concerned about that and we think that there needs to be some some actual rules sets before she does that even though it's her property because if she's done at once she's probably gonna do it again and so we need to speak to that what's gonna happen with the code and and it's gonna be enforced and i guess one of the ways around that could be that we actually have codes that could be enforced because i know that's been kind of a touchy subject that the rats haven't been addressed in the code so we need to make that very very clear one of the other questions that keeps popping up is is that what it's going to happen to the house and i'm gonna be very honest people want the house torn down they want it raised and they don't want anything built on that site so that's what i'm hearing and when you go to ward meetings there's those that go and those that don't go and those that don't go aren't gonna make their opinions known but only to people like me that ask them so this is what i'm hearing and the second so we know that they want it torn down and then i have a question for the city attorney and it's the city law and codes prevail over colorado or is it what's ever most strict and the reason i ask that is because i pulled up a case that was in the colorado supreme court today and it talks specifically about blight and there's four conditions out of like i think there was ten and only four conditions need to be met in order to consider it blight and that structure meets at least for me if not eighty happen and then i felt you know that it should be it should but he needs to exercise eminent domain or condemn the property and i knew this that we would have to pay fair market value for it and offer her the fair market value which might be the land value and it may not even be that much so thank you in english good evening thank you i think the ward five meeting was the best meeting i've been to so far it was the most positive we heard a lot of good things that are happening please don't make us push mud up to go further with this because that's what it's taken to get any results at this point and as i don't have much to say but on the asbestos i know we will find out that the results of that test on the th and i ask that cap kaitlyn be asked to let us know that as soon as she knows the information because that as far as i'm concerned may make the difference in whether or not she stays at the house is torn down and if the owners are to move back in would you also as soon as you know something about this let's elk are know what all of us know because at that point you know we've got to have code enforcement's already in place because again as lynn said probably if she's done something like this once she'll do it again she has another property that looks just like this so thank you thank you and then diane you're you're on deck good evening uh i'm here again to talk about the rats i would like the coat to be revised soon soon the reason being this woman will be back in that house before we have a new code and the code we have cannot be in force the gentleman who can enforce the code is the city attorney to see a draft soon okay that's the one thing the next thing is i don't know about the flies we forgot to ask about the flies on saturday but lore mentioned that the flies too are now a problem in addition to the rats and i am so sick of talking about this i cannot tell you i think there's going to be a public mutiny if this woman returns to this home i really do i think that is not going to be okay finally you as a city meaning through the council and also through chief floor's statements have guaranteed an amount of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to clean this house up if that lady can't and betting that she can't i have asked for records on this there are none apparently none no communications about this i find that hard to believe if the city is going to step in and take charge of that debt then by god there ought to be some documents about it it's been publicly announced and i think that's a necessary thing last i thought the word five meeting was very helpful it was helpful to get the information out there one thing karen norway rats are not ind to lakewood colorado not that is a fact i am daring to bring it up because last time somebody brought up something that was contradictory your husband screamed as a female i find that very offensive and i think most of the people in that room were very uncomfortable and i don't think that needs to happen again and i hate to bring it up okay thank you michelle is there another sheet that we need to grab okay all right so that will close the public comment on general public input  mister bunch currently we're just gathering information on trash and recycling and a whole bunch of different things so thank you for being a part of the conversation and as we've learned in the past trash is a passionate subject for many and so we take it quite seriously so thank you and our crew left from the north lakewood ward one area but well done on their survey and we all have that and i think we'll turn that over the city manager and her and her team can carry it from there but great responses hitting seven hundred and some doors and for the elk our folks will just continue to ask you to work with caitlin and get you that information as we have it  we'll move into item four and i'll turn it over to mister doar and again if you want to speak on the public input portion on this please sign up and we'll get to that after this presentation mister mayor and members of city council once again larry d'or city of lakewood finance director and city treasurer's i'm waiting for the madam clerk to cue up our powerpoint i'll just jump right in this is yet  another step along quite a journey that you as council have been on since february it's hard to believe about nearly six months have gone by that this conversation has been happening just to kind of recap what's what's happened since february  council had its two thousand and eighteen planning session and set forth a number of goals for two thousand and eighteen and the city manager and all of the city staff have been focused on those goals since that time one of those goals was to identify strategies to pay for community needs and as a follow up to that i provided some information at councils orientation on march th i gave a little bit of an overview of taxpayers bill of rights and then there were two study sessions of course these are all public events and that information is still there i won't recap all of that but but just a little for those who might be tuning in really for the first time to this subject here tonight as a result of this second council study session there was a there was an assignment set forth to councils budget not a committee which is a committee of three citizens and three council members to further study the matter and go into just a little bit more detail and then as a result of that there was a report back to council on june  th and on june th councils direction was to have the city staff began a city engagement process which i'll overview a little bit later in this presentation but it's also allowed really a two month period for each of you to have various community meetings ward meetings neighborhood association meetings and so forth to really reach out to the community and get feedback and input and so forth so it's been a structured process an unstructured process of really engaging the community in this subject over the last couple of months so that's just sort of an overview of what's been discussed and sort of where we're going but since our last meeting on june th there's been some financial information available and i want to just give a little overview of that our three  council member members of the budget not a committee have seen these that i feel it's valuable for the community dialogue to occur and then also for all of council to see and really that's the results of the two thousand and seventeen financial  information our city auditors which is an external cpa firm that reviews all the financial books and records of the city was on hand to give their report that's the firm of anton collins mitchell which is a certified public accountant firm and that's all in order with the with of course the city charter but here are the results really for two thousand and seventeen in the general fund and you see the revenues minus tabor net revenue and then expenditures and as you see it's a it's a operating subtotal of two hundred eleven thousand i you know i should have on this slide that you have to add three zeros to each of those i'm a little bit used to working with the larger numbers but that top line would be a hundred and twenty five million four hundred and eighty three thousand so a bigger part and i should have that on the slide but as you'll see there's a very very narrow operating margin as a city and and that's is getting more and more challenging of course as the cost of services is escalating a little bit faster than the cost of good so we're gonna have some work to do there and of course council's budget study session is already scheduled for september th of course i'll go into much more detail of that and as but as you know in building a budget you look backward if you look up what's going on so far this year and then we'll do some forecasts for the future in addition councils direction a couple of years ago was for the city overall course council makes all the appropriations all of the spending decisions but for the city to begin using its reserves to in to undertake generational type capital projects and that was done so six million one hundred fifteen thousand was transferred for from reserves for capital projects it was a it was quite a long list but i think one of the biggest ones of course was the lastly park reconstruction and that's quite vivid now because lasley is reopened and then there was a whole slew of things like a park path pavement reconstruction and the amphitheater here at belmont park that which is also completed and we're all enjoying that now throughout this summer so the bottom line i like to just keep it simple as opposed to you know net income or that kind of thing bottom line was five million nine oh four and i provided that to the committee in july and then also just an overlook of the reserves i've seen some questions in the citizens survey and as i've gone out and spoken at some of the ward meetings about city reserves and where are those and i want to just provide this information you can see where the city is at as of december st two thousand and seventeen very transparent you can go online and look at the city's annual financial report and see the number there thirty million two hundred thousand and i suppose i should add that that's in millions up there i got to get i'll get better at that i i promise one of the things however to check in on is of course that's a large number that that's a very large number but all things are relative of course and one of the things that is popular in my profession which is city finance administration is sort of comparing the reserves from one community to the next now clearly a very large community like denver would probably have more on hand in reserves i mean the operating fund of city and county devers general fund is nearly a billion dollars so clearly they would have more cash on hand and reserves and then a smaller community maybe like edgewater  obviously we have a much smaller reserve but the way to do that is really to measure the amount of the reserve as the numerator and the amount of spending as the denominator and get a percentage so similar to a business a very large business would have more cash on hand or more working capital than a very small business and here's how that shakes out so i've gone out and looked at the audited financial reports for a number of cities along the front range and you know a few cities haven't yet put their idea of what other communities are at and where lakewood is along the the curve there so clearly small some of the smaller communities might have a larger percentage just as it relates to overall spending and then i also felt it might be relevant to have jefferson county a present on there now their their business is a little bit different of course and so they may or may not need a slightly different reserve and you know council has a policy on city reserves to be at least ten percent and that's greater than the tabor required minimum of three percent and i showed that a little bit later in my presentation one of the things that's relevant to this as many people have heard the old adage over the years about keep x months spending in the bank i say x because maybe some household said six months spending or a year or something like that and why lakewood would have three months  and of course it's a bit of a rainy day fund so as colorado mills closed and that impacts sales tax revenues or in the past we've had damage to facilities that may or may not be insured we had a leak in the swimming carmody rec center last decade and that was a that was an important asset to the community and the city needed to get that fixed up so that that could continue to be enjoyed so really quickly now council you know what is i know that but just for those in the audience i want to do this really quickly first of all this was created by a statewide vote and it's amendment to the state constitution it governs the state's finances and many of the dimensions of tabor are really relevant directly to the state itself so for example the state's reserves at the time of the tabor passage we're actually less than three percent and so tabor required the state to get at least a three percent but of course lakewood many other cities were already well over that but tabor also governs counties school board school districts cities towns etc so it's widely widely applicable requires that all tax increases be approved by a citizen vote now that's been in the lakewood city charter and isn't really new or frankly interesting because that that's kind of an overlap a tabor also requires that most bonds or loans be approved by a vote of the citizens i mentioned the emergency reserve which is three percent of spending and of course the state has gotten up to that level now and then annual revenues are limited to inflation and any excess has to be refunded that's really kind of the meat of the subject of what we're here tonight but then also a taber's very explicit voters may alter or eliminate as desired by the voters they they have the opportunity to do that very explicit there's quite a detailed section on that on that very subject and in fact tabor spells out when the vote can occur and minimum disclosures in the ballot question and so forth tabor has quite a bit to say about how the tabor elections they've all been approved and i've given a little bit of an overview to council on what that looks like in the last four years the city has refunded sixteen million you don't have to add any zeros to that i think i got that finally no zeros unless you want to put point zero zero but anyway presently there is a pending refund that council would decide how and a win that would be refunded and as i mentioned you saw it on an earlier amount of the refund is twelve million five hundred and thirty six five hundred and four no zeros to add to that i mentioned the city council goal strategies to pay for community needs we did have as a part of our earlier study session to look at you know debt financing and tax increases and how all that works i mentioned already the four public meetings and then the citizen engagement process which i'll talk a little bit about now and you know i have to tell you i'm not involved in this function of the city's business on a day to day basis as the city treasurer the city's chief accountant and the finance director i'd have to say getting close to this and really seeing this in action is really impressive it's really been a learning process for me and i've really become a student of it and i'll be able to answer any questions you might have about that as as we go along but i've what i've really been impressed with there's all the different platforms and all the different ways that the city can reach out to the citizens  first the city has a friday report many people in the audience might not be familiar with that well it's just as it as it says it's a report that comes out on friday it includes a lot of different community activities and updates and bulletins and so forth and you have to subscribe to that you can look at it on the internet but it also you can subscribe to it and receive information emailed each friday and there were two articles present in the friday report  related to this citizen engagement process and inviting the subscribers to come to the cities wake website liquid together to learn to share and to  one article on this subject again with all of these the the focus is to invite people to come in and participate or get in touch with council members also the city's outreach process our outreach platform called liquid together has a newsletter again with subscribers there were two articles there also the city participates in nextdoor com as a as an entity the city is a subscriber it's part of our public outreach and there are two postings there  also the city participates on twitter and i don't think i've said three tweets ever before in a presentation so i'm excited to say that three tweets on the subject and also the city's public outreach is engaged in  facebook of course and we have data on the number of subscribers and you know who's involved in all that and then of course we have channel eight we have channel eight for those who are either watching online or if they are comcast subscribers they actually  channel eight and on our bulletin board again information inviting people to get involved and participate in person or online or in whatever platform is best for them okay so the backbone of the engagement process is really inviting people to come to lakewood together and you know it this is a unique software and engagement tool that allows people to interact in different ways some some folks like to click on videos and get a little information others like to download information and read them later on paper or on their ipads or what have you and some people just kind of like to scroll and so this this platform really involves people with variety of different preferences some people like to do it all right and so we can we can do that and that's liquid together and here are some of the outcomes of that engagement process and i should say that all of the information and there's there are reams of data were provided to council just last week we wanted to give you the most up to date and of course this platform is live now and people can go to it tonight tomorrow in fact i imagine it might be available some what and not indefinitely but at least for the next number of days and weeks until it's perhaps no longer relevant or or interesting but there were one thousand six hundred web site visits over seven hundred surveys completed and the surveys involved people's feelings about different city services and you know how they feel about tabor and and how they feel about the amenities in the community and what's important to them seventy one percent of the survey said yes l and spend the refund it also asked what's important to citizens and it it allowed people to click a drop down menu and select from there you know choices of what's important but also they had an opportunity in what's called an open box we've all seen that there's literally there's a square you click on it and you just type in what you want and two hundred and ten people did that and that's the reams of data i've only had a chance to just sort of skim that but some of the commentary  long and detailed and people were able to really express their passion or dis passion for a number of for a number of things in there and again as i mentioned all stats and narratives were provided to city council for your review so with that mister mayor the member city council thank you i wanted to try to keep that as brief as possible and of course i'll be available for questions and also our citizen engagement folks can answer any details that i might not be able to cover right thank you so we'll go through council questions and then we'll have public input and i think clearly there won't be any sort of decision made tonight by council we have this against calendared for august th to have further discussion and that will be a regular meeting so i just have one quick question related to your presentation it was a slide that budget audit committee was able to see and it wasn't part of this presentation which is fine but there was something that struck me in that meeting that was the city's total debt as to the ratio of debt that the city holds and what percentage that is and it was surprising how low it is and if you could maybe speak to that once again larry d'or city of liquid finance director let's see yes we did talk a little bit about that and you know debts can be expressed in more than one way it's first of all the amount of loans are dead outstanding we talked a little bit about that all all the cit largest debts from capital projects will be paid off in two thousand and twenty two that's very unusual it's very unique across the front range but we also expressed it as a percentage of income and that's probably something that many people are familiar with and that is if you're buying a home typically you typically a bank will loan a family a household about thirty to forty percent of their monthly income as a mortgage payment and that's that's pretty common that's that's been well known for a long time the city's debt payments as a percentage of the city's general income is about three percent so it's it's a much much smaller number so yes mr mayor that was discussed there and i i don't have a slide on that tonight and i think that outstanding debt is about twenty some million twenty two million it's in that range so that'll be the ceo p's certificates of participation which would be paid off then we'd probably have maybe two outstanding and that's one pension obligation which is i think three million a long term pension obligation and then we have a lease purchase agreement for solar panels which i think we signed on to last year which is about ten years so in all that's really it as far as the cit yes that's awesome mister metro area or a top figure i don't a couple of things about that was a good presentation as usual thank you i do have a couple questions you said tabor is limited to inflation is there not a population growth portion of that calculation thank you it is inflation which is the denver boulder lakewood consumer price index as produced by the bureau of labor statistics i did leave off the local growth not the state level it's the inflation factor plus population but at the city county school district level it is inflation plus local growth and the local growth is really the increase in sort of new construction in the community in the last ten years for lakewood that's been less than of a percent so it's a pretty small factor but i should have included that in the presentation and this year is likely to be larger but not a lot larger i wouldn't anticipate it also the survey at our award one meeting some folks for saying they took the survey three or four times is that possible we they had three or four devices around the house and in fact could even take it sometimes twice with the same device thank you we took a look at that because we felt that that would be important and i was i learned a lot about that process and how the city can assess the possibility of doing that clearly what we're most concerned about are those sort of computers frankly that can just do survey after survey after survey we didn't see any instances of that certainly and we did track through internet protocol or ip address the number of responses from a given location we have the ability to do that we did have instances in fact we had three instances where three surveys were filled out from the same household now that instance you could have a an adult child or a grandparent or perhaps two spouses we did have one address that filled out four surveys so again could be a large household and and those weren't really outl ers we want to make sure that that's you know valid information but at the same time this is not a professional statistical study with with questions that line up that make it a statistically valid situation but rather this is a survey and but we wanted to make sure that the responses online weren't in the tens of thousands from one location overseas and are there any from overseas i'm not aware that there were any from overseas in fact the the part of the response included a question asking people to include their zip code and so that was another way for the control and and know most most concerning would be five thousand responses from one foreign country and that didn't occur okay thank you very much miss franks thanks mayor paul i did want to comment i'm glad you guys said it wasn't statistically you know scientific  because we are not gonna go into the dynamic versus static ips and how i could roll my ip as many times as i wanted and look like i was multiple people so from a technology standpoint but i do think that we ran our own survey  councillor skilling and myself and required people to put in names and addresses that then could be verified and i would say that our responses would kind of line up very similarly so i did want to just kind of add that there's a lot of technology out there and that's anyways i did want to have a question answered because in our survey which ours we only had two questions and again for those who it again is not scientific on in any way shape or form it was really meant to get the pulse of people we also had a comment box and some people put a sentence and some people gave us a novel and it we appreciate every bit of that information but one of the ones that was reoccurring was the question of where else might you want that money to go if it didn't you know if it where else might you want it to go and several of the people answered and said i wanted to go to the school district to fund those activities and i wanted you mr doar to speak to that to kind of explain that situation and why that would not be feasible thank you the city's charter and focus describes our mission really which is to provide municipal services and and we're all familiar with what those are we're not providing education we're not  regulated by the state department of education and so that's managed us a tricky and i suppose legal arguments could be made on one side and legal arguments could be made on the other side but it's probably not prudent for the city to get you know in the middle of those as it was so indeed the city does partner with the school district for outdoor athletics and other programs and clearly you know the city is involved as a matter of public safety and and also early childhood education and different things that come close to education but absent a vote of the people asking for their tax refund to go be a cashier's check to the school district i just don't think that prudent within the scope of what the city's to provide to the public thank you i really respected those folks you know you know appreciating that we have a lot of funding needs in the school but i certainly wanted to make sure that that answer kind of got out there so they could kind of see it in a broader context the other couple questions that i got privately were can those funds if they are and again it would all be a part of the ballot question what these things what they couldn't couldn't be in whether it was sunset it and all that if it's put on the ballot but folks were asking about the storm water can we put more money into that and then of course i've got folks on the other side saying well you already got doubled last time so can you speak to what are the the constraints andor limits that where that money can go i think that might kind of help direct future conversations sure thank you well that obviously the stormwater management utility falls within the scope of municipal services provided provided to the liquid  community i hadn't quite thought about what that and how that impacts the enterprise which is described as a business within the taxpayers bill of rights that's the stormwater management utility but i'd want to do a little bit more research but i imagine that that could be possible if it  specific question and were of interest to the entire community but i would be concerned about how that makes the city utilities still a utility under the enterprise and so forth we've had that discussion a few times over the years about how it would maintain status because there are many tax payers who may or may not be receiving a benefit from the stormwater management utility whose refund might otherwise be going into it so i'd want to do a little bit more analysis of that thank you nice presentation  different comments that have come to me larry is that the narrative perhaps could include how would someone want their money to be and described in terms of how the funds could be refunded i will say that council has until october to decide how to proceed we need to we need to refund these these monies and there is a bit of a clock ticking and certainly  my job is to analyze options present options and help council understand how and when and best to do that that that's really my role some of the things discussed in luke the focus of the council in the past has been to make the refund in the most efficient cost effective quick quick way possible that's been the the theme in the past and that could continue or something else could be done at your direction my job then is to describe some of the strengths and weaknesses of that or the cost of doing that and other things have been described like mailing checks or inviting people to to city hall to receive checks or credits on electric bills and a variety of different things and i'm continuing to provide analysis on how best how that can work and so but no to answer your question specifically there hasn't been a question in the survey about how best to return the funds and in the past has been with the sewer or the stormwater fee is that right last year it was a credit to property owners property tax bill and that's been the focus for a couple of years prior to that it was a credit on property owners stormwater management utility bill and i think we've got that information out on liquid together website some of the history of that the dollar amounts and so forth just in terms of how that's been done the reason for those that approach the reason council has been interested in doing that in the past just just a year ago in october council approved that because it doesn't cost anything to make that credit it's the most efficient cost effective way to do it and a hundred percent of the refund can be made that way okay i understand that there's really not a totally perfect way to do this too i mean a lot of this is going to depend on what the language for that for any ballot initiative would say i mean we can go from one hundred and eighty degrees the way this would be structured on the past four ballot initiatives it is my assumption but i think we need to get it out there that they were time limited and for specific projects is that talk to me about that okay thank you let's go let me see if i can go through the four let me get my recollection together just a moment  yes a tabor exemption or relief from the revenue limits can be one year it can be three five ten whatever the voters decide or it can be perpetual so in the s liquid voters authorized an exemption from the may i say denver west area of the community forever forever that was perpetual and and that was the first election that occurred then the next question  occurred in the late s i don't want to give you the date just so i don't get that crossed up there was a nine year exemption in lakewood that has since expired of course the third one please talk a little bit table refund pending unlike today the councils focus at the time was we want to we want to have a table exemption whatever monies are developed we will provide a report there was no specifics such as you know law enforcement or whether case maybe but each year council then authored a report describing where those funds were spent and there was of course the three main businesses that the city is engaged in which is public safety parks and transportation okay  those reports are available and probably retained in the city clerk saw archives we could we could have those then the third the third exemption occurred with the city's increase in its rate of sales tax from two percent to three percent and the new or the added sales tax was voted up and is exempt forever so that that was the third one  two percent to three percent the new amount was exempt forever and then the fourth question in lake woods history was related to oh let me back up the increase in sales taxes does you spend on parks  parks transportation and public safety of course and then the fourth exemption was related to all open space revenues and grants for cultural activities transportation oh let me get this one more time law enforcement public safety cultural activities and transportation and that was perpetual that's so that's as well and there wasn't any pending refund related to that interestingly the city is receiving grant funds related to its recent decision to acquire the taylor property we aren't doing an annual report on how much open space money or other grants that were receiving but those grants would have been limited by tabor if that election hadn't otherwise have been approved in that was in two thousand and six thank you mind talking a little bit more about the taylor proper money that we'll be getting so our parks in our community resources department has applied for grants from great outdoors colorado jefferson county open space and others i i couldn't give you more detail on the grand tours but as those monies come in they will not be refunded or limited by tabor they will be exempt pursuant to the two thousand and six election otherwise those grants would have been limited and potentially refunded well it sounds like all of the four previous exemptions were structured very differently in a different context that right i agree also could we please get an example tweets that were put out there by the city in the facebook i'd like to know actually what it is that we've put out i don't stay on top of tweets to be honest with you i haven't seen them either but we will excuse me might i interrupt you were sent a report i think on friday about three ish and that information was included on what information kathy it was sent by our deputy city manager ben goldstein and it has a list of all the also we've had a lot of a lot of things here that council has been looking at and dealing with and talking and getting input one thing that we maybe should be considering it would be some type of an evening or a forum or a study session i don't know how you'd want to call it where we would actually invite speakers that have  different thought on tabor has that ever been thought of i would just direct that to the mayor we're certainly going to look at having a league of women voters opportunity with all the ballot initiatives and if that's something that you wanted to try to do that you'd encourage you to fill out a council request form and we can have that conversation on a different evening what kind of public input prior to the last four times that the city addressed the tabor what kind of public input did the city get at that point do you know it was probably before time larry yeah also the technology was a lot different obviously we didn't have all these things right these ways of communicating with people but i do recall newspaper articles i do recall some of those are in the city clerk's archives  certainly looking at lakewood was much more visible in the public and may i say the old methods of communicating with the public and and of course public hearings and things of that nature m okay the one thing with this that just feels a little off for me personally is that we as a city are driving the the potential initiative rather than having it driven by the citizens as a referendum just throwing that out okay that's all i have to say great and i'll just just add the councilmembers able's liking that this all came to fruition at our last planning retreat so that's partly why it's being driven in this direction because this is was the direction that council had given staff harrison thank you an excellent presentation thank you mister doar i know in the in the past we've had a way of earmarking results of tabor expenditures  could you describe because in the ward five meeting that we had on saturday we kind of had a straw poll no we made our straw poll really simple we asked should it be included on the ballot or leave it alone and we had forty we had sixty people respond forty eight of them said yes it should be put on the ballot twelve responded no leave it alone so we didn't give him a direction we didn't say anything about where it would go but that without those were the results that came out  but one of the common are a lot of the comments that we got at the meeting were how are we going to know that that money gets spent for the right report so what i know in your presentation you said in the past there had been specific reports per a presented that showed where those tabor expenditures would you go into a little bit more definition of how that would work should this be passed sure let's see in my experience  it from the past one of the things that counsel could direct the staff to do is relevant to two thousand and five in two thousand and five the citizens had similar concerns about the sales tax increase and where would those funds be spent and what guarantees are there and that kind of thing and one of the things that this council could consider is doing something very similar and that is approving two budgets and that could be a very effective way because it really binds the you know the council to what it's describing to the public so in two thousand and five this is what was done the city went in and the city council of course is the only body that can make appropriations and decide spending for the city only only the city council not me or anybody else and so the city would potentially or in two thousand and five went through its ordinary budget process assuming no changes and no change in the vote and all this kind of thing and and authorized an ordinance and approve the ordinance and the budget was finished the council then could at your direction work up a second budget at the same exact time that says you know if whatever is on the ballot if it's on the ballot if it's approved we're not we're gonna approve another ordinance and another budget that is contingent upon the approval of the ballot question and then that really is councils commitment to the public that this is these are the exact same things these are the exact things that will be approved and then as a follow on as you know a part of the budget process at each year i with my colleagues in public works  the police department and in community resources we always provide a report on projects and and talk about things that are getting done i mentioned earlier that you know lasley park that's really easy to sort of verify it's done and you know the amphitheater and things could direct the staff to really work on two budgets and and that i think in a proven ordinance as well that's contingent upon think anything being voted up and then i think that's probably the greatest way to do what you're describing and that was done in the in two thousand and five m it's always a pleasure to see you i just wanted to see if you could go over briefly just sort of the process or the different things that we looked at on the committee on the budget not a committee of just other potential options that we that we looked at and how we sort of got to talking about tabor what do you mind doing that for us sure i think what you're referring to is that in the municipal funding process presentations and things  what our leaders in our police department public works and community resources presented things to the city council that are not either programs that are being undertaken or projects that are not in our current capital improvement and preservation plan to give an idea to the council on the public those kinds of amenities or choices that could be made in utilizing the refund all those things were really hypothetical but an opportunity to start a conversation and get feedback from counsel in the community on what some of those things might be of course as i said before only counsel can ultimately decide those things and so as you would guess they were split pretty evenly across public safety and it talked about increasing the number of police agents and increasing some of the equipment that the police use in their in their detective cars and other things then there were there were  those are as i say hypothetical and could ultimately be directed you know by the city council on the public does that help that helps but i also just wanted if you wouldn't mind sharing just how we looked at ceo pease and other options for the revenue side and if you wouldn't mind sharing that absolutely i mean all of this connects to frankly counsels goal of identifying i had to look at this identifying strategies to pay for community needs that's the goal of council and so our exercise  in i think april was also to talk about other ways to pay for community needs and of course as you saw earlier our operating budget is is two tenths of a percent quite frankly so the city is living within its budget and providing services as directed by council and the public and so forth but going beyond that really it's it amounts to either a tax increase or  new debt that those are really the main three that would give an opportunity for council to pay for community needs thanks i appreciate that okay i have a couple more questions they're actually clarifying questions as to some things that were asked miss franks inquired a little bit about enterprise but as i heard the question it was could this money be used in the enterprise fund for storm water and my understanding is no because you can only use ten percent of outside funding in an enterprise as fund or else it loses its enterprise status is that accurate that data i can tell you for sure and that's why i'd want to do a little more analysis on sort of who's paid the taxes that'll be refunded and you know can it be easier than any enterprise fund and so forth side i'd want to look at that a little bit more carefully and could report on that in the future and we talked about exempting in the past have exempted different sources of grants and things like that what is there an example today of money that we take in for services that isn't exempt so potentially we're bringing in something for a service that we're providing and it's going back out sure oh my gosh i could give a lot of examples i'll just try to do a few of them off the top of my head so certainly recreation services we're all familiar with that go to recreation center you pay a membership fee or you buy a you need you buy a equipment piece of equipment whatever all of those revenues are limited by taber of course building permits plan check fees about police services and i'm thinking along the lines rtd so for example if a police officer provides extra duty coverage for a fee that's that is limited as well we provide fingerprinting services for the children or other job related activities those those revenues so it i guess it's easier to describe what isn't limited then then sort of what is but yeah licensing we have interest income in the past we've had an example that our folks providing extra duty on the light rail receive a check from rtd where we receive an annual check of two hundred and fifty to three hundred thousand dollars of which is not exempt is that correct i'm trying to think of a few others oh that's cool you're good you talked a little bit about memorializing one budget but if you if this group sent something that about and the folks said five years ten years how do you how do we assure the community that beyond that one budget those funds will go directly to what the community says they want him to go to mm hmm well they're never  guarantees i think it's been brought up before that the amount of the refund fluctuates from year to year it can't be predicted within a dollar it's not a guaranteed amount it goes up and down but of course each year cut we could calculate it we would calculate it for councils council and councils in the future in terms of what it is and how much it might be and those kinds of things so just as sales taxes or volatile property tax revenue goes up and goes down then those things have to be dealt with as they come in the future just as with the increase in the sales tax rate you know the that amount goes up and down from year to year and we have to keep track of that so the city only does one one year budget at a time that's pursuant to the city's charter all appropriations expire after one year and those are the constraints that we deal with so that that's just one of the one of the many things to contend with in that process however today does that one percent still go towards the things that were highlighted to the community when they passed the one percent tax on trees it does the amount available of course could flush for sure but  what is in what that one percent still so we would still be able to go to the community and say the tabor refund beyond the two thousand and sixteen number will always go to whatever is offered those those three five one things absolutely and so that would be kind of the check in balance with the community and council indeed okay and then the last thing was just quick clarification on one of the previous renditions that we looked at with the third a third a third we did have ten police agents and i've heard some feedback from the community there's some hesitation about adding positions knowing that that number is gonna fluctuate so how would we how would we deal with that because i think there's a hesitancy to you know start hiring and then it goes down and we're laying people off that's the last thing we want to do i agree that is one of the challenges presented in all this certainly if public safety and law enforcement is an interest a need in in the community i would suggest the smallest well the smallest amount possible is the most conservative clearly you wouldn't want to add twenty thirty fifty police agents although that might be you might be able to pay for that with a twelve million dollar gonna go down in my estimation and that would be far too aggressive and and that's scenario that you just described could very would very likely occur quite frankly but a smaller number would be more conservative and maybe the idea is that a third of the refund is dedicated to law enforcement public safety type activities and to start small and increase over time and do that in a very conservative and thoughtful way thank you mayor very great presentation i just wanted to get some quick clarification you had mentioned in the past we had refunded some money through stormwater and through property tax that was the county property tax that you we paid the county and then that was our small portion of what we collected on property tax now quick quick  comment and and question for you is there any other possible ways of doing a refund for example what was told to me by one of my constituents said possibly  used in excel as a mechanism to do refunds you know through the city of lakewood and the second one was through voter registration can you give us maybe  i don't want to put you on the spot obviously but can you give us a little bit if it's good or not good or the pros and cons to those sure i've got a few emails from my award from our ward three council members on this subject and i've responded to those and and certainly those are those are public anybody could see those and i'll try to do this from recall i beg your pardon i don't have those messages right in front of me but let's see the first one is well let me just step back and say that tabor itself does not describe how a refund should be made it's really sort of wide open and that's challenging because communities across the state or have had to deal with that and it's it's it's difficult however tabor does describe that reasonable expenses can be deducted from the amount of the refund to pay for the implementation of the refund it also describes it has to be done in a timely fashion you can't wait you know five ten years from now to make the refund that taper is very explicit that that's about where it ends so let's see regarding the first idea which is refunding via excel let me expand on the proposition which was that a list of xcel energy customers would appear and that then the city would use that list and it presumably would have property address and it would have the the billing customers name and then the city c utilize that to make this table refund and and it could be you know let's say the list is a hundred thousand people council could decide to take twelve million five hundred thousand dollars divided by a hundred thousand names addresses simple arithmetic and make the refund less the cost to do that couple of things are interesting in that one is xcel energy is a private company and in business for a profit and on and on my hunch would be and i don't know this because i haven't reached out to excel but my hunch would be that the company would probably have some customer privacy issues in providing a list of its customers to anybody else so that that for one might be kind of challenging the other thing is that if the city is going to disburse checks to anybody for this refund the city has to meet certain requirements for check in issuance and that is under internal revenue code we are required to issue a one thousand and ninety nine miscellaneous to anybody who gets  city of lakewood check so for example we have over two thousand vendors were purchasing gasoline and bulletproof vests and many different things as a city we're procuring and anybody who is paid a check  we have to issue them a irs form one thousand and ninety nine miscellaneous and that would have to be done in any instance where a check was issued so that's a complicating factor that would require labor frankly we would need to invite those xcel energy customers to provide information to the city that would allow us to then issue that check in a very proper way under all of the laws and codes and so forth to do that i made some estimates of the cost and i you know i think it probably voters to provide their information to the city and then the city issuing a check to them in the mail so in essence the the the most speediest shortest way is just to stay within our system like with the stormwater and go to the county and say here can we you know credit this amount on their property tax and the cost on that would be how much versus well we would have to pay if we use the other system the reason that to my knowledge all front range cities you've made refunds have used the property tax first of all the department colorado department of local affairs has they provide the infrastructure meaning the forms and the calculations that are performed to get the refund done through the county property tax and  it it takes me and my staff a few hours to fill out the form and that's the cost so then there wouldn't be a one thousand and ninety nine assessed to that no because nobody's getting a check issued on a city of liquid bank account that they then take to the bank in cash for u s currency type of thing yeah that's what we're talking about okay thank you you first just wanted to thank you so much for the presentation tonight but also over the course of the year and then joining us at our ward meetings giving people a chance to ask you questions in ward five we found it incredibly valuable and got a lot of great feedback about that i also wanted to take just a moment to thank everyone who took the survey and took the time to do that and give your input and who's here tonight really appreciate your time and your input because at the end of the day this is your money and you should decide what we do with it so thank you my question is i want to understand what the process is going to look like going forward to determine ballot language that's very influential and how people feel about this and determines whether or not they want to see it on the ballot and yet just how we're going to wheedle this all down in time for the ballot  let's see all i can offer on that subject is that in order well tabor requires any question related to tabor to be a part of the general election it can't be a part of a special election in order for a question to be presented to lakewood voters on it as a part of the general election in november this he needs to coordinate with the county clerk to have a question placed on the ballot the deadline for that would require a council action a resolution no later than council's meeting on august twenty seven beyond that i really looked to you mayor members of city council in terms of what that resolution might contain that's where my job really ends and that's the goal of tonight's of another opportunity to hear from the community and then we will address this more in depth next monday night and at that point we'll be discussing the breakdown of funds and if we're gonna have a sunset and all of that it's gonna go to the ballot of a time for everybody to bring bring their opinions okay suggestions and then the following meeting would be the  actual two weeks after two weeks after okay thank you all right any other questions for mister doar certainly mister skilling so if we did the municipal funding piece i understand that there's certain projects that would be specific maybe on the second budget thing you were talking about the is the money siloed so that if the money comes in off the table refund and it's used for a municipal project that was specifically voted on by the voters does that money stayed siloed there that makes sense yes we're very good at accounting and very transparent in that process so we would be able to show down to the dollar funds retained funds spent and all those appropriations would be authorized by city council yes what if there's an issue with one of those projects and we've got  over an overage of some kind and something that should have cost a hundred thousand now costs two hundred thousand is there prohibitions within tabor as to where other money could come from because remember you're not to take from another projects were approved and the money's all siloed how do you account for budgeting inaccuracies sure let's see tabor does not describe that in any way let me tell you that factually and i could also say i've never seen a project that didn't have issues projects always will have under runs or some overruns and we'll have to manage those as they come and typically the way we do that is through contingencies within given projects rule of thumb is ten percent typically be there and then we would have the the output at the end which describes a certain project was under budget that's that's typically our goal and then there would be some leftovers for lack of a better description that could  similar type projects and maybe other capital project funds could be used so you're right these silos they're very important and we're very good at accounting for them and very transparent as well that's that's i think the key and many times the cost overrun is due unforeseen circumstances when you're getting into construction or maybe an opportunity to add a change order that really makes sense for the community those are all really fluid but i think have to be as you said siloed appropriately and again tabor is doesn't describe any of that but it's sort of similar to the existing appropriations that city council makes for any construction project things come up and we deal with those as they come along and do it in a very transparent way  tabor project and you just mentioned change order so would have a change order we have the discretion then once it's been approved project a has been approved by the voters as a specific municipal funding they wanted to see okay if there's going to be a change order to that we have full discretion to change the direction of that or what are our constraints now that we've asked the people they've said yes this specific project we want the twelve and a half million a portion of it to go there now what happens with that project what are the parameters and i mentioned the budgeting piece but you've now mentioned the change order piece so who gets to decide what that change or like this is what i said what i've seen in the lakewood history and then also in other communities across the front range is typically a ballot question describes broadly public safety parks and recreation and transportation  otherwise the council is going to have to describe within twenty one days those exact projects to the nth degree i don't think that's probably likely i think that's probably infeasible or very very challenging at the very least so as you look a questions across the front range and in jefferson county they tend to be pretty general in terms of public safety transportation and community resources or parks and recreation and parks and open space whatever it might be the next step however is for council to adopt potentially to adopt a budget that sets forth the really fine details of what would be a contingent approved budget and then just like any budget the budgets get revised for those exact things that you describe and council has the opportunity to control those very carefully so i think that's probably the best reason for this appropriation you know tight budget that really is transparent helps the community understand what its voting for mister abel follow to that that when we label silos as you put it we label one public safety and we did that with the sales tax increase a few years back people thought well if we're given half of this to public safety then we're going to have more police and more police equipment they didn't realize it also extended to snow plowing replacement of stop signs there are so many things in the city that can be considered public safety related that it doesn't restrict us very well and how we spend that money so there are still lingering feelings in the community about that i think the more detailed we can be the better off we are or at least instead of a broad category of public safety we could do police  agency expenditures label them some way somehow that way if but if you know street sweeping is that important to other folks and maybe you know we could invite them to urge us to put street sweeping  going to follow up to mister skilling's question i think where we were going is if there was a project listed if we went with some projects it was two million dollars but it actually turned out to be three million dollars where would that delta come from well that's quite a delta first of all i don't recall having that issue in the past but to answer your question what i would envision just as with any project you know council approved one point two million dollars for lasley park and  excuse me if that worked if if the city staff were and of course they're the design of lasley park just to make this more vivid mayor the design of lasley park was a very involved community outreach effort for many months that describe the design and what it might look like now if the city staff with alt with the appropriation and the plan and all that went out to a bid for the project and it came in at two point two million i can tell you that  would involve a reengagement of the city council to say first of all how could we be so far off which didn't happen thankfully and then to here's why and here's what's necessary we can either carry forward we can go forward and do the two point two million dollar project or here's what a one two million dollar project really has to look like now and we should probably reengage the community so probably wouldn't surprise you that that would be out and that is a big number and and i know from my experience we haven't but you could also because you had a silo you could still have the opportunity it's not an enterprise fund so you could certainly come from the general fund to shore that up for completion or go into reserves or something along those lines to make it whole i just wanted to comment if we were off that much that project manager needs to be fired but besides at that point did want to make sure that that you know obviously when you're looking at the fiscal management i'm just wanting to make sure the audience was aware you know you're looking at the scope schedule the cost and you're looking at the quality and those are kind of the four pillars and so you're giving and taking upon those if you're if you're looking at you're going to have a cost under run and you're looking to that you might have had a parking lot wish list if you're having a schedule is that really does that change the cost appreciably yes or no sometimes the schedule is the one thing that can slip quality an increase in the quality of the material is a decrease in the quality of materials again so there's a lot of different ways to slice that but what i'm hearing from the community i wanted to get out there is that i'm not sure people are wanting to slice down to the project level i think its broad categories like acquisition of new open space or public safety for specific gear for our police officers to ensure their safety so i'm hearing these these broader so i just wanted to kind of point that out but but again if you know on the project management side there's a lot of ways to true that up there's contingency budget management budget risk management all those things come into play so we would want to have obviously we have professionals staff who take care of that and monitor those four pillars very carefully well sad thank you all right so we'll go back to public input if you haven't signed  speak please do so now or forever hold your peace and mister norris thank you until next week same rules apply three minutes two and a half green thirty seconds yellow and red after that and if you signed up and you don't want to speak but you want to say thumbs up thumbs down we'll accept that from the gallery maillard okay first up we had mister gomez and it looks like he left got here to sign up first and left early eva come on down say i think the surplus should go to the ballot she should go on the ballot i mean i've been to various ward for board meetings word for word five it's been a lot of discussion about the surplus and what should be done with it very vocal and quite frankly aggressive minority saying i want my money give it to me now and i've got to say they are so sure that they are speaking for everybody in our wards they should let it go to the ballot because if they think they're gonna win why are they afraid of so i think people should be entitled to vote and i'm going to speak as a property owner because we're the ones who are going to benefit most likely because it is the most efficient way to return the money i don't think that's fair the money comes from what i understand correctly it's sales tax renters pay sales tax people who work in lakewood but don't live here perry sales tax in order to return at the most equitable level i think investing in the community is the way to go more open spaces i know summer youth that's a pet project i go for that more open spaces more parks as addressed earlier in the meeting ward one is deficit in number of parks that would be an opportunity to address that balance because ward four rocks it when it comes to parks but really great um that's about it really thank you thank you so then i have kim netherto everyone you and me yep we got you awesome so hi my name is kim netherton i've been a resident here in i quit since two thousand and seven i'm a member of the working class i make below the national average a little to no retirement and i've rented the same house here in lakewood for the last eleven years in fact two of my three children were born right there in my living room i'm also a local girl scout leader and i am a state board member of working families colorado i am here in support of adding t to november's ballot one of the key tenants of tabor is the involvement of the voting public and issues of government revenue collection and spending and that's exactly what this boils down to are you representatives elected by lake woods voters willing to support our right to decide what happens to the taxes we have already paid this ballot issue would not increase our taxes nor would it prevent us from voting to increase our taxes in the future i was nowhere near old enough to vote for tabor in and ninety two but i am now very much old enough to feel the effects of tabor the intersection of tabor and gallagher has created a no win situation for those of us who live and work and raise families here in lakewood i've watched the steady decline of the quality of our streets and local parks the inability of our police to address the concerns of our community in a timely and effective manner and the exponential boom of private land development and i've heard my neighbors complain from across the political spectrum about what feels like to them a city who is uninterested and unwilling to mitigate these issues what my neighbors and so many of lake woods residents do not always understand is that effect is hobbling our access to basic city services we all want better roads and sidewalks nicer parks fewer private developers and increase public safety but because of taber's limits you all have to prioritize those needs and too often working families like my own who do not have the time and the resources to come to council meetings and ward meetings are left underrepresented underserved and bearing the brunt of budget shortfalls we also want you to consider the method of our turn current tabor refund mechanism as it stands the city collects sales tax revenues from everyone who purchases goods here in lakewood when the revenues exceed these tapers cost as taper caps as you heard the excess is typically refunded as property to property tax owners as a property tax refund how is this fair it's not nearly fifty percent of lake woods residents are renters we and unless we have a unicorn landlord which i do not have we will never see a single penny of the sometimes sixteen point eight million dollar refund that goes back to property tax owners now the people who do own property who get that maybe as a residential  owner you get about ten dollars a month one hundred dollars a year and your refund the ones who get the most walmart target king soopers these companies who already post billions of dollars in profit annually are making the most money off of these refunds but they're not putting anything back into our communities and that's not okay so we the working class of lakewood and our families would very much like you guys to consider placing  ballot so that we the people of lakewood can decide what happens to the money that we have already spent and that should go to our communities thank you thank you i have joan and  since i heard about this i've been thinking about what i might do with this refund maybe a dinner with some nice wine maybe a pair of shoes but you know what there are things i need way more than another dinner and a pair of shoes what i really need is a safe sidewalk along colfax so that i don't twist my ankle on the busted asphalt when i walk to the light rail one hundred and twenty bucks isn't gonna get me a safe sidewalk and i think about the police i need the police every day to protect myself and my property and i want our lakewood police to have up to date equipment so my refund of about one hundred and twenty bucks what would that buy like maybe a radio but if we pitch in together as citizens of lakewood i can get a safe sidewalk and police i also enjoy our parks you know when i was a young mom that's where i met my neighbors our kids became friends but what mom or dad wants to take their kid to a playground with a dilapidated playground equipment so what would my hundred and forty bucks pay for it's not gonna buy new playground equipment maybe one time mowing but if we partner up as citizens of lakewood we can have parks that are maintained upgraded and added to like this awesome idea i heard here tonight a park near westland so the great thing about city services is that they're for everybody we all need sidewalks we all need police we all can enjoy parks but none of us as individuals can pay for city services our individual sel so together we have the money so let's not dribble it away let's make lakewood a better city for everybody and keep me out of a cast when i walk to the light rail but lastly in response to councilwoman johnson's comment i'm here tonight as a citizen i voted for some of you i voted for you to make good decision for the city of lakewood i'm glad council brought this up because that shows that you guys are doing the job that you were elected to do a citizen i say thank you and thank you for listening to me tonight thank you come on down all right then i have mike molar louis witty and scott mckay will try to move fast right i've owned a house in lakewood for about fourteen years in ward one i also own another house there as a rental  i'm a real estate agent i drive around looking at houses all the time i've looked at thousands of houses with i have no idea how many people they don't ask about property taxes very often they ask about libraries they ask about schools they ask about paths walking paths and bike paths they ask about public safety crime those are the things that homebuyers care about property taxes in colorado are the tenth lowest in the country and our housing prices are the th highest and still our taxes are way down there i'd love a refund i hate paying taxes i love putting money in my pocket and kim's right i'm not gonna give that to my renter i'll keep it and you know that would be jolly but that's not the right thing to do we have so many needs in this community and we i live here because it's a great place to live i don't live here so i can keep an extra two hundred bucks a year or whatever that's not what draws people here they're drawn here by the quality of life and that requires investment in infrastructure both police and bike paths are huge to me and they're huge to a lot of the people i show houses to they always want to know where's light rail where's the bike path where's the park where's the library that's what people want to know that's why they moved to lakewood in the spirit of tabor put it on the ballot that's what tabor is about giving taxpayers a choice and the only reason not to put it on the ballot is if you're afraid it will pass thank you thank you mike muller a little sweaty scott mckay and mike schumann good evening mike mahler i some of you have heard this this little story but it just puts everything in perspective if you go to a gas station and you give a guy fifty dollars and you're gonna fill your car up and you use thirty dollars and you go back in there and you say i want my change and he says well no i'm gonna keep it because i can spend it better than you i deserve it well i don't think so but that puts everything in perspective well who's the money belongs to is the people i was set to mills and dana i hate to say this but we're gonna agree on something i was that to mills and i was standing in line at one of the shoe stores up there and there's this family that came in with four kids and you could tell they weren't real high maintenance people and when they saw the bill they the parents just swallowed because they had over two hundred and twenty dollars just in shoes and then they said where are gonna go to get get all the stuff we need to get for school and they're sitting they were dumbfounded they could close school probably where are we gonna get the money then i saw a thing on tv senior that had a five year lease on their house an old beat up house that landlord was a slumlord he hadn't done a thing on it you know their rent was i think two hundred and fifty or three hundred dollars a month cheap one one bedroom one room house it just junk he jacked the price up over one thousand two hundred dollars seniors all they wanted to is eat some seniors in our neighborhood all they want to do is eat some of these families they you know you're saying it's just one hundred and twenty five dollars but some of these seniors can live on one hundred and twenty five dollars for the month that's what they eat with some of the low income people you don't think that a husband and wife get a three hundred and fifty dollar check you don't think that'd go long ways for them especially at school time or lunch time or you know just living maybe maybe here's here's a shocker how about paying their stormwater fee bill oh that'd be a shocker wouldn't it you give us the money and then we got to pay the stormwater feedback the question should be not how you can keep the money the question should be how do you get it to the people that need the money now me i plan to do one thing with my refund i'm gonna donate it to teen challenge and specifically one hundred and sixty because all they do is handle drug and alcohol abuse for kids and they have a excellent re that is my decision that should be your decision you should be donating to these people these these places that are doing so much good donating to the city of lakewood that has a thirty million dollar budget balance they don't need the money teen challenge needs the money low income families need the money some seniors need the money especially in ward one and about i find it even hard to imagine that you would even ask the question to keep the money i it's just it just boggles my brain and when you got thirty million dollars in the bank and you're you're you're all worried about it's only three months well that three months that you have if we lost ten percent in our revenue but still be years here stay on the roads before the city was in trouble and two  hundred twelve thousand dollars less one percent of the budget you can't cut one percent of the budget staying within budget balance oh boy we need new city or city a city auditor if that's the case but that's my my  suggestions that's what i'm gonna do with my money and anybody else who wants to donate with me i would be happy to take the check down with them thank you thank you louis and then scott do think it's a great thing the council did there and i'm very supportive of putting this on the ballot it is an issue that does belong to the people and i think if the people don't want to give the money back the will tell if people want to give the money back the vote will tell that let the people talk and speak for myself i would encourage the council to draft it in a way that gives the council the most discretion within you know the parameters of the issue the three police open space i love open space so that's a big issue on my heart but you know i'm not looking at all the competing needs and i think it's important for somebody that makes this decision to do that because it may be most important to put the money somewhere that i would have no idea that that's a critical priority yet it is so i encourage you to put it on the ballot give yourself broad discretion and d bruce forever thank you thank you the newspaper the city newspaper and i was a little disappointed that it seemed like the city took one side said how do we keep and spend the refund you know i was kind of surprised they didn't ask us how can we give this refund back to the people and i it just looked very biased to me you know perhaps it could be  many good ideas i've heard tonight the stormwater fee or gosh there's been a lot of good creative ideas how to give that money back and i really don't think it's right that the the city picks one side looked very one sided to me i guess there's a bicycle group that's holding its meetings on city property talking about deep deep bruising or detailing and that that they're advocating for this i don't think that's right on on city property you know would would a anti taylor or detailer group get the same kind of treatment i just like to say please give the hailstorm that storm caused a lot of hardship for me a lot of hardship for my neighbors you know we had broken windows our roofs were wrecked it destroyed my brand new barbecue grill you know and we had to pay deductibles on our insurance to get all this stuff fixed so uh you know that that money costs us quite a bit i don't know about you guys but i don't budget for deductibles so i'd like to get some of that money back instead of the city profiting from my hardship others i know had to put their deductibles on credit cards and they've been paying interest on that i'm sure they'd like their money back um i think it's just wrong that the city's gonna profit from the hardship of the citizens and the taxpayers bill of rights allows the city to give back that money  that they need to spend to repair their lives i've also hear heard the argument that the money to each individual is insignificant compared to what the city can do with that lump sum um i think the people that argue that should count their blessings and donate that money back to the city but i work with about forty people to make between twelve and sixteen dollars an hour you know they sometimes come to the end of the office an twenty bucks on a friday to make it to pay day that twenty bucks has to last five days paydays wednesday so they're using twenty bucks to get through five days i don't know about you guys but i couldn't possibly do new shoes new clothes i think you guys probably have some type of demographics on the income level of the lakewood citizens and how many people this would definitely benefit  for over forty years i give you a little background on me i'm a graduate of the colorado school of mines i've been in the engineering profession for over forty years and from that i i want to go to two weeks ago when we had a big huge downpour on green mountain i've actually seen that before it was something else the water came down my street over the curb into my driveway rocks dirt it was way over the curb coming down into the driveway my wife and i happened to be there at the time to keep the water away from the building we spent an hour doing that with shop vac and towels and everything we could do we got as much as we could all of it we couldn't keep away from the building i have also learned since then that several of my neighbor's up there have had damage to flooding in basements i've seen and i've taken some pictures of it which i can provide to council ladies and gentlemen storms like these are going to be more likely than less likely we're in the middle of global warming here in this world and it's going to be here for a while net and if you read the reports it says we're gonna have weather extremes not just hot weather but weather extremes and these are things that will be tough so with this in mind i would like the council to seriously consider using a portion of this twelve million dollars contacted the urban drainage and flood control district and i'm working with one of their engineers over there i've done a preliminary analysis myself and it looks like there's a problem up there now what i'd like to do is put together a final report using those resources and submit it for the council to consider and and again what i'm focusing on is a way to use some of this tabor money to upgrade the stormwater system up there and without doing new taxes or new stormwater feelings i don't know how that all works i'm kind of ignorant of that at this point but i think this is going to be something we're going to be facing year after year boulders gone through it lions went through it in thirteen and it can be very expensive for all of us so thank menton mayor mayor and city councillors i i'm concerned about what is taking priority as far as spending in our city i am afraid that taxpayer money is going for things that are necessary like lawsuits against citizens various i feel that if the city would spend the money it has on the essential services it should provide for the residents in lakewood then the city would have enough money without having to ask the tax ask the taxpayers for more money but this reason i would strongly encourage you to give the twelve point five million dollars back to the taxpayers so that we can use the money however we may see fit i also and  johnson addressed this i often wondered why when you have issues that you're addressing that you only address one side of the issue and you don't let the other the opposing you know viewpoint addressed so i think that would be a good thing to do so that the and this would and because it would be fair and it would better inform the public and if tabor does go to a vote of the people the strategic growth initiative should be on the ballot also i would like an update on why it is still in the court and thank you for your time  oh i'm sorry i'm sorry land good evening good evening mayor then miss o'neill any council no hurry i think that if this is put on the ballot which  support i think it's very important that a few questions be answered there's a few things that very are very confusing to me if these are i have a list of services it says what could lifting tabor limits pay for so if you if you lift the limits and the city keeps more funds than they are going to presumably they could fund although it doesn't say they will so my question is first of all can we be assured of what will happen to the money that is retained if we vote to lift the limits i would like to have that clarified on the lakewood website and perhaps city council needs to decide are the excuse me are these the things that are listed on the sheet for public safety quality of living and quality transportation are these things definitely going to be the things that are funded no is what some people say what so i'll address that after  want to clarify what the money would be spent for if the city did retain some of the tabor what would be the refund and secondly conversely i should say if it is not lifted and the citizens get a refund is it seriously considered that we won't have these things will we still get some of these things because these seem very essential i can you know i think police  funding is absolutely essential i think we should ask the police department which things are highest priority and that we should definitely fund these things for a safe community whether or not no matter what happens to tabor we need to do this i mean why are these things the things that are only going to happen if the city retains the refund these need to be things addressed anyway i can personally tell you that one of the intersections i'm concerned about is quality transportation option five the that we need a traffic signal at west florida avenue and south union boulevard that's near that little king soopers and the road that relates down there there's a lot of traffic and now that there's more on union i mean we're just waiting for a fatal accident there we need this whether you know whether tabor whatever happens to the table funds so i'm just saying that we need clarification on how the money would be spent if the city retains it and if they do  not tane it and the citizens get a refund which of these options is going to be funded i'm very confused about this and i think we need to definitely keep our community safe keep our transportation system safe and fund our parks but why do we have to do it with the tabor money that's what i don't understand thank you all good questions we'll get as many answered as we can miss o'neil then m want my name and no we got you thank you okay your financial persons are a presentation was very impressive he said seven hundred people indicated that the city should keep the money however he did not say how many people had indicated that they that the money should be returned to the people i did not take the surveys so therefore i don't know if it allowed for this i'm sure that he realizes that the seven hundred is not representative of the whole of lakewood and i would hope that decisions are not made on such a miniscule number i personally don't know why we're even talking about this and why you want to put it on the ballot the money belongs to the people i don't care whether it's a dollar fifty dollars whatever do the right thing give the money back to the people secondly i know from experience with the council that it does not matter what the people want you are going to vote for it whether we want it or not we have experienced this previously so i guess what i want to say is if you know that you have a majority stop wasting our time thank you for listening thank you ros speakers that that hailstorm back in two thousand and seventeen it was a nastiest storm that i have ever seen since i've been in colorado and i've lived in colorado since one thousand nine hundred and eighty two it was basically if you had a car outside it was totaled i mean that's how devastating it was and i got lucky i did i i got spared but a lot of my neighbors and did not and had to spend thousands and thousands of dollars to get r fixed mailboxes fixed siding fixed i mean the list goes on and on so i'm definitely very interested in finding a way to return the money to the people that got hit by that storm  second of all on the survey i definitely liked the idea of having a community survey i participated in it a couple of questions that i wish were on it and one was talked about earlier is how do you i'm how to refund the money i definitely agree that that should have been on the survey and the second question of it would have liked to have on the survey is how can the city actually save money without increasing taxes and i would have really enjoyed that to have that on the survey i have a couple ideas that that could help on one the city of westminster and el paso texas are actually both doing and that is do an extended four day work week so instead of doing a like a five eight hour work week schedule you do a four ten hour work week and where that would help you is  bills air conditioning heating and that's money that's being wasted right now and that could be used for a lot of different things that people were talking about earlier i am number two is this we haven't seen as much in this area but it's a technique called asphalt asphalt pavement recycling and what that does is it's a fairly large machine that you bring over some areas in need need street maintenance with the air alligatored streets and that sort of thing that we see all over and what that does is instead of having to write a mill the street get rid of the asphalt pavement come in with new asphalt repave and it takes a lot of time and a lot of money and all that it's just one step the asphalt that's there stays in place and they add a bunch of um tar and that sort of thing to it in and out you actually get fairly brand new looking street and performing street doing that so that's another potential option but there's tons of different often so i would have really liked to see that in the survey and that wasn't in there um one other thing i just like to mention real briefly is citizens of lakewood and colorado in whole have been seeing a lot of nickel and dime tax increases over the years and just one example the next election we're probably going to be seeing a mill levy increase with urban drainage from zero point five eight to one zero that's fairly large increase their school district they're probably go levy increase and it's a potential of a income tax increase one other thing that nobody really talks about a whole lot is these trade tariffs that are going on we're actually increasing inflation so every single good and service we're buying is costing more money because of that and that and that hurts everybody so that's just another thing i people keep in mind so my recommendation is to return the money and try to find a way to return it to the people especially the people hit by the storm so thank you thanks for coming out come on down i didn't figure you to have anything to say about this so i wasn't gonna hold my peace first of all rtd lakewood pd lakewood city council is the only one of the agencies that we deal with that requires that we pay it to the city i don't know why that is but we actually have to pay rtd tax payers funders all of that pay an additional two dollars per hour extra above the forty dollars per hour that we pay the off duty police officers so if you want to remove that from the taper revenue i don't know what is stopping this city because denver doesn't do it aurora doesn't do it i know you had mentioned that so keep that in mind please and i looked up the chief tarbert email forum the other night when i heard that come up be happy to forward that to you the way i look at this issue is in the same way that week all we have a wide variety of opinions on the the limited growth growth issue right for me it was about property rights it was about voters having the ability to dictate property rights of individuals here in lakewood i view the tabor refund as my property not community property it's each individual citizen here it's their property by putting it to a vote you're allowing the fifty one people in a room of a hundred to say what's gonna be done with my property i have an issue with that i think there is a solution there are folks in the room here who are happy to let their money go to another park or a street or something else there are some who want that money for whatever reason it may be there are people in our community that trust me as i've talked to people out there you cannot imagine the ways that this would even if it's a smaller amount of money how it will help them and we'll be sharing those stories with the community and by the way i was kicked out of clemens rec center senior center going to ask some folks about this initially i was told this was soliciting when i was asked their opinion i think there is a solution that would make everybody happy and that is why i wanted to put this piece of paper up here and describe the situation i believe one of the most fair ways to do this would be to get the list of the voters here in l and i've already done the legwork on this and what i did is i took the latest vote list of voters in liquid as of june th i then bumped it up against the list if you know data you know what that means of those who also lived here mid year last year so out of that i was able to generate a list of ninety three thousand people and some change who had lived here roughly a year so we know they generated part of this tabor revenue and they're still living here we have their address we have their name we have their voter id anytime you do a database you want a unique identifier that's their voter id number why do we need the voter id number because i would like the city to use are looking at lakewood to publish notice in this fall's edition and instead of pushing to keep the tabor refund what the state to the citizens is for those who want to contribute it back to the city you have until december st to go to a portal liquid org look up their voter id which you can do by going to go vote colorado com you will punch in your voter id and lakewood will already have this unique identifier because they have access to the voter rolls the person can go there before you even send out refund checks and say i want the city of lakewood to keep my refund and on that portal is going to be a little check box here's where i want my money to go berks streets police all of the above before we even send out the checks we have a list of people who want the city to keep it great now but by default oh i'm out of time okay when we're resident you can return this check return it and mark what you want the money to go for everybody's happy thank you go ahead and do this if you want there's that all right great thank you all very much very thoughtful public feedback tonight so we really appreciate that and want to touch on a couple things mister clough if you have a council would probably be more than happy to hear some of your ideas and maybe we're already doing them i know we do some different things with asphalt so please send us a email we'd like to hear some different things that you have going on the list that is the list from all the departments of things that are needed are important and so that list was huge for all three of them then it was cold down for the two and then brought down to what basically twelve and a half million dollars could provide if that's exactly the route council wanted to take with that and will that stuff get funded it will eventually right that's part of the budget and that was my understanding from the presentations from mr doar that eventually that stuff will be funded this would be an acceleration of that and now i've heard and i think you've heard tonight council wants to have a discussion and so that isn't what would be presented maybe it will be after next week but you're gonna be able to hear next week more of kind of the whole body decision of where they want to go do they want to go project specific do they want to go to a proportion of a whole amount do they want it to all go to one thing or do they want it to go nowhere so that'll really be where we go from from next week and this was the opportunity tonight to have another another hearing on th so i i want to be care i don't want to get in too much engagement from the dyess but i thank you so these are priorities mr doran if you want to elaborate a little bit more i mean these are things that are important we are a safe community you know we have all those attributes but these are things that we could accelerate things that are gonna be needed mister doar let's see so my recollection of the of the basket of projects and so forth is first  the neighbor in in the area of police agent count or police agent services i don't think that an additional ten agents necessarily will be added at any time in the future you know certainly that's council's prerogative to juggle the priorities of the community but you just saw the city's operating surplus two hundred and eleven thousand dollars it's just not the capacity to add to our base of two hundred and seventy five police agents so that that's that programming dimension of things in terms of the capit projects the capital projects don't exist in the current five year plan they may or may not become a part of the plan in the future but they certainly wouldn't be done in the next five years within the capital improvement and preservation plan so you know again that's as you said that that could accelerate those things from not being on the plan at all to being on the plan next year or maybe some of them you know might not ever make it on to the plan that's sort of to be determined in the coming number of years okay so okay all right but i imagine certain certain of those facilities will eventually you know either have to be removed or rehabilitated in some fashion but yes would make that change sooner but but these priorities weren't just hey just pick some things that you want i mean these are on a list for a reason clearly i think as i mentioned in my presentation the three are three leaders in the organization our police chief public works director and community resources director very thoughtfully with their staffs looked at community needs that have been identified for example i think i referenced our recent community resources outreach to the to the public  liquid priorities in the community resources area they took feedback from those on things like restrooms park playgrounds and things like that's i think i mentioned the one of the things i remember from one of my earlier presentations was the splash the sprayground slide that i had and that that's an amenity that's not a current part of our plan but something that could be brought to bear in some of our community parks all right so the long and the short of it is some of those might be on future budgets some of them may not it may accelerate some but ultimately what this body discusses and decides next week will get to either a more defined list a list that exists or percentages or nothing so i would encourage you to stay tuned on that and before i go to some questions or comments from council i had one more ball i'm glad that you are working with urban drainage i appreciate that and if you maybe just want to give your contact information to the gentleman in front of you we can make sure that you have the right folks at the city as you are inquiring about the the storm issues up there so yep okay all right counsel ms johnson thank you i'm intrigued by natalie's proposition it seems to help with both sides of the issues i'm curious what would that cost to the city to structure something like that do we would we have i want to give it some analysis to try to figure out what that would cost one of the things about issuing checks that is tricky is that we need to have the recipient of the check certify what their social security number is so that we can provide the appropriate notice of receipt of the funds for example if you've ever gotten a refund of income tax paid to the state of colorado you you know that after you get that refund later on in the mail they've already been able to verify what your social security number is and can provide to you a notice of what your refund has been because that could adjust the individual income tax that you o so any disbursement would require kind of a two way communication but certainly a voter registration id that is something that can be done we can verify who those people are we can divide the money evenly just as it was described that something that could be done at councils direction but this interplay of writing a check and where does it go of course we have to print checks they have to be mailed whatever the case maybe there would be some overhead but i'd want to do some analysis of that but one of the things that is somewhat labor intensive is again verifying the social security number of the individual who's receiving the fonz that's something that has to be done and that could be labor intensive abel couple of things along that line though it seems to me a few years back the state was going to give us a refund and they cast it as the sales tax refund believed in order to avoid the very thing you're talking about which is an extra obligation to the federal government because of that refund do you call  recall the details i've lived in colorado many many years i don't recall getting a check at my house but it could be though that the credit was made on your individual income tax return i think that's how it's been done in years past in other words you do your individual income tax return believe they said it was the causa does a refund of sales tax and therefore it was not part of your federal gross income calculation the other thing is along with all of this conversation we had a reminder that two weeks ago we had one heck of a storm and it did a lot of damage all across town what we're talking about it's not enough to aid with storm water in fact as you pointed out mayor we probably couldn't take take more than i think you can only increase in our ad to an enterprise fund less than ten percent mister doar from general fund or other sources so we wouldn't be able to use this for that purpose but we have to find a way to address these stormwater needs and i'm not sure that ruling out revenue bonds was prudent in view of all the needs so i think we need to come back and revisit that at some time in the near future  there was a lot of damage last week two weeks ago certainly okay thank you for so we certainly have our work cut out for us council i think that we've heard a lot i'd encouraged the group to to get any questions answered through staff this week and i think stormwater will be coming back we'll have another presentation and i know some of that's dedicated to one of the gulches but certainly yeah we know we're looking at just a thirty five million dollar potential project there but it one project and it equals the projects needed is in the one hundred and twenty one hundred and thirty one hundred and forty range so i have a couple lights on do you have questions or comments okay just process certainly mister skilling so next week we have more community input and then there's going to be a larger discussion by us as i understand it that's th and then there was an august th deadline was that for a second reading because i was trying to figure out first and second it's just a resolution so we don't need to do all the readings okay so along this process we've got next week what are we going to do what will be the conclusion of next week's meeting are we going to have resolution language that we will then vote on two weeks from then are we planning on voting on language a week from now what are we doing so what what i would envision is that we would come to a consensus on if we want to one do this or not and if we're going to do it then we need to give direction pretty tight on to staff and also you know have a fluid conversation with our attorney as to what can and what can't be a part of that ballot and that's why i think some members have been curious about could you do one question then could you do another question that said do you want it here here here here so if you have those kind of in mind if we could get those you know out this week and then maybe have some sort of feedback to all accounts el that covers that for our discussion would be helpful miss hudson what would be most beneficial for for staff as far as what you're going to need and process wise to help make it make it meaningful yes thank you i believe it's just what you're saying so for this next week if you can really be thinking about what those parameters are a do you want to send it to the voters or not so that's kind of the first question and and if the answer is no then we're done but if the if the answer is yes then how do you want it to go to the voters what do you want that question to be do you want to determine  sunset and and what is that sunset do you want it to be the dollars to be earmarked for certain programs or certain elements of your local government and if so what do you want that to be so if you would be thinking about that and direct staff on the th and will come up the attorneys will come up with our best draft of a resolution and then could be half a dozen we're hoping for that conversation to be during the th and you are vetting those out in terms of the time if indeed it goes to the ballots we'll make that assumption for a moment so then you decide you direct staff  do you want that sunsetted do you want it to go to certain programs how do you want this to be handled if you can whatever direction you can give up to us then we'll turn that into a resolution that you will actually take a formal vote on the  th okay and i think one of the pluses maybe about the th and the discussion on th is it's not a study session so it's not going to be consensus they'll actually be an opportunity to vote on how we want to go i mean not vote but but i mean call it down to something that's that's yeah so that's my question okay yes that's accurate okay paul be quick i just wanted to add a little bit more since next meetings discussion is gonna be where a lot of decisions need to be made that it's important as mr doar said earlier that you know this is  unusual amount of money but there's no guarantee that we won't have other storms that make for this unusual peak and valley so i think it you know we just need to be cognizant of that and i also wanted to bring forth them some citizens have been to other meetings and bringing forth the idea of well can we look at reducing fees for things that way we have we don't have an overage or as much of an overage so certainly want to throw those things out there but for folks who want to kind of bring their ideas forth because we'll certainly have public comments but that's all the things that we're looking at is you know yes no on the ballot then if if it's yes then what is the uses that we're going to say that we're going to put out there and then if those uses what are we going to say about any caps what are we going to say if yes or no and about a timeline with a three year timeline a sudden you know a perpetual those are all the discussions and then are there ways that we can equitably give you know reduce fees in order to have less of an overage as part of the discussion as well so it's a pretty broad based discussion so please everyone out there watching and those in the audience we need a lot of rich feedback in the next in the next week in order to have a real productive conversation which means questions need to be given to staff with time for them to come with answers and so just be sure that you are and feel free whatever you want to do send it to all of us send it to a couple of us we're making sure to kind of feed it all in to make sure we get as much information back to back to  our constituents and then can speak to as much from the dyess and next week as possible miss vincent and i was going to reiterate some of those same things so thank you but a clarification because i think there is maybe some misunderstanding out there as far as some of the community members that i've talked to the table question if it gets on the ballot has nothing to do with the refund that has to be decided by october is that correct so we have to refund some money that decision how has to be done by october will not impact yeah thank you i i know that gets confused and that's one of the functions of tabor is that you have financial activities in two thousand seventeen you have council decision in two thousand and eighteen and then the refund gets made in two thousand and nineteen so the twelve million five hundred and thirty six five hundred and four is pending it has not been made yet and what council would do is decide that in its budgetary process and in its mill levy setting and its choice of refund and that would be implemented in two thousand and nineteen or not because if the voters choose something different it overrides really what coun in and the opportunity to have this public session and i would echo counsel please please get your questions anything you know nothing's too small or dumb get your questions to staff and let's try to be ready  for a good conversation next monday night i wanted to go through and see if there are any committee updates from the committee's that our folks serve on so i'll just go down the list i think budget not it moving jefferson county economic development corporation that's me just certainly always looking at new business prospects there's a bunch that are interested in jefferson county and also some talk along the lines of  doing a foreign trade zone designation for the whole county which could then benefit all the cities that are involved and those can be somewhat complicated so i don't want to try to give a report on that tonight especially in case i mess it up so it's kind of having the summer off d thank you we've also had a number of meetings canceled for the summer but what we're working on now is there's a new process to apply for transportation funding through doctor cog instead of going through a regional allocation it's going through a sub regional allocation which for us is with jefferson county and so we are in the middle of getting that process up and running that's great and as you can imagine regional is sixty some and so now we're getting it to sub which is six seven or eight but it can still be like making sausage not easy head start  yes we meet and we do have representation on that board and we meet the fourth thursday of every month at seven o'clock at the taj mahal or the jefferson county yes and that's a for the folks who may not know that's a heavy duty board where you are actually part of a group from throughout the county looking at folks who are perot lling from prison into the community and it's good  do have representation on there because we do have the community corrections in fact right there on board too so it is good and it's it's not um it's it's a hard committee let's just say that and we actually have both say that i advocate or at least ask every time regarding the interchange at watts worth at six and particularly the sound wall that needs to go up along six avenue and obviously it's a funding issue thank you i'm judge's salary committee i don't think i think that'll come a little bit later i don't think there's any updates legislative committe johnson thank you well i am biased and frankly i feel like it's the most important committee that the city has everybody on this committee understands the significance of what we're doing and that we are actually working on your behalf and having input on at a state level regarding government in legislation and it's not to be taken lightly the way that we have organized this is that we take votes on certain bills only those bills that affect lakewood directly and we only weigh in on those bills in which we have a strong opposition or a strong support and based on our vote and then that vote will go forward to our legislators in the process at this point of analyzing those bills that we weighed in that heavily on and to actually see what happened to them and to see if we oppose something if it passed i'm very interested on on how that's going for us frankly i want to make sure that we're using our political clout appropriately and get an idea if we're actually weighing in on the right bills so that's still in process petitions were due today for ballot initiatives so we will know very shortly just what is actually going to be on the ballot there were a number of petitions that were turned in and the mayor has alluded to the fact that we are looking at teaming up with the league of women voters and after we know what's on the ballot actually having a spotlight on channel eight and having spokespersons on both sides of the issue not a debate but actually just a presentation on what the issues are and how both sides see it so there's a lot going to talk a little bit about that the seizure fund is usually comes from property or equipment that is seized by the federal government th ey sell it and there's funds available so our police department can go ahead and apply for some of those funds as a date as of today we have not requested we are revising the questions that we've been asking applicants for our various boards and commissions of believe the questions are probably fifteen twenty years old and some of them don't  carry much weight anymore so but we've been revising those and should be we're about done we had we're looking at planning commission soon and then we'll come back to you you got to feed them and unfortunately i wasn't there that night because it was the night before my husband's surgery so i know that you all enjoyed them and it was a wonderful opportunity so thank you and thank you to the city  you put on a great show mary did an incredible job and they really did enjoy their state and we have a group coming next month from staad germany so we'll have the opportunity to mingle with them another one of our sister cities we'll keep you posted urban drainage you heard a little bit earlier about a mill levy increase they're actually looking at de bruising measure that would increase their their dollars about twenty three million dollars a year and as you've seen the storms and and all the things that have gone on they definitely could utilize those dollars but that'll be up to the communities to decide but they have a pr campaign going out there just to educate folks on what exactly hermit drainage does and if there's any questions about that you can contact me and i can get you in touch with those folks but it is a it's a pretty cool organization that deals with not only flood issues but also a lot of the open space surrounding our wetlands and water lands and in the enhancement and kind of cleaning of the platte river and things like that we get grant funding from them matching dollars to do stable stabilization projects cleaning projects things along those lines so that's what you may see on the ballot from urban drainage and that is all we have from committees so of money is coming into campaigns through independent expenditure committees and issue committees we want to make sure that those are as transparent as possible so we want folks to know who's spending money on our elisions right development dialogue m is our next meeting it's the most most attended committee that we have probably combined of all the committees so yes our membership will take credit for that attendance  it's a really good time people should come out listen to everything happening with mixed use but in all seriousness we are making a lot of headway making a lot of progress and we should be actually making some drafting from to six thirty p m and will begin to start looking at the policy recommendations from the housing study as well as you know what the makeup looks like of a housing type advisory committee who those members should be what organizations or industry should be represented and start to move that forward so that'll be the first meeting and i think there'll be a synergy back and forth hopefully between the development dialog in the said just reiterate that we are having our ward two meeting on wednesday at seven thirty in the morning at the forty west building and then we're gonna have an additional one on saturday at eight in the morning and at eight thirty in the morning and that will be more geared towards having more discussion on taper and our mayor will be there so it should be a good time so i hope you'll attend and that will be at the forty west building as well next should be great what time okay mister abel our word one meeting was saturday we had a great presentation on the development of a family justice center in the jeffco da's office that would combine all of the social and legal services in a one stop location so that folks don't have to make repeated trips to the county building at great expense and dragging kids along or escorting their kids with them and i would encourage all of our wards to have this presentation it's very interesting miss harrison a couple of things first of all i know we don't have general business tonight but i did want to let everybody dana and i are working on getting a nuisance slash pet rodent subject onto the agenda at some point so that we can kind of address what we've hollered and i just want to say i am very blessed to have a man who supports me in every single way and he felt like he was defending me we had a discussion later that maybe him attending our ward meetings may not be the best solution for him because he does want to support me at the very end the the point that was made was maybe a little misleading or i don't know but  blessed to have a man that loves me so i just want to say honey stay home and i love you a lot and then the third thing is action center is really really really looking for any school supplies that you are willing to drop by this is they donate to well over five thousand kids in jefferson county to help them and we talked earlier in as we were discussing parents really have a hard time figuring out this time of year what to do and how to pay for it so if you can help them out that would be wonderful thank you skilling another word for newsletter went out this month and it's pulitzer worthy as usual but i can take as usual also no credit for that so another great job by councillor franks on the newsletter if you're not getting it you should get it and i will let her explain what's coming up this saturday at  stay tuned for the next forty five seconds it's exciting his good wine thank you just also wanted to add a thank you on behalf of ward five for chief floor fast as possible job that's being done while also stressing that they all want to continue to see that until the project is all the way finished so just a thank you and on in happy anniversary honey one of these it's it's creepy i got married when i was three so i'll be home soon honey that's it congratulations vincent i just want to say i guess saturday is gonna be a very busy day you can go right on the interurban car twenty five and then of course you'll attend the ward two meeting first before you go do that and then you can come back and go to mural fest i cannot live up to that lead in so we're just gonna pale in comparison our reward for meeting is going to be this saturday the th from nine thirty to eleven zero in the same place green mountain presbyterian church and the topics will be tab and trash so we've got the two two hot button issues and of course any other topic that folks want to discuss a couple other things i wanted to let folks know is on september th and th that is when the festival italiano in belmar is and zero waste services is involved in that and they are looking for volunteers and the slot that i'm in has an opening so if anybody wants to be there with me and help kind of talk that through so but be sure to sign up if you want to help with that it's basically giving out information and also being kind of the dumpster monitor to make sure things that should not be in the trash get diverted and then the other thing that i wanted to mention was let me get it up here is some folks have been a little not sure where the non emergency calls should be going and so i just wanted to call attention to the fact that we now have jeff comm so basically a centralized place where it dispatches the local police fire and emergency medical services and so that number and somebody catch me if i'm wrong i think i got it right three oh three nine eight zero seventy three hundred and then for the hearing impaired three hundred and three nine eight oh seventy three thirty five are the two numbers of course continue to call nine hundred and eleven cs and don't be taken aback it won't be answered as lakewood it's going to be answered under the jeff comm so that's thrown a few people so just want to make sure folks know about that change okay mister roybal great i just wanted to bring everybody to our attention that we're going to be having a community picnic on the  rededication starts at ten thirty and then the actual picnic starts at noon so please everybody come down lastly park florida and pierce thank you thank you all right so i will just follow up and close us out with national night out is tomorrow night there'll be plenty of opportunities lots of parties going on in all neighborhoods throughout lakewood i think we got the list today and it's quite long at least forty forty five different parties happening so get out there enjoy your neighbors meet your first responders i think we try to have police show up to just about everyone if they can so that should be a lot of fun and a lot of good stuff going on in lakewood this weekend it sounds like so get out and enjoy and i'll just close with thoughts and prayers to the o'donnell family as our police our police folks are  are reminded every day of the challenges that they face and the dangers that are out there so we we wish him a speedy recovery and miss hudson will have an update for us next week but we certainly are thinking of him and his family during this challenging time and with