evening i'd like to call to order the lakewood city council study session in the city of lakewood colorado on april april nd two thousand and eighteen at seven p m in council chambers this is also  world autism awareness day so i think that kicks off a month of autism awareness and we will kick that off here tonight so with that with a clerk please call roll huh johnson present tonight and our first thing up is going to be an update on our housing study this is a by the third fourth fifth time we've had this opportunity but now it's really starting to get in from what it looks like on a piece of paper to what it looks like on the ground level so with that i will turn it over to nanette who looks like she's waiting for david who is here yeah he's here i think he went to the restroom well here's the deal if you remember i think the last time he was here was the national the ncaa football championship night and tonight is the n c double a basketball championship tonight so well i'll i'll set the stage and then i'm sorry i apologize we had as the mayor said about five study sessions on the housing study and it was all the groundwork that was laid it was a lot of data compile ssin to paint a picture of what lakewood looks like and some of the kind of cohorts that kind of indicate what housing needs could be like depending on what policy decisions were made as a result of that the last minute he had was a draft you received a draft a report we had all the data that voluminous over the many study sessions that you had with the idea that we would next the next dialogue would start the policy discussion wanted to emphasize that policy the policy discussion that we're starting is david's going to give you a presentation of the background for those three council members that were not here and sit adan seated on counsel to give you kind of a highlight of the executive summary then he'll pose a bunch of questions to you entering in and having the desire to have a dialogue to start having you think of what are those policies that you want to start considering putting in place and then he'll start going through the pros and cons of policies so you have a sense of which ones that you want to go because the policy direction comes from you but he's trying to be here to be the facilitator for you to bring up the correct policy discussion so with that david you're up already i was sandbagging a bit here for you then that you did a very nice i'm fashionably late at three minutes and twenty five seconds well first of all i just like to say it's very nice to be in front of you again i'm sorry it's been six months i know that there have been a lot of things take place between then and now but we and i there are three new faces that i don't that i'm not familiar with but i'm sure that through this discussion we can generate some level of familiarity this is the fifth time we've a conversation about this this effort and as most of you know it's an important one and as minette just said i'm just here as a facilitator of this discussion we've provided some analysis weigh in a draft report form format with findings a limited number of findings and those are and i want to discuss generally some of the directions that can't could be taken see they're generally kind of four paths moving forward and what some of the consequences of those paths moving forward might be it's not a comprehensive list but it's really just jet i've really just generated this for the sake of facilitating and conversation that all of you can have amongst yourselves and with me as a backstop as well so let's just let's just dive right into this so i'd like to review the process with you al for the sake of the three three new council members i'd like to review the the process that we've gone brief process that we've gone through we want to cover some of the major conclusions of that and then go through those the cons of some of the some of the  limited number of consequences to efforts that might be oriented toward four different categories of paths that you could take and then discuss that where we i'd like to establish some type of policy direction and then we can talk about next steps in establishing policy actions i want to steer clear in my role of suggest of of recommending or shall we say making policy decisions for you that's not my role i can make a bunch of suggestions to you and i can i can give you best practices i can give you case studies and in some cases i have done that for some of these ideas but really i want them to come from all of you and from a discussion so this i think is going to be a two phase discussion this tonight is the first phase of discussion when thinking about how to make policy really there is the prism when you establish you want to do this much with this much money and you wanted to accomplish this is a policy action item and i don't think that it would be fair to all of you to stand in front of you and suggest xy and z and a b and c are the things that you should do even from our professional  perspective i don't think that that's our role to stand here and say in just one session to you that that's what we think you should do take it or leave it and then i'm done i so backing up i think that the more appropriate direction to take is to have a conversation with you about or not you see the store the narrative of what's going on in the city in the same way what you think the issues are whether you agree with some of the issues that have been identified in the in the study and then discuss what direction you want to take and that direction is a political position and so that's the conversation that i want to have tonight the first one is just a bit of reorientation on the on the study itself so these five questions on the left side were were some of the guiding questions to the study well housing continue to meet residents needs that is existing residents and future residents how does housing impact economic development is housing is the housing makes adequate for a changing demand is the supply of housing in desirable neighborhoods and how does housing create a vibrant community some of these are some of these are kind of value laden as well but i think that those were value laden in the in in the first sense because they are they do require a bit of a value judgment from the political the policy perspective so in terms of the data analysis there was a many of you will recall the massive amount of information we have covered in some of our other other work sessions but we also included a survey of major employers we had thirteen hundred plus responses to that analysis covered demographics it covered economics it covered worker resident preferences the housing market an assessment of where then we're in to what extent there were neighborhood amenities and proximities of housing to neighborhood amenities  so and we tried to address number of questions that came up throughout the process there are some questions that that a few of you had many of you had through the process and we tried to address those if there are some things that you've seen in the draft reports draft report that are missing please do still let us know because i think we've received councilman karen's responses or questions but i don't think we've had many other takers on comments on the draft report so please do avail yourself of the report at least the executive summary and and give us your feedback it'll be very helpful and then just a reminder so are just the discussions that we had were last february march june  august and then we took our hiatus well none of we are all on vacation i think between then and now is that right i know i haven't been so some of the some of the limited findings i think pulling out of the executive summary looking at the the higher level stats here the the city's experienced in the last fifteen sixteen years a trend of growing by three jobs for every one new housing unit now  we can have a discussion about what that means later on or you can raise your hand now and and maybe we can have a discussion about it but from our perspective and having and looking at other cities around the country thinking about what it means for the msa thinking about what it means for lakewood they comes with a question and the question is do you want to grow your supply of housing so that you can accommodate your new workforce so people are people are coming here for jobs and so the question i'm embedded in this statement is really a question do you want to accommodate your new your new job holders and do you want them to live here that's the question underlying that that statement so the workforce is growing top performing industries are relying increasingly on in commuters that's another part that's another component of this trend is that increasingly people are choosing just to as they retired continue to live in lakewood which is a great thing  but with a constrained housing supply that means that people are that means that new job holders are having to commute in so that has so that has implications that has questions underneath it as well local population not grown in proportion city and region are facing unprecedented growth pressures from the under s and the over s so those are those are unprecedented patterns that the city is experiencing and the msa by the way and of course the last piece limited land to address these patterns and trends  although the city did facilitate a growth in the targeted growth areas that were identified in the comp plan and mainly infill or redevelopment is is what's going on now and so i know that embedded you know in these statements  are are a number of considerations that i'd like all of us to discuss or at least i'd like you all to ask questions about and discuss stated preferences from the workforce survey the high level takeaways choosing where to live cost the cost of housing and the quality of construction are the two topmost considerations for everybody doesn't matter what age they are everybody says the cost is important and the quality of construction is important under s and this is not to say that this is not important to them because this remember is top ranking but under thirty five their next highest ones are they want to live near parks shops transit but they're still mindful of safety and security just like most everybody else's the thirty five to fifty fours cost is less important but they want characters so they're kind of in the working families place and they're interested more in character schools short commute to work over fifty five s then begin to look for lower maintenance living and proximity the services that are very important to them so the the high level finding without the numbers attached to it is that if only if those that are just working in the city wanted to live here that is of the workers we surveyed representative of workforce we if they wanted to live here based on weather needs were the city would have an under supply of housing in those areas and that's for all those areas that's foreseen that and all those all those demographics that's for seniors who want to live in proximity to services for aged care for supportive services so on and that's the under s as well so i want to reiterate this study is not just about new residents and meeting their demands this sir that this study is not just about identifying the needs of the under s this is not just about one demographic and this is not just about one population so tonight i want to look at at four different paths we think that the city has one is is is the supply path you can add inventory the second is the demand path you can make you can enhance the community character and just simply make it lakewood yet a more attractive place to live you can identify resources augmenting how we do business making it better to do business in the city of lakewood and you can also take a hands off approach you can let the market do what it's going to do whatever that is the other said there was a chinese proverb said something like unless we change direction we're likely to end up where we're headed and so you can take that how you want but it can go either way so the first one is let's talk about some of the supply side all right so one of the options is we can build out but which way so the the building out is what lakewood has historically done and when we looked at this i don't know maybe it was the last march maybe it was june or something we looked at some maps and we looked at the percent of housing inventory that was built at a certain in a certain decade we saw this general pattern of the the you know that southwesterly movement of  growth and so as lakewood had land to accommodate the growth that was great was fine so now we're up against some boundaries we're up against we're up against other other areas so building out the pros we have new residential locations or areas that can facilitate the traditional development patterns there are probably there would prop to accommodate the additional growth that would probably mean because it's traditional development we would maybe find fewer  problems than we do today i'm not sure that's just a suggestion on the con side we'd have to look at annexation and that's and that gives us into nimby concerns obviously potentially negative fiscal impact to this city because it is in the state of colorado where we have very low property taxes new residential development doesn't exactly pay for itself and i think councilman dave wickman mentioned that in one of our past discussions that you know or  made that made that point about new residential development on its own costs the city more than a combination of mix of uses so that's one way we could also build up and this is just an illustration i've also overlay those targeted growth areas in the purple areas and then you know i'm imagining hong kong style fifty to ninety story building i'm kidding not really so build up in targeted growth areas this is the other supply direction so this avoids annexation challenges it would it would go in line with medium difference demand segments by adding housing near community amenities and transit commercial corridors all those kind of things that that some of those demographics are looking for it and if they're in the transit areas it would lower the transportation system impacts because when you think about it in commuting in commuters of new job holders so the city's doing a really great job building its business base and building its job base but if the in commuters are increasing that means you have more people coming in who are not living here and contributing their sales tax dollars they're not spending they're spending maybe ten percent of their retail expenditure in the community and then they're spending ninety percent outside of lakewood but meanwhile they're driving on the roads and they're creating to the potholes they're contributing to the potholes and the wear and tear and the roads so the city's left with all of the the road this road and street onm but not the revenue to to take care of it so the khans nimby our concerns in this case are likely hurt are likely or anytime you're dealing with infill development or redevelopment you're facing nimmy concerns if it's not in transit areas then it would again still in even if you do in in build up in some growth areas but they're not in those target in the transit areas then you're still increasing the transportation infrastructure impacts by simply adding more cars to the roads so the next so another way to go is addressing this the demand side and i tried to find some you know pc images because i recognized and was it was told to me that my my presentations and have enough images in them and they and and they were they were sometimes difficult to digest i can appreciate that i'm i'm not really a marketer per se and i i don't do the softer side of things so i'll let you all think of the softer side of things but i still found a little silhouette of you know what i thought were under s so increasing attractiveness to the under s what does that mean what's what are the pros and the cons all right so let's think about this the under  s spend a lot of their money on on all the things that they want to live near you know parks shops transit dining entertainment so that creates new local residents from the new job holders now and in the future so this is also the the demographic of in our mind these are also tomorrow's buyers of lakeridge traditional housing stocks so you know getting the people in the community and then when they want to move up into the you know the the single family dream then they can because there is the housing stock so the the pro side of this is retail spending goes up that is they are bringing in their sales that their their retail expenditure city sales tax revenues then follow suit and go up proportionally  the major transportation investment that they are theoretically looking for in their stated preferences is already made for example the west line is there on the con side the fourth bullet identifies the fact that i think that we think that the feeder transportation system however is a little bit inadequate to support that at the moment but there are there is currently in our estimation under nine percent of the housing stock optimally located near retail shopping restaurants and transits transit and we looked at some of these maps in a previous presentation and i think if we have pulled those up or if we have them available we might be able to look at those from a different presentation if you want to see those but the other side thing is that this this demographic is sensitive to entry level pricing commercial reinvestment abreva revitalization takes a lot of time and a lot of money and a lot of a lot of private investment so would either mean catalytic develop the catalytic investment on the city city side but it certainly means that enhancing the attractiveness for this age group means there still is a lot of commercial revitalization that would need to take place and it also does add to population and transportation impacts just like all of this kind of this this kind of development does alright so what would it look like to address the needs or the the stated preferences of the thirty five to fifty fours  these are working families pros the existing housing stock is what families with children are and still will be looking for in the future i think i've mentioned this in the past every single survey we've done of local populations  workforces has shown that in the future even the younger demographics who say they want to live in one of those third spaces in a micro unit and they just want to live next to starbucks and you know look at their iphones even they say in five ten years when their lifestyle changes when their life stage changes they're gonna be looking for this housing stock like what has this housing stock so the pro is to enhance an attractiveness to this this demographic is it also puts children in the schools and avoid school for closures again local retail spending increases in the appendix of the the draft report is a chart that identifies consumer expenditures data  that is based on a national survey and this is consistent even when we do local retail surveys this age group has the highest spending of all the demographics thirty five to fifty four the next highest is just the under s so city sales tax revenues increase this is the highest fiscal impact from these from these households the other side is and there i want to say there really aren't too many cons about about maintaining or enhancing the effect the attractiveness of a community to any of these aid groups it's not like we're saying one age group is better than the other or we don't want any of these people or we don't want any of those people that's not really what we're saying but in thinking about what the quantify things are about this so many have expressed an interest in the housing stock being located within walkability to transit in schools for their demands in five years so those are the people who were are currently in the thirty five to fifty or four year old bracket are they thinking in the future about where they want to be when their kids are out of school are they thinking about where they want to be simply in five years even if their kids are in school nevertheless that still that still creates this disconnect where only nine percent of the city's housing stock is is located in this area that's a limited number of housing units and in the numbers that we've calculated which are in the executive summary that is still a number of several thousand units that could be added in these in these proximities i'm not making any kind of a case for a certain housing product type that's more of a zoning issue and that's more of a community issue a neighborhood issue  but these these these folks are also sensitive to enter your level pricing and sensitive pricing in general and again same as the the under s commercial reinvestment and revitalization takes a lot of time takes a lot of money maintaining and enhancing attractiveness to the over fifty five s i think in terms of that this is a smaller list but this ensures that residents who do live here have housing options in retirement to stay in lakewood i've heard lots of anecdotal stories about people saying they have to leave their home because there simply aren't the supportive services to deal with the problems they're facing and that and and that that means things like rehabbing their houses retrofitting their houses with with railings and all that kind of stuff on the other hand there is you know limited low maintenance housing stock there is limited capacity for services for aged care and there are really a lot of private partners that are needed to make this work because i don't think that cities are generally the most effective at getting into this kind of a business although facilitating is another thing the third the third path the city could take is identifying resources this is this is less a path and more of a means to getting to a path but i did want to address it separately so dedicating local resources on one hand the city maintains control over the resources it identifies i think you're familiar with how cdbg and home dollars and federal federal hud money works that comes with heavy restrictions in one of our pre the previous sessions we had we looked at what those restrictions are and the income level restrictions and the ten year level restrictions on all of that make it very difficult for a community to flexibly address the issues it sees are really at the core of its problems or its it its patterns and trends the city decides how much or how little and the city can contemplate how to use its strategic partnerships on the other on the other hand if it's funding the revenue has to come from somewhere and that's a tough that's a tough war to to wage someone somewhere has to pay for it either it's a reallocation and a sacrifice and a compromise with other priorities or it is a new funding stream and that's a difficult thing to get into primarily if it requires voter approval and primarily in this state if it involves also control over local financing targeted regulation and is another path that you can take down the down the the resource  path the means toward a path and this is a little bit vague but intentionally vague and i think and hope some of you will raise some of those questions in our discussion time about what this means and what where this could go but the city in regulatory mechanisms is laying stake to managing and limiting how that growth occurs the city also can make goals in in terms of requiring land uses and development to do certain things the the other side of that is simply the other side it limits outcomes to the market we you know you're limited to market cycles if development is occurring and you wan leverage development to do something then that means your your your your theoretically tied to those patterns in the in the market and not able to really do what you want when you want to do it and the other thing is regulation traditionally from a this is our perspective deters market development regulation can function as a tax on development it can function as a deterrent that is you know a lengthy review time lengthy development review process can deter development although in some places like i was just in toronto two and a half weeks ago and we were talking about many of these issues and in toronto  you can be thankful you're not up there that you don't have the ontario municipal board reviewing projects where developers anticipate at least twenty four months to go through a development review process so i want to say that to make you feel a little bit better about just where we are in the denver metro area and what we're dealing with not a statement about where lakewood is but as a consideration of those things that are that contribute to deterring the market if you took that twenty four or thirty six month review process somewhere else that didn't have extremely high demand you you would likely fort development most most most most definitely the hands off approach is of course another thing another direction th can that you can go the you know the continued patter the last the last ten to fifteen years have been an increase in the workforce and a constant kind of diminution of the the available available supply many of these things are really good patterns and these are as as some people have stated lakewood is really a victim of its own success in many ways denver was is is and has been a victim of its own success as well and there are many cities like that around the country contending with these same issues business expansion continues to go upward and that's a good thing how long will that last that's anybody's guess in commuting has been going up because the ability of the new job holders to buy into or find housing in lakewood has diminished so that is an increased proportion of the new job holders having to commute in from somewhere else and many of those are making decisions about about living somewhere else because they want to live somewhere else but many of them are some of them would probably want to live in lake if they had if they had an option to so that means the loss of new worker household retail spending that creates induced impact so it by that i'm you know in the standard economic impact jargon we're talking about a ripple effect of this spending so job holders are spending their money on on retail and if they don't spend that money on retail then the businesses begin to to suffer and they struggle more and so that ripples into either retail spending or not and so that that continues to cycle sort of downward transportation infrastructure impacts will increase road oh an em cost increase i mentioned the businesses having increasing difficulty recruiting finding qualified labor existing residents spending goes down so that's the other point about the the age level differences in retail spending and when after fifty five every ten year increment people start spending less and less of their income and less and less money in absolute terms on retail a lot of people spend in those in those ages more on experiential items so trips cruises experiences not in not shopping and you know all dining everything like that so that has that has a negative impact on city sales tax revenues aging in place that's that again is kind of related less it is related to the last point so  what is the new one in here demand for home health care social services and lower maintenance housing increases some portion of current residents leave lakewood seeking those services that is there is a policy priority in there there's a there is a you know a lot of these there are policy priorities how important are some of these things to all of you and how important should it be to the city constrain and supply and region and continued regional demand this this increases the gentrification presser pressures and this you've already seen it on on colfax just up against the denver denver lakewood border where there are increasing gentrification pressures and you're getting you're  housing stocks scraped and it's been replaced by seven hundred thousand dollar townhome you know those those are the kind of pressures that will begin to eat into the end of the city even more as you know if theoretically the housing supply remains constrained housing demand if it remains constant pushes pushes pressure upward so then the land becomes more valuable than the than the home and so on and and you get the the displacement gentrification so housing prices escalate city workforce already police fire and teachers in lakewood are increasingly priced out there were some stats in the executive summary about police fire and and teachers their salaries what they can afford and how much that affordability gap has grown in the last in the last just a few years so household spending on on housing increases again transportation spending and impacts go up so their discretionary spending goes down quality of life goes down because they're not enable able to enjoy their life as much and city sales tax revenues go down all right so i've made it through generally those kind of things that i want to i want to get through this is really where i want it we want to we want to take a step back and and start to open it up into two questions because i some of you have been writing some things down feverishly and madly as we've been going through and i want to get to those things so i'd like to orient us around maybe a problem statement  should the city of lakewood balance and allocate its resources so current residents receive the quality of services they desire while enhancing the city's relevancy and opportunities for lakewood employers and employees so this is in reflecting on the five core questions that we were given to address in the housing study i think this summarizes in our in our minds maybe one of the questions at the core of what we're dealing with the city is at a crossroads in some in some ways and we've we've given our in our our our two cents on the the four paths that can be  taken and it's not for us to decide which of those paths you should take it's for all of you to decide which way to go so so let me just ask a quick question and maybe we should open this up to council for your first part kind of did the quick update and before we get too far down the road see if there's any questions from council on that first part that was just laid out mister abel you refer to the  one unit for every three jobs what kind of jobs are we talking about there are these folks coming in to work at burger king and wendy's and can't afford to live in lakewood i didn't see any  financial information tied to these figures what industries so what industries so yeah i'm sure if a lot of the a lot of folks are coming in to work at in service  industry they're likely to have a hard time affording a place to live anywhere in the metro area right so maybe that's farther not moving into denver they hold a job here but they love with mom and dad or an aunt or an uncle or a brother absolutely so how do you to say that is that is a stark  example three units or one unit for every three jobs but i think there could be more to it than just the surface there is there is you are correct there's more to it than meets the eye and that was in so it's on page twenty four of the other report so between between two thousand  and two thousand and fourteen public administration has grown by three seven hundred jobs retail okay so retail is grown by two three hundred jobs but professional technical services has grown by two thousand one hundred jobs we've got growth of health care and social assistance by two thousand jobs and the other one which i never agree with on the naik's categories is called administrative administrative support and waste management and remediation services it's a catch all and makes and makes nomenclature for jobs that don't fit any other specification those have all grown by by considerable numbers and then take out the retail and under each of those other categories there are entry level minimum wage jobs education there are daycare aides so in a professional services would that include a carpenters helper you know and the thing is job categories don't reflect income they do reflect income from the individual perspective they on these numbers so health care and social assistance has increased by sixty nine hundred jobs and health care's has an orderly's at the hospital no low paid talk it's difficult and we never get this guy to detail you can get average wage numbers and you can get total agar you can get aggregate wage numbers and you can get an average wage in each of the industries but you don't get an understand you can get an establishment level distribution of what average wages are within these and if we  if we should go down this road of looking into the into the the details of some of these than identifying maybe if it would be helpful to to the discussion we could identify the portion that are really in that home ownership band is that is that what i hear you saying not necessarily it doesn't have to be ownership you're talking about units i seen you're talking about rental units as well so it just me is if you say the number of units per job i think the kind of jobs that the other two people who don't have a housing one out of three has a housing unit the other two don't so it could be the kind of jobs they have or there could be some other reason for it you know the suburbs lakewood is a suburb suburbs became suburbs because people didn't want to live in the city so there are people that do want to live in denver and maybe they just work out here because that's for the job so maybe you're saying it's okay that the the ratio is three to one i'm not saying it's okay but there are other factors that could be involved it might make it less stark than it seems should we identify should we identify some different numbers so i mean may i i  think you know cuz a lot of this i certainly understand where mister de ville able's going to get that better understanding if we're looking at the policy part right the vibrancy of a community is going to it's going to matter whether those folks who have the retail job and want to be able to afford to live in the city can or they may not want to so the generalization of is it all good or bad at the three to one i think is where it's at but before we i think get into meat can i ask a process question go back to charlie real quick and i have a few more things that could ask your process ok so where we're at right now with the core questions and starting to go to this next step thought a lot about this and we're missing key stakeholders right we're missing our housing authority we're missing neighborhoods we're missing a lot of that in this part of the discussion so when you're a city that is actually an infill community and you have designated growth areas wouldn't it seem to make more sense and this is up to the council absolutely or if you've seen this to bring those stakeholders together and say these this is what we have what did you envision realizing we still have to have a mix and then what does the housing authority provide and ms nealon and i we had a ceo roundtable of the largest employers in the city of lakewood and the five largest to a point within of the biggest problems they have is housing for their employees and they're interested in sitting down with the city and trying to figure out how they could have a partnership when it comes to housing so while we're looking at these high level things it really needs to be on the ground level i think before it really comes back to us to try to implement that includes that's going to need stakeholders that's going to need the citizens that's going to need you know something along those lines and i don't know if you've seen that or how that's worked in other communities and that's part of what i meant with my question is the affordability for some people is a lot different than affordability for others so we need before we launch into policy decisions i think we need to know how we change that equation how we make it affordable for all three of those workers to have a unit i do want to be added of what that requires i mean that yeah i'm not necessarily we're not making this an affordable housing discussion i mean this is that that can be a part of it but it's not necessarily a discussion about affordability don't ever think you can separate an opponent if you're talking about how many units per worker i don't think you can separate the affordability component from the rest of the equation the the part that the the the aspect of the analysis that this this statement or that assessment points to is merely the supplies the quantity not the price of it and it's a statement on the on the difference of the historic growth pattern which is more consistent which is more related to a which is more along the lines of a one to one relationship or a lo at least a lower relationship that is as city as the city grew its employment base it also grew its housing base now there have always been people who have commuted in and out of the city don't get me wrong the commuting data don't don't go back far enough for us to do that proper analysis but when you look at some of those fundamentals though the city was growing more at a you know a lower ratio of jobs to housing which was that as the jobs grew the city was able to accommodate those jobs without regard to the price point without regard to that so there is that i do acknowledge what you're saying i'm not not denying that there is there is a component of this where if the city is growing by one thousand nine hundred retail jobs versus six thousand nine hundred healthcare jobs and some of those are on the lower side and whether or not they want to live here or not is another question of course those are all kind of points of it and if there is something about that that we could get into maybe to refine the numbers so that we can move forward on that point of the discussion then we're certainly willing to do that i'm just  looking at our housing mix we have to know what affordability is because if we if we if we had nothing but high end market rate apartments for  that's going to limit the accessibility for some of those workers were talking about i think that affordability and income is as have the foundation understanding amongst council and staff of what the whole city looks like the purpose of eps was to bring that and then start the policy discussion the policy discussion in the past year has really changed across the metro area and for our seated council based on some of the actions that we've seen either by our citizens or by and asked by a council of any council person so we had talked about doing a focus group or some public process i would think what i'm hearing now is that the timing for that public process is a good timing because you have the foundation of information a lot of information has been provided that does go into affordability as we go out we would talk to different areas and that affordability and that housing stocks going to look different for different parts of the city and that's something what i'm hearing is you think that's important as you have the policy discussion because what may look in the southwest part of our city may look different than in the northeast part of it and so it we could design a process that brings that back to you i think what i asked dave to do is is start getting on some of the core feedback on some policy items that maybe you want to take off the table from an economic development standpoint we can incentivize things we can incentivize in the what we always call our purple areas that the comp plan identified as where growth should be happening it preserved the existent neighborhoods which was a big value statement that came out of the comp plan but it said it had to be targeted in here and then you start looking at the density in there it sounds like there's been a kind of a lack of understanding in the comp plan process of what does density look like we could work on that a little bit and say here's what it could look like and here's how it supports some of our jobs etc like that so we could go out and start linking these in a different way with the community with our stakeholders because as the mayor indicated it was very interesting when we talked with our top employers and it wasn't that they had a hard time finding employees they had a hard time keeping the employees because the housing price is forcing people out of lakewood and out of the metro area and that becomes a big concern because now employers are thinking do they stay here so it's a big it's a big nested system so if david can get through some of the policy discussion or get some feedbacks of what you like and don't like without getting to all that detail because we can get to some of that it starts helping the community understand here's the things that kind of an illusion of what's really there we are more dense in most places in the city when we brought in a bunch of property out in the rooney valley that's not yet developed it lowered our density rest of the city has a different situation so that that again you're absolutely right it depends on what for the town we're talking about so that general statements like this tend to so i appreciate that miss nealon i think we'll have to i understand what you're saying but i think if i could summarize what we've heard from that community is what is appropriate in the certain areas in the growth in the growth and is it are we off where we kind of out of whack with that type so much we don't need it but what type and what's going in and how what do we do about ownership versus rental affordable versus market all those things and i just feel like at this point we don't have enough of our stakeholders at the table but let's continue through there's a lot of questions related to this so i'm gonna start going down the line mister betta thank you mayor and tell me if you think i'm a little bit ahead of the game we can come back to it i wanted to address the core question that we have up there are we to that point yet you know what we've been flowing with things so go ahead all right this is just a quick observation i like your core question i think that's something that we almost have to look at from the very beginning before we move into some of these other more difficult issues but i would suggest to you that we might be missing one factor in this equation and the factor that i think might be missing is what about the quality of life and the existing lifestyle that the current residents enjoy now it seems to me that that needs to be included in this question it's fine to talk about quality of services now and in the future but it's more than just services it's  i believe it may also include quality life so i'm wondering if maybe we might want to think about adding that into this core question at some point i like that suggestion thank you i'm gonna go off of what nanette was saying earlier and maybe this is my understanding of this and one question i had is why this is a draft i mean i understand that section five is left intentionally blank the whole policy part but i was under the understanding that a housing study would give us as the net was talking about we hadn't had it previously now you've got kind of the thirty zero foot view of what the city looks like it's a very comprehensive you're on page eight i mean that's a good breakdown there's lots of those tables throughout there is a bit of editorializing throughout but i can live with that for instance your last slide twenty one you've got a bunch of down arrows we continue the current trends i noticed that all of those are bad wait i can live with that but i kind of understood this study to be the study that we c go to and look at four data sets so we're not all up here making up our different or not making up but conveying our anecdotes that we have or our speculations so that when we have a policy discussion and mister bjur and i disagree on something then we can go to this document and say but look i mean we've got a hundred and ten percent you know something whatever the stat is that's what i understood this to be so that later on when we're doing a lot of the heavy lifting that we're all going to do whether it's affordable housing or incentive programs for promoting ownership in the city or any of these other issues we can look at this and say what's our ratio of ownership versus rental those types of things and we can make decisions and we're all looking at the same data set putting aside any editorializing which i think we can identify and those are fine but you can take that out and just look at the raw data so i kind of thought that's where we were going with this and that the questions and the process of this i guess draft was just the draft in the sense of is there more information we'd like to see more stats not sure how many more stats you need but if we wanted more you would throw those in there but i didn't think we were making i didn't think this was a policy document this isn't a plan this is just the thing that we really need for to charlie's point everybody on this council we all know there's a lot of anecdotal stories i mean you asked ten different people they'll give you in ten different opinions about what the growth is like in the city right well we can look at this and we can make informed decisions for all of us we might disagree but we've got some data so i just want to be clear that this contract our hope was that we could get a toolbox of policy options for council to consider because sometimes you don't know to even bring up a policy option okay so that's that purpose of that chapter five that or that missing chapter that we're going to put in there if we don't want to go that far i think david has presented some of those to us a staff level the caution that i had is i do not want to lead any one of you up there on any of the policy questions remember we've had that discussion back and forth of council the staff gave you policy does counsel give us policy how do we how do we have that dialogue and i would recommend we could do some workshops much like we did policy and procedure and you'd find it very interesting to start understanding the nesting of policies and outcomes that you can get and it would make you think it's so it's very nested and very complicated it's not that you can't get through it but it has a lot of dialogue that needs to happen in it for example do you incentivize housing to a targeted area and how do you do that and what's the outcome you get if you i think in the comprehensive plan they dealt with a lot of the quality of life issues in there it's do you want to invest invest in what is it in transportation is it in the incentive part  of the housing affordable housing or market rate housing and there's some downsides because you're trying to control the market but all those things start coming into play and you need to narrow it because you're wise it's going to stay in a large amorphous situation and  don't know how to get you there that's we've been struggling with that part of it but our contract did have a policy component to it hopefully targeted to lakewood and the reasonable policies was under the contract for david now he spent a lot more time in the data compile a ssin so we've used their budget for that part of it to get this data to you working for free yeah have been for months and i would say that point i would leave out i mean this is my two sons take it for what it's worth but i would leave out i would leave out section five i think that dilutes the per i think that has a tendency to drive as you're saying that drives things i would love this just to be a resource a very valuable very valuable resource for data and that the policy discussions that's development dialogue that's the part that's the things we've all been talking about i think we all know what those issues are and i appreciate this document without section five but that would be my two cents on that well and i would just add to that mister skilling though while yeah that's developed in dialogue but and i think maybe we see this different but there's a lot of programs that could help like live denver there's a lot of communities looking at over ten fifteen twenty years from now what are those housing needs gonna be and to say it's just related to the development dialogue i think it's deeper than that it's saying what do these communities want to see do they wan ownership what is our housing authority doing are they being outside the box i know they have a limited amount to go and and build should we be looking at policies to enhance their programs should we only be having our housing authority do rental or should they be in some ownership that's the way i looked at this part of this section is to say here's the raw data this is great for development dialogue but what if any policy should we look at we're just keep it the same and utilize you know metro west as our housing authority and just see what happens and i agree with i agree with all of that i think it's just a process issue of what should this document be and i think if we add all that stuff while i mean gosh we could write a lot of chapters on everything that you just said but if we just kept this somehow separate that's all i'm saying keep this as a separate document so that we don't have everyone's different perceptions infiltrating that and somehow driving because you don't want that out of a study you just want this to be a completely neutral document that we can look at and i agree we obviously need to come up with everything you just said and and development dialogue i wasn't just leaving it at that that's just the thing that's right in front of us that we're dealing with now so when planning commission comes back to us with their recommendations on housing you know that's gonna help us formulate policies we can all go to this document and be informed when we're talking about it and cite this study to make a case for whatever policy we want to implement but i think we're saying the same thing it's almost just uh i just want to keep the i'll be hyperbolic the sanctity of this study and not and not have it infiltrated by any kind of  editorial or prioritizing that maybe we don't need that's well said so let's come back to that at the end and see potentially that's that's where we go with the next steps and so i'm gonna go to miss franks thanks mira paul i'd be curious to see you and mainly i think this is more directed towards the net if when we're working with our employers current employers and perspective folks who may be wanting to relocate their business here i'd be wanting to see if we can find some type of an overlay for the kind of the cycle of employment right now we're in the it field we're at near one hundred percent employment that changes the landscape for those of us who anyone who wants to be mobile now's the time to be mobile so any little thing that's if housing costs are high you're ready to move there's all these because you're able go somewhere and generally get more money and other things so i'd be wondering if we're able to look at it through a lens of time where what happens when that changes and how do we need to kind of shape our policy so we strike the right balance and don't end up with a glut of something that then has nobody to be in there so that would be the one thing i would hope that we would kind of look at that also you know i've been reading about kind of flexible spaces where they're designed in such a way that units can be flexed to fit different scenarios and i think that we may want to be looking at some of those things and seeing if our employment communities interested in those types of that would that help them with that retention but yet give the city sort of a an avenue forward when those things need to change and if you structure them right they can kind of be through an entire life cycle if they're structured correctly also and again this is probably more for the sta holder discussion i'd be curious to see what businesses are looking for to remain in our city if any of them are you know on that what are they needing because it may not just be housing there may be other things and also what are we doing to attract other businesses and what are the things that we're encountering whether it be housing or other things so we can look at it more holistically and develop a plan that addresses it a little more broadly than just a housing stock issues so that's kind of a lot of things to throw out there no real question in there just a lot of food for thought mister eiland do we have an economic development update with jeffco edc and we're looking at one in august not only with jeff go edc but with the chamber and our business improvement districts kind of kind of say what how do we all function together as a team yeah i was going to answer that question some of some of the things that are going on the dynamics is if you look at your comp plan in your zoning we're very limited at where businesses can locate in the den city i mean the bigger businesses you know whenever when amazon was coming in lakewood wasn't we didn't put lakewood on the map there's no place that we could place amazon and we turned down a lot of opportunities to attract businesses because we just purely don't have the land space if you look at our industrial area you look at our union corridor you look up like a tech center where we're in that market area we don't have a demand out on the west side for office space we've found that out when we looked at the rooney valley area so what we need is flex space and that flex base goes into  industrial park area and that's very limited we have rtd is one of our largest land holders and in the our industrial area so to attract businesses it's more the retention of our businesses unless there's a that you know the federal center area was one area that's that had an economic opportunity there what we do know about our businesses along the union corridor is they're very flexible they they work there in industries of the financial field or the tech field and they are very flexible so if the oil industry is booming people translate transition over either from an ite or and in our medical we're seeing a lot of the skillsets transition so that businesses can remain flexible and they change your portfolio whether they work with the federal center or they work with the private sector so we have a very strong foundation along our union corridor on that so i just wanted to let you know we've done some work on that and that's you constantly are doing that research on that but i think the the thing that we learned with our top largest businesses it was it was without a beat everybody said we're not having that harder time attracting employees we're having a hard time keeping him and it was singled out housing it wasn't even prompted they told us that and that was very eye opening and we said good we're doing a housing study can we come back to some of our office space is a little bit older so what does that look like to create those opportunities and then ease of transportation if they can't live in the community to then get to the community i'm speaking specifically without denver west and and one of our largest employers in denver west is vincent that does the narrative and this study fit what we're seeing up here and i just wanted to answer that for me personally that yes everything in here fits very well with everything i hear in the community everything i'm seeing in the community  discussions articles in the news this is this all fits the narrative that we are growing in the denver metro area and we don't have enough housing in lakewood i also just wanted to point out that i think  also fits very well with the information and our comprehensive plan which states makes very similar statements and even identifies the growth areas that are also identified as desirable places to grow here so i think that's great that that there's alignment there and it's important that we have additional information there and and i think it also does really capture that growth is painful for the people who live here and that we want to make sure that we're doing creating policies that respect and maintain the quality of life for everyone who currently lives here  but i think and i think that it would be fine if we do separate out the policy section of this document from the data but it is really important to me that we have the policy discussion because we currently  i see that we have significant issues that the people who work here can't afford to live here and i know that you know this was kind of discussed there a little bit already but we do there is a lot of data about the average wage of people working in healthcare construction real estate and and what that out there housing cost would be and the fact that basically unless you work for the utilities or the mining oil and gas you can't really afford to buy a house now in lakewood so and i guess some people disagree with that statement but it is right here um on so anyway my question is when as we get new housing we are seeing a lot of higher end housing coming in have you seen any policies in other communities that incentivize having a mix of price ranges so that that are effective policies to accommodate different price ranges that's one of the questions that i anticipated coming up and yes there are policies i don't think they're great policies some of the people i work with around the country and even in canada would disagree with me or not like me to say that publicly but i don't think they're great policies i think they go along with the line along the i mean these are these are i should preface this these are our professional perspectives on these things these are not merely factual this is sort of an opinion question that's yes fact there are two there are regulations there's inclusionary zon there is there's inclusionary zoning that you can define on whatever income level you want davis california for example established a middle income inclusionary zoning ordinance back in two thousand and seven and they risked and they they repealed it in two thousand and eight when the reset f right after the recession hit because it was way too much they also had an affordable income or a low income inclusionary zoning ordinance which was a double whammy on the on development now the theory the intrat the idea was very interesting because the average price of housing and davis being a land you know it's not landlocked agriculture all around it's beautiful little community with you know solid urban growth boundary that nobody's gonna cross but because of that and because of the demand coming from sacramento from the its workforce was you know housing prices just shot through the roof well they wanted to they wanted to make any new development in davis have some of some component for a mix of incomes not just the seven hundred nine hundred million dollar homes they wanted workforce housing so it was defined as housing that would be affordable to i believe it was a hundred twenty to a hundred sixty percent of the area median income and their lower their lower band was eighty percent which is standard for inclusionary zoning ordinances  so that was the only that was the only ordinance and the entire that in the entire country that i know of that that targeted middle income housing because most of the other in the most of the other communities that face these issues are facing issues for that they've identified for for primarily the low income housing the low income needs and they've documented and quantified what those numbers are and so they've said well that's the one we want to target so that's what we're gonna do now the question about are they effective somebody else could stand up here and say yes they're effective and you have to make them amanda to and you have to make development do this or else they're not going to do anything and you'll get some people who will stand up here and say montgomery county maryland has the oldest program and it's produced tens of thousands of units but i want to tell you that those tens of thousands of units have also expired in their affordability in their deed restrictions because when they first established that in and seventy two or four it had a one year affordability requirement so of course developers were like yeah sure sure i'll provide twenty twenty percent of my units as affordable for the first year of course cuz when they after a year the deed restriction expires i can just sell it off so montgomery county then incrementally stepped it down and when you look at the graph of the production of their units over time in the last thirty years all those ten thousands of units produced were all in the first ten years because they had a one year time limit on it so when you take out montgomery county maryland from the case studies and you look at the other i think the latest count is something like eight hundred juristic in the u s four hundred  does deter development and that's you know that's a theoretical position that's not just a value judgment that's a theoretical perspective because it's a tax on development you can talk about what the impacts are and whether and so communities that choose that regular that well that's helpful so in other words there's not really any successful workforce housing programs no i definitely wouldn't say that no okay so no income that's the second thing that comes to mind so there were no mix of income zoning policies that that is the or of zoning okay policies well then could you give us some examples of work successful work house workforce housing programs there are there are different varieties of successful workforce management programs and some of them are in really high priced communities some of them are in communities where where the workforce like the health care industry realizes that it's so important that they have workers that the hospital actually that a hospital actually builds housing for its nurses that has happened and we could come up with a list of a lot of communities i've worked with a lot of those communities that have done that and up in every one of the mountain resorts there are employee housing programs that's a different game that's a different game we don't have that dynamic here in lakewood okay but that is that that's one of those things and those have been those are successful because if they don't have housing for their workers those people earning those levels of wages will not they cannot find those workers and that's an exacerbation that's it that's a that's an exaggeration as well not an exacerbation it's an exaggeration of the trends that are kind of currently going you know that way in this way so i guess maybe i would love to know more about potential options that for our next discussion or at the when we we bring the stakeholders together of workforce housing options policies programs that would work in lakewood just as options to discuss  that are effective and then i have one other question and then i'll pass it on for now the same question is about  another priority in our community i think is that it's very painful to our community when we see something that people perceive as a open space or but it's it's vacant land when that gets developed that's a very painful emotional process for people and whereas when they see redevelopment it's more exciting to see something that was old and needs revitalization take place so are there do you have a successful incentive program examples to incentivize redevelopment instead of vacant land development do you want to see those now maybe just an example  there are there are a number of communities that and i'm where we've been working recently with san antonio and san antonio has a lot of a lot of policies that they have they've recently tried they've also done a lot of reorganization and they're in their city governance structure and they have they have identified targeted investment and reinvestment zones throughout their city they are they use tif very creatively although they have put a moratorium on that while they're reassessing the current situation for their need for housing specifically around workforce so san antonio is that  i didn't expect to have to think about san antonio it was an example for you guys but yeah there's some there's some really helpful examples around the country on those kind of programs so that's kind of like in addition to a growth area you would have a redevelopment area identified okay that's interesting and i do have one more question just about other you know i think that in our comprehensive plan one of the major goals was to not only provide a mix of housing and at different income levels but also to maintain the quality of life of our existing residents and the way i think one of the primary ways was through establishing the growth areas so that you maintain those stable neighborhoods and then you have targeted areas of growth so it's not as much impacting the stable neighborhoods are there other example you examples you've seen that can add additional ways to help protect that quality of life but still allow for growth in other areas aside from what we're already doing well the answer the answer is yes there are certainly lots of case studies around and there are varying degrees of of efforts that can be that can be made and put in place some of the things some of the minor things that i'm thinking about in terms of protecting the the quality of life of existing residents one one policy case study we uncovered was in one of your sister cities in australia that has and not that australia is the only place that has established something like this but had established shire is the is the city has established a resident parking permit system so all residents have a parking permit and parking on local streets is for residents and if your non resident you pay that is a benefit to local residents that might be very popular and that is something that would benefit existing residents and their and the quality of life it also made it also  impacts it generates a revenue stream if i'm a visitor and i'm i'm living in denver i live in denver and if i'm gonna come over here and if i'm gonna i'm gonna speak to you guys and have a conversation i honestly would don't mind paying for parking i don't mind it but that's just me okay so i think maybe some additional examples of things like that would be really helpful at the next that that's a great example that i think yeah it's very interesting so dana we have put that list together oh so we'll be ready for i just can't wait what your feedback is gonna from every council member is going to help us to say did that list help or not because we had to call this down i mean you could be looking at every one of these categories i don't know david we could have been looking at fifty policies in each one of those so we tried to look at it lakewood we tried to think in your shoes and start putting it down and say here's ones that at a staff level we think you would like but the more you give us feedback the more it helps us go we're gonna hit a conversation in stride and the next meeting great thank you they call that code the curb i think is what the term is for that now is that right a lot of cities are starting to look at that yeah yeah miss vincent a couple of things one is as an aside i think one of the stakeholders we probably need to have is transportation there because there's a lot of information here about our our feeder systems which don't work and where does that growth go and transportation is also cars not just we have a tendency here just to look at the light rail and and it's more than that  as we start looking at things i want to start looking at policies we throw out the term here keep some neighborhoods stable but at the same time there are neighborhoods who are trying to increase stability of their neighborhoods and that is probably from home ownership less apartments not all the affordable housing and i think it's important that we need to keep that in our minds because as that stability goes so do the schools so do the income levels so do the shopping and retail all all this stuff that this these studies are saying so i think it's important to look at that all the way through that's my so we need information on that because we targeted we've talked about the schools too we have those schools that are in higher income neighborhoods that are very stable and we have those that aren't and they're making great progress but we want to increase that councilwoman is there a reservist is there maybe something more specific or something that's missing in the study that we should add i think it's the the what i have to try to get my arms around is those high growth areas and a lot of times that just means apartments and i don't think that that necessarily helps aid the stability of a community and there have been some community all neighborhood discussions about that that sort of thing we don't want apartments anymore because those people come in and out every two three years four years their kids don't stay in the neighborhood they don't know their neighbors the school sports co suffer and then the income too can be impacted by that is that does that help no it does help i'm just not sure what what kind of data we can we can put at that you're getting  stability being defined by by really a broad mix of of family types demographics and income levels correct and an ownership ownership piece up we have been going through as i think we we talked about maybe in the first session a massive apartment cycle in the country krim that's been unfortunate for this the context of this discussion i think honestly because that's in that's in the backdrop yeah that so we talk because i think that sometimes up here as a council we have a tenancy to look at this neighborhood is very stable and then this neighbor over here neighborhood over here is high density yada yada yada and that that doesn't help lakewood as a whole i don't believe so if we could get stuff around that there'd be great miss harrison thank you great information i really actually read the whole thing was totally bottled by all the numbers so hats off to you who work in numbers all day long every day i had questions about i think dana addressed a good share of them but i also had questions specifically about the fifty five plus crowd because there were comments in the study that talked about the fact that a lot of that people were not moving out of their homes they were still living in a home that probably was you know the two story four bedroom home and it's one person living there because when they bought it they put it for a hundred thousand and now it's worth four hundred and fifty thousand and when they get ready to move they're losing all that equity because they turn around and and you know have to buy something to replace it do you have any studies or ideas of how to create that turnover number one number and and i'm going to come back to another question second question would be do we one of the other things that as i was knocking on doors during the election there were an awful lot of people in neighborhoods and probably a lot of us sitting here up on council that if we had to buy our homes again at today's rates we probably couldn't afford to do so and that was the comment that a lot of the people as i was knocking on doors their concern is if i leave this nest i'm going to have to pay a lot more for my new nest wherever that is and lose that equity that is why we're not seeing i believe that turnover in the neighborhoods with seniors because of that very issue are there ways other cities ha struggled with that issue and come up with maybe a way to turn over those homes well that's a really good question and sometimes senior housing issues can be an entirely separate study and i think  just have a separates didn't jefferson county just have a separate study completed yeah from there are i think there are two components to that and and turnover is one of them but allowing but the the issue that that you just articulated anecdotally is common through in all of these other cities one of them one of them is again and one in your sister city in germany  stata has has several senior programs and those are in tender intended either to facilitate people staying in their homes handymen program programs to help and to facilitate financing for people in need to retrofit their homes with railings with with all the other kind of amenities that they might need as they get older the the the inventory part of it and turnover of housing stock is a bit more of the human or more to more of a sensitive topic because some people don't want to leave their homes and i don't blame them for not wanting to but the problem there is housing stock and what type of housing stock is available some of them i think not all of them certainly because i'm not ready to turn over my keys yet but some of them i think wouldn't move if number one they could still be within liquid where there's their their their support system is both friends family neighbors etc etc doctor's etc if they could do that but when they have a two story home and want a ranch style home what i one of the things i wanted to see in this the study is do we have enough ranch style homes to meet the need potentially of the senior population who might want to wrench down home i don't know if that's a wild question but i was hoping we would have some of those kinds of answers i don't know i think that's an answer that we can get to cool we travis and i have worked on that a little bit yeah what we recognize is we defined it not as ranch but as patio homes and we just don't have the assemblage of property that can put that housing stock in place in lakewood and that's where it gets into where's those opportunities to get patio homes in here and there's very limited spaces in lakewood to do that relatively expensive because they're new builds and you know again trying to trade that equity for a new house then i don't have the money to live on so i think those are the issues that have senior population or looking at and i don't know how to fix it beer ya just want to yeah that me personally i'd really like to see some policy recommendations because i think there are a lot of things that we share on this council as values that i think it would be good to have some policies to back up some of those values and i think there are some places where there are some differences but where there are similarities i think it would be helpful to have policies  you know i sort of wrote down just a couple for example i think there are places in the city where some of us think that redevelopment of businesses are really important obviously along colfax and share in and some of the major corridors but there are other places in the city where that's not really a big issue so you know i think seeing some policies that are targeted and that give us some direction of where we should go in some parts and maybe some and others that are that are different would be helpful whereas for example preserving stable neighborhoods as sharon alluded to a little bit councillor vincent you know i think we all care about preserving our stable neighborhoods you know i think two creeks or i burr or you know these are no different than in ward four or some of these other neighborhoods so you know where it would just be good if we could see some you know looking at this from a value perspective and having a sense of what policies reinforced some of those values that we do share and then you know where there are differences then we can sort of you know i obviously have those discussions especially because my girlfriend wants to buy a home right now so and i'm living in a condo so it's you know i'm particularly interested in that  yeah the thing that's most of what i have there but a local economy yeah building a local economy is something that for me individually is a value that i really care about and i just want to add that because what what that means to me is and i've said this before the way i've interacted with the city has changed because of some of our economic development that has occurred so when i first moved here there were virtually you know no sidewalks in certain places we didn't the light rail wasn't working or wasn't up and running it's still working on working but anyway in certain places and there weren't a whole lot of businesses near my  near my home now things have changed the light roll is there we have new businesses that have come in we have new art areas and murals and buildings and sidewalks and and all those things has changed my interaction in a positive way for me and so you know one of the reasons i decided to run to be here is to encourage that sort of activity in certain places and i think it's been a welcome thing and  part of town so you know so i'm looking for you know policies that will help encourage that in our neck of the woods thanks miss johnson thank you david sure your document is very comprehensive i just wanted to bring out a few things that kind of jumped out at me several times you and thirteen to two thousand and eighteen there's been a great deal of issues around that rewrite of that zoning ordinance so when this stops at two thousand and fifteen it kind of leaves out a lot of real interesting things that have changed since since fifteen and i thought in here too that i saw that fewer people are leaving the city to go outside to work is that right didn't i read that someplace out commuting is decreasing in the in community in this increasing okay so then folks are finding homes here finding jobs here that already live here so the trend is kind of going in that direction right you've got a combination of things going on there are there were job holding residents that were either working in the city or working elsewhere th now retired and so many much of the out commuting numbers is it one of the contributions to that that data point is that the job holding local residents are not commuting out because they've retired and so one of there are a couple different patterns going on in that in looking at that number and it's it can be a bit confusing and plus i that a lot of seniors are getting part time jobs probably local anyway so they're staying put okay and again i'd like to emphasize that there is a question that we should be asking and as end music when there are developments and build out there is a cost a literal cost and i don't mean just quality of life although that's a piece of it but the cost to providing services to the look for the local residents to have to subsidize some of this stuff and we need to be sensitive to the cost that we are creating for our for the people who alre ady live here by any build out i very much agree with adam when he said that we need to get community and residents to the table we do and when councilman laverre said that he's ready to make policy i'm not this is the kind of a document that all of us need to be taking to our board meetings and maybe even up on our different newsletters that we have have some surveys and ask our constituents where they're coming from with this as well i feel very strongly about that  there's one place in here where it was talked about the city council to encourage folks maybe to leave their large homes you know you have one person living in a home with three or four bedrooms their spouse has died and they would you know they're there at a crossroads just in general i'm having a hard time with the city council getting in a position where we're trying to encourage people to leave their homes plus i think we're giving mixed messages there were several places in the document when it talked about  creating services so that people could age in place so that's a an irony you're saying gee you need to leave your home because it's so big a big family can move there and we crete our density on one hand and then on the other hand we're saying you know we need to be looking at what kind of services need to be provided for people to age in place that's a mixed message plus i'm not sure it's the city's responsibility to get involved in either one of those a councilman i've got a question clarification so if we've stated in here that that that we're giving direction that the city council should do this i think we need to revise that that as in city council should encourage people to leave their homes i don't think we want to communicate that message at all i don't need so if it's in here oh we need to we need to find it and strike it and revise that because i think i think what we want i think if if that does enter the territory of a value judgment i think we need to take that out and neutralize it so that it is presenting the case that that there is a trend going on and how you deal with that is either you facilitate people who if if people want to leave their home they can and then you enter in the the issue of the turnover and the affordability of that or if people want to age in place that's something else and then whether or not city council gets involved in that is then your decision so maybe we should clearly go through that and make sure that that's not really a you know well councilwoman harrison kind of brought up that broached that particular topic and that's why i have concerns that we do not put that message out it's not my place to tell somebody that they have to sell their house if they're seventy five years old may want to stay there plus i don't know that it's our place to be providing services either you know people need to be thinking about their own old age and try to prepare for it and their families need to be involved but that's my value system so i understand that i couldn't agree with sharon more when she was speaking out about the stability and some of our neighborhoods we are putting pressure on existing neighborhoods for instance up and down the th avenue corridor and also the union corridor with a lot of apartment houses folks and apartment houses are to be frank with you they're more transient they don't have the same buy into the community that somebody does if they own a home and we need to also be preserving those neighborhoods up and down that th avenue corridor of the folks that have residences  homes and have lived there for quite a while in fact i've asked the question and frankly i've never actually gotten an answer from about wodsworth to perhaps  from maybe th up to th we've and like the target build out we've got so many apartments going in at some point you got to ask yourself what is the number of apartments individual apartments versus the number of residences and you reach a tipping point when you've got many many more apartment houses those people that live in residence corridor are fighting for their life for stability in their neighborhoods and we need to be careful of the way that we suggest build outs with high density apartment houses continuing that's my own take on that also i know it keeps coming up that folks cannot work here and have residences here it's too expensive you know i keep i read the newspaper to like everybody else but we get mixed messages i hear that denver is a lot more expensive than liquid you know and some realtors will back that up with different stats so to be honest with you i'm not sure where all the information is coming from and and whom to believe  i just don't want this document and i very much appreciated your preface when you first started speaking david i don't want this document to justify increased density in those areas that we've defined as high density we've got a comprehensive plan that has said along the cut along the th avenue light rail and belmar in the union corridor let's let's put all the density there well i don't want this to justify that we need to take a look at what we are doing to the existing areas and have we learned nothing from what happened in the last election and the fact that there are people that are looking at a growth initiative and what the union corridor documents said in it it literally said in the in the end of it there was a statement that the problems are wrong along thirteen which is an honest statement and we've got to be careful that we do not continue to put so much stress on corridors that are already struggling i i feel very strongly about that let's see here when i was reading through this it seemed like there were many issues many values many similarities between those that are under thirty five and those older than fifty five they see a lot of things the same and that that frankly makes sense thirty five crowd they they're probably renting more they're not as interested in walking to school they don't have children yet but when they start to develop families that's when they start looking at homes with with playgrounds for their kids and things and of course the over fifty five crowd there they're kind of in that same mindset but it occurs to me as well that a city cannot be all things to all people and some of this needs to be market driven art what is our role as a city and i'm thinking that our role is really the way that we are zoning things and allowing growth to occur and we as a council need to come to a consensus what what our zoning ordinance is doing what it has done and learned from that rewrite also i noticed that there were places in here where people were talking about having their kids that they wanted to have them walk to school and that that's great but now that we've got choice schools that totally changes the picture on things so there's a lot of things going on and i'm struggling with things like what's happening on independence across vermei burr with the metro west housing putting up i think one hundred and fifty five units  the impact on eye ber and also just south of that there's going to be more townhomes independence doesn't even have sidewalks and here we are thinking it's folks in a long union we need to look at the stability of those residential homes yeah i just wanted to clarify my state councilor johnson i didn't say that the city should develop programs and boot people out of their homes i had no intention of that what i would want to do is see if our housing stock meets the need of the people and also if there's other programs in other cities to help those who want to move out they could i had no intention of out of the house i did not take what your comment was but the comment came or the the subject came up and i have heard other people that suggest that that you shouldn't have a big house you know sell it to somebody else that has a thank you mayor you know it took a while to read through this dave thank you so much raw data boy it just it just goes through your brain at two o'clock in the morning i'll try to take that as a compliment yeah it's it's fantastic but you know what one of the the positive things that i was looking at is that maybe in consideration when you know i constantly walked the neighborhood and i asked the questions and you know i've been in my house twenty plus years i'm still the newbie in the neighborhood the question you know to take in consideration i was asking that maybe it might kind of filter through through the study is that when you have a couple that has gone through the cycle of life the next generation which are the kids have moved in because they can't afford housing and then their kids are there and then you're talking second and third generation in the same house now one of the positive things that i looked in the neighborhood once you buy into you buy your house you don't just buy your house you buy the neighborhood you buy into the neighborhood that goes around everything from the parks the streets the curbs the gutters the businesses and a lot of times i just wanted to put this out like in business you have a lot of small businesses in lakewood that they you know i've developed there for years and they may own their house and one side of lakewood and maybe about five ten blocks away they they have their business there and so they do buy into the neighborhood and i just wanted to make sure kind of reach out and see if we can put do we have any data or can we get any information to kind of share with part of this data here about aging in place obviously and then the next generation taken over the house so they you might have two or three generations within sixty to eighty years living in the same house you know kind of just moving forward and and i'm looking at my neighbors next door and they're working on the third generation and like i said i'm the newbie in the in the neighborhood but i wanted to reach out and take a look at you know if you can possibly give us any information or go about trying to figure out would that be part of the housing study so is there some information that we can gather that identifies intergenerational composition and households something like that yes is that well yes or a number of people in a household well generational you know let's say if you have a senior that is single their living and then the kids move in and then the grandkids kind of move in and you know that the the changes are kind of moving so i'm trying to figure out how do we accommodate that yeah how do you accommodate it yeah or facilitate it to find  out and obviously you know you got one two three generations and they go through the same cycle again going through the elementary schools going walking to school or driving to school the grocery stores  playing baseball football you know going through all the the you know parenting cycling but just kind of wanted to reach out and see if there was any possible data if we can get something that might might help us give us an idea about the housing and and what the trends are if they're saying in place or there they're wanting to move into an assisted living or in fact they might have done a reverse mortgage to stay in their house or you know things like that to kind of give us an idea of the neighborhood we can certainly look for it and it strikes me as something that would come from a from a survey of actual residence yeah and i think in this study we opted for the workforce survey because the citizen survey had just been fielded and it was perceived to have been too close on the heels of that to numbers and we can see jefferson county just completed something we can try to drill down so before i go to the second round of questions i want to offer two things one is on the second round maybe clarifying anything else that you'd like to see or more data that you'd like to see the second part would be there's been a suggestion to then bring forth chapters one through four just bring that forward then i would suggest creating a  committee and a committee that could then start to look at the policy type issues could look at other stakeholders to bring in and have these conversations as a committee moving forward that can then engage and  keep this conversation going because clearly it's going to take a lot longer it's gonna also depend on where things go with the development dialogue but the importance of bringing together many of our stakeholders i think needs to happen before formal recommendations are sent forward so with that i'll go to our next round miss franks paul kind of speaking along the same lines of mayor paul is just on the policy and the stakeholders information that is going to be critical for me for decision making purposes is capacity analysis planning and what that looks like from an investment perspective and i'm just going to give a few examples i mean everything from the capacity of current rec centers capacity of city administrative staff and another staff  park capacity also our nonprofits that provide services we're going to you know any kind of growth impacts them and then we start talking about critical things like water water the electrical grid  our schools i know that they we had a frightening number on the number of seats that lakewood high school could could permit i think it was based on either water or fire or something but it was a scary number that that community could have to incorporate  fire sewer all of those things this this seems to me like i'm bereft of information that shows these stress we're going to put on not only city services but district level services and amenities that we all  enjoy and so that's gonna be part of the equation too when we're trying to balance that whole quality of life piece and i'd want those stakeholders all the table to tell us you know what is that going to take to put new water lines in there is that going to stress existing water lines what's that infrastructure all going to cost us if we add on x number versus y number versus z number and some of those as we've seen from recent bond initiative those some of those don't pass so then what happens does everything degree so those are going to be key decision making for me those incapacity out analysis planning and investments and what stakeholders come to the table to tell us about what they're planning looks like and do they even have the budget for some of the stress that we're going to put on that infrastructure yes sir clarification council owned is that something you want this study to do part of the whole louise broaden i was mainly speaking part of what needs to because when we start talking policy so i was starting i was trying to look past you and didn't do a very good job but she's literally right off your shoulder so no that was more for nanette because i was seeing a scope of services this big i was getting afraid okay um thank you so a couple so i think you already added incentivizing ownership policies that's already taken care of okay and then also looking at examples of ways that we can encourage or incentivize senior housing we that's already getting incorporated okay great and then the other main thing i wanted have to get back that's okay that's fine i so i just want to make sure that we do do that and i think that some people have mentioned this before and that i think it's great that we're gonna have the stakeholders but one thing this is really highlighted to me is that the different at different times in our life we need different things we prioritize different things and i i don't want to see that that frankly like the group that i come from well that has young kids and and that are in our schools left out of out of the conversation and i want to make sure that we do you know we have to find some kind of balance as we're increasing all of our fees and our park fees so that we can also increase our school fees otherwise we could just you know exacerbate the cost of living issue here in lakewood  and i think i'm just going to leave it at that for right now thank you mister levere i just want to clarify my previous statements councillor johnson mentioned that about community input and i'm all for more community input and more stakeholders i'm just saying when it as it relates to policy and my desire to see some policy recommendations is geared towards where there are values that are shared and that we that we're in the direction we're moving for example this might not be related to this housing study but business development i knocked eight thousand doors last year and i don't think i met one person in that entire time who said they didn't want to see some new businesses a restaurant a coffee shop on colfax so to me and another example of  stable neighborhoods okay we want stable neighborhoods in certain areas i think that's well established well what does that look like does that mean we need to lower our taxes do we need to raise something do we need to put a gate in front of the street so nobody else can move in i mean that's the kind of questions i have how do we keep stable neighborhoods is it just keeping zoning are one you know and certain you know what it whatever it is i don't know i'm not the policy expert but uh so that's that's what i'm looking for so just want to throw that out there thanks skilling so take this back from a study perspective and to give a real life example of the things that we're all dealing with we've talked in generalities as we often do not that that's always a bad thing but let's just take this back to what's really happening right now in the city and if we take a collection of ideas from all the councillors where there was a mention of patio homes a moment ago that we need more patio homes or at least that would be a goal especially if people are downsizing we mentioned the ranch and the seniors and aging in place well if we come up with a policy and we look at this data and we ask you to provide more data and we talk more about providing patio homes how does that actually relate to the real world and what's actually happening because as i see it i've got some examples of places where patio homes currently would have been given the red carpet and that people would have been very excited to see a field that there's nothing built there now but they would have welcomed patio homes and instead the reality is developers are a not interested in ownership be certainly not interested in patio homes which leaves us with c which is more market rate apartments which we've heard echoed throughout this council that's the reality so we can sit up here and talk about our lofty ideals which is what we do and that's that's good but how exactly do we take that and put it into practice so i've got a real world example over patio homes and development in my ward of all places would have actually been welcomed which i know you're not as familiar with lake politics but that says something when word for wants to develop something so that's what i struggle with so we come up with all these ideas and we should build more patio homes in this but then on the ground we've got developers that won't do it so my suggestion cuz i'm not one to just whine and then not offer any solutions is that we have some and maybe it's part of the committee process but we need some real examples probably isn't the right word but let's get into the way that the developers are thinking as members of the community what is it that would attract them to build those patio homes rather than market rate apartments how about what's the difference what kind of incentives could we offer and that a pie in the sky idea are there no amount of incentives that we could possibly offer to change their minds and get them on an ownership track i'm not having a construction defect conversation tonight but the if we're gonna really talk about oh we need this kind of housing stock we need that kind of housing stock let's talk about what reality is what can we actually achieve in this city and how do we achieve it so if its incentives do we need to understand what it costs a developer to build a certain type of product i couldn't tell you off hand right now what the current per square footage cost is to build a certain type of housing stock know that somebody does and then compare that with patio homes because we're using just that is the example how do we bridge the gap how much money is that going to take and do we have the will then to create some kind of incentive program to actually bridge that gap so until we start talking about what the realities are i don't think we can really move forward with anybody's and they're all great ideas everybody's got and to jacobs point are all on the same page in a lot of ways we have differences up here on on certain things and in certain parts of the city that's what create that rift but yeah i i really want to talk about specifics and i know you know nanette has some great ideas on that but if i was gonna offer a suggestion it would be let's talk reality how do we get that debt builder to build an ownership opportunity and how do we get them to build those patio homes rather than the market rate apartments and i  would just say to that i think this committee absolutely you're gonna want developers as part of this you it's gonna have to be everybody to understand and if you can figure out incentives that's great but maybe it just comes down to zoning and you have to do certain kinds of zoning as well so everybody needs it to be at the table to have the conversation and better understand and that's what i would envision mister able i would agree with that incentive we have is letting people develop prime properties in lakewood that's a privilege and i think that  instead of holding that carrot out there we allow them to meet the community's vision who we are and i agree with skilling how in the world those high end market apartments help which is our predominant project in this city lately how does that help teachers and firefighters and police officers buy or get into an affordable situation whether its purchase or ownership opportunity or a rental and it's just not there so we need to direct the the direction of the market toward things that are good for our community as well as the developer's pocketbook and i think this study might help us do that mister schwartz last word from me i was gonna i was gonna say thank you for the suggestion because that was actually a part of our original scope services additional additional services were focus groups with key stakeholder industries and one thing that we offer as a firm is our interaction with both the public and the private sector we work with the private sector and we work with the public sector and we work at the intersection i can't tell you how many focus groups or stakeholder meetings i've facilitated with a council or with a subcommittee of a council an ad hoc committee whatever it is and developers in the room asking just those questions you've asked why are you not building the product we need why are you building this i i can i can i know some of the answers already about the development side but let's just leave that i'm not gonna i'm not gonna offer that up because i think that if the conversation happens which i hope it does i think those need to count those things need to come from them mister abel if you're still willing to work for free we'd like to have you on that committee second that i have time so let me let me let me wrap this up and here's what i would envision so essentially we need to start with the committee of council and maybe a preliminary meeting to talk about the scope and what they envision for that body to look like and then come back and then we can get it approved by council and they can get to work and that would be stakeholders kind of a vision of where they want to go a timeframe and then we'd of course need to figure out maybe what staff would need to be a part of that as well as if you want to continue to donate your time or if we need to write another check so does that sound like a an okay way to go and we could preliminary hopefully have something in the next couple weeks that would identify who the members want to be and could then how about this who wants to be on it i can bring that back next week and then we could if that's approved then we can go forward with the scope of what we want to try to do and in that meantime we can get information from all accounts on what they think that scope should like i'm learning to be specific in these study sessions very specific so let's get specific you just talked about committee let's talk about it now i like that idea okay who wants to be on the committee ramie so we have remy from one going to come back as far as votes go i'm gonna i'm gonna want to be a part of this there you go so then we're gonna leave open spots for howard the stakeholders work howard staff work staff stakeholders commu members private industry our housing authority seniors we've got to identify the stakeholders okay so when's the first meeting i'm the idea man okay those meetings will take place on monday nights immediately following city council  meetings thank you sharon but we still need to bring the ad hoc two to a vote so if that's acceptable let's do that and then after the first meeting we'll come back with a scope of and in the meantime please if you think of  other item that i heard is that david can finalize his report without the policy chapter in it and so we can get that closed out the direction i was airing so addressing what you heard tonight and then wrapping that up and this group will start to take on the next round so that'll be mister goldstein i think that would need to be for april th to have the ad hoc approved we'll see if we can add it to the agenda oh certainly okay thank you all right public comment on that this group in here knows the rules mister firman you are the only one who's indicated a wish to speak good evening welcome thanks for hanging it's good it's good here i actually mostly came because of usually both in council meetings and study sessions the people you hear from are very much anti growth in every way possible and they'll move the goalposts in any way they see fit to make sure that their agenda to stop all growth even in some cases i think wasn't last week or two weeks ago someone's suggesting that you need to reduce the population i can tell you from someone who was born and raised here has essentially been a part of this meeting my whole life my parents live here my sister lives here as somebody who knows the community well growth is ok by a lot of us people my age group we don't have time to come down here often understand the growth is a part of this community and there are ways in which this growth can benefit us this is a fantastic study you combine it with your union corridor transportation plan and you can begin to see overlay where  people commuting in happens to coincide with the same time period you begin to see some of your traffic problems arise i mean so i think the information you guys have is fantastic in front of me i just hope that you remember the people who come and talk to you or often people who have the most because they don't have children at home they aren't getting home at and seven zero at night from work oftentimes are the people who are you know they're invested in community but don't don't forget it's don't allow this or disproportionate ownership they like to put out about how this is their community it's all of our community none of us own it we all have new be just citizens here so i just want to make sure there was a voice that occasionally said there are parts of growth that will work for us and they're going to be beneficial and so finding it at all costs is gonna be fighting a huge number of your citizens so it's the main reason i came down but it was a good talk thank you anybody else converge so i'm not going to go through the several minutes that that i had prepared i was going to underscore what i had submitted earlier today in that email and touched on a couple other items but i don't think it's really necessary now may be the deficiencies in the in the study and we'll see where it goes from there and we'd be very happy to also be involved as a stakeholder so thank you i imagine you probably will be a part of that just just one just municipal funding and i have our finance director slash city treasurer mister larry door who really enjoys talking about this sort of stuff and to set the background where this came from this was a priority that came out of our planning retreat and so this is an overview and it'll be up to council as to where if anywhere this discussion goes council once again larry dora city of liquid finance director and city treasurer and yes you've got to have a real passion for this subject for sure and you know that i do and i so i'll be looking forward to talking about it tonight  apologist touched on it councils planning session there's an interest in talking about municipal funding which of course can take on many different dimensions and go in a lot of different directions as a result at  councils orientation earlier i should say last month i almost said earlier this month but it's april now i handed out some information at the orientation about the history of tax payers bill of rights in the state constitution and how its impacted the city just kind of a fact paper gave a little background on that so that's that might have been one dimension and then second dimension tonight i'm just gonna get into some different areas but one you know it has been since two thousand and six since the words certificates of participation were used in these chambers that was the last time the city issued certificates of participation and those were in refinancing old ceo pees and people use the expression  gonna do a little refresher that talk a little bit about bonds and the history of those across the city and then relate that to infrastructure needs and opportunities across lakewood and i'll try to do that as fast as i can and and do it in a simple way as possible and then just seek some direction and we'll get specific we can talk about you know next steps and and things we we might be able to do first i wanted to just talk a little bit about a resource that i think could be useful to you mayor and members of city council this is an elected officials guide and it reads to debt issuance it's about seventy five pages it goes beyond that it really talks about capital planning and other things and this is authored by the government finance officers association of the united states and canada and all i'll put this in your council office and it's a really it's it's a really good academic resource that goes straight to the glossary if you hear a term that i'm using or something that might not be understand it'll go straight to the glossary and and then look up what the term might be and be a good resource for you i'll leave it in your office and you can have a peek at that let me just say that chapter one in the book is preparing a capital plan and of course the public is well aware or excuse me the council is well aware and i think the public could be in in some quarters which is we have a capital improvement and preservation plan that is prepared each year by staff and related to sort of municipal bonds one hundred and one any any interest in taking such an initiative forward but first begin with what are the needs of the community what will the infrastructure needs and so on and so forth it's that sort of chapter one which i found interesting another thing in in here that is a consideration is sort of like fixed interest rates versus versus variable interest rates you know large communities will issue municipal debt with variable interest rates that's that's more and more common we have not done that in the history of lakewood but there's a place for it communities who've done that have done well over the last decade because interest rates have remained very very low i also want to just bring in some new information too with federal tax reform municipal interest rates are not as good as they once were and that's because the tax bracket the highest tax bracket is now lower and so municipal bonds that have no taxable interests are a little less appealing to investors so that's a little bit of a  change and then last i just want to draw your attention to long term bonds versus short term and you know the city has been involved in long term issues twenty years those are a little more risky and bear a little bit more interest shorter term less risk less interest and all of this is really just a backdrop like to kind of get you loose as you think about some of the facility needs and some of the infrastructure needs of the community and again all of it comes back oh really things that i've taken out of this resource for elected officials one of the things about municipal bonds is of course they're gonna require voter approval except in the case of enterprises so the city has four enterprises it's a water utility sewer utility it's stormwater management utility and our golf enterprise all of those enterprises can issue bonds with with a long term commitment just with the approval of city council okay and that's a lot under the liquid charter as well  without a vote those bonds can be issued to further the enterprise and its customers tabor does require a vote for general bonds general obligation bonds or even revenue bonds that's the taxpayers bill of rights it's a section of the state constitution so two different sort of two different dimensions one of the other basics from the resource is and we would need this you would naturally understand this as you think of our own budget and your experience with that but a new repayment revenue would be needed and as people often say the school you often hear this expression around the community the school district is going for a bond well what that typically means is not just for a bond but also some sort of revenue increase or a tax increase typically a property tax increase for the schools in order to repay those borrowings which might build schools buildings you know fields all those kinds of things and then in addition one one difference could be also a tabor exemption for the city of lakewood i've reported to budget not a committee in january that i estimate the tabor refund for this year which you'll be seeing later on this summer in the budget study sessions is between eight and nine million and so that as well is somewhat could be a voter approved revenue stream tissue bonds or to finance projects on a pay as you go basis now we often hear this expression c ps and i use that a lot and you see that printed in the city's budget what it really means is certificates of participation or a lease purchase and the city council just at its last meeting authorized the lease purchase for  sustainability and related to our energy performance contract repayments are subject to annual appropriation with bonds they're not subject to annual appropriations though those funds have to be dispersed there are promise  opie's or bonds the same thing a voter approval is not required obviously we just had this a lease purchase approved by council just at its last meeting however revenue repayment stream is needed if we're gonna have the ability to do any sort of substantial municipal funding some examples of this and i just these are hypothetical i just pulled these out of the sky and you can see that i've got one one mil of property tax would generate two million dollars a year in revenue if that was bonded against fifteen years probably fourteen per excuse me four percent for fifteen years that would develop twenty two million dollars in proceeds for some slew of capital projects or for transportation recreation of myriad things i'll show you in a moment or in sales tax a tenth of a percent would develop three million dollars a year again bonded and you can do this math in your head it's obviously half again as large thirty three million dollars in projects that was done in lakewood early last decade and in the late s and we're just on the last number of years of paying off those co ps which will be next decade  revenue could be retained for bond or co p issue so now just to transition just a little bit into infrastructure needs and opportunities i spoke earlier that i really wanted to focus on open space parks and recreation i'll give a little bit of a flavor for that a stormwater management and then i've lumped together roadways sidewalks in the cities bicycle system so first let me just touch on  imagine lakewood and i think that many of you know that's quite a graphic many of you have seen this and we're a part of this study which is the two thousand and seventeen community resources master plan this was a twelve project and involved two thousand two hundred surveys from lakewood residents on what they were interested in what they valued and really this is this is sort of the guiding principles for our community resources department and let me just give you a few of key fundamentals that came from the process one was quality programs that was toward the top take care of current facilities was in their new facilities to meet the needs of the community and then stewardship of our resources as a community one of the requests were these i got some new vocabulary myself in this process and one of them one of the request was for more spray grounds i had to say that pretty carefully but they're there apparently they're awesome and popular as well with the youngsters and i think you all know where this particular one is and you know we in our park system have the ability to put in many many of these and they're very very popular on the other end of the spectrum is our morse park pool that was built in the s and much like glendon heights it needs some attention and that's going to take you know quite a bit of funding to get that park pool away from the the baby splash pool that people have seen and it has to be protected by a lifeguard and all that to more of the sprayground you know type of environment earlier i think you saw that sprayground was at carmody park and you've seen probably this two thousand and fourteen carmody park master plan and project summary and if you look at this and if you know carmody park you'll see that just phase one of five phases just phase one is complete we don't yet have the nature play and and we don't have the the path that sort of makes that kidney shape if i can call it that around the park so we have needs for park development not only at carmody park but two creeks park whitlock park and wright park and there are probably some others but i think you can sort of imagine each of those and think things could be done there and so a park development that's a big part of that i heard a little discussion with the earlier presenter about the aging population and i'll tell you our aging population our retirees in the community are very very active in many different ways across the community we have four thousand two hundred and thirty five pass holders which are aged fifty five plus and that is growing and when i say pass holders that doesn't just mean recreation centers that also means places like burke creek lake park and other other passes that we have we have one thousand two hundred silversneakers participants and greater and increasing demand at our recreation centers  somebody told me if we could build any classroom space at any of the rec centers they would be filled up instantly as i did a little research on this so we have a need for center expansion at our existing centers and some of them have been expanded and then of course if you know our our star center over on west colfax that wodsworth somewhere in that north just northwest of the intersection you know that we have a need for renovation at the star center so we have to address in some regard those facilities and infrastructure needs for our for our aging population in two thousand and ten the city added capacity for its head start a program and i know that many of you know and understand the need for head start this isn't this isn't shrinking in our community and last time this was added this is over a million dollar facility and of course we continue to have waiting lists so we would we would certainly in our infrastructure have the opportunity know to meet and expand and needs in that area all of these relate back to municipal funding of course and then in transportation our roadways sidewalks and bicycle system you know all of these places i'll give you a minute just to skim down the list but you understand our traffic needs for automobiles in various intersections and interchanges you know about our citizens sidewalk request which of course is a function of transportation right we have logged one hundred and ninety requests from citizens and that of course there are many more that staff and our city engineer's office could add to that list but it's over a hundred million dollars in need  and then lastly we're going to have a report with the city's bicycle system master plan you'll probably see some big dollars but that report is pending so these these infrastructure needs they're large in the in the academics called intergenerational equity and that is when it takes ten years to save up or twenty years to save up for a project and then the project is built and then that takes a few more years to build the the first generation paid the taxes they saved they were saved in the treasurer's office coffers and then later the project was built and that generation of people which changes they enjoy the project versus in municipal  pays how what however you want to put that the taxes that are collected go to pay the the borrowings or the lease purchase and by the people who are enjoying the the facilities across the community so in our stormwater management utility and you're going to hear a lot more about this on april sixteen we have of course major needs across the community and i know council has still studied that very carefully but now in the context of municipal funding we need to one of these not just addressing our eighteen major drainage ways but in the future we will need to replace existing facilities we have a hundred projects that are needed in the books and right at the moment we have a pay as you go plan but we had the opportunity to accelerate that with any kind of borrowing mister hutchison our public works director will have more details on that in a coming study session in just two weeks and so with that i i know it's a little bit later in the evening and i know that was a quick presentation on a broad subject but i do want to note that that's added on to my fact paper on tabor and how that's impacted the city over the years and some of the many changes citizens of lakewood have voted on taxpayer bill of rights matters four times in our community and so i wanted to provide some data on that so with that mister mayor i'll be glad to answer any questions and you accept your direction yep so i appreciate that i know that this is never popular it's not a popular subject to talk about but i think i've heard from a lot of people and in all throughout the community different areas different things that they want to see so i'm happy to have this to put it in perspective how much have we with this potential eight to nine million does that put us around thirty five or forty million in total tabor refunds it'll be right at twenty five mayor with the nine with  dais that's double what we receive a year from the state of colorado and the federal government for transportation in the city of lakewood we receive about four million dollars my question is if you looked at municipal bonding without a d bruce because currently we refund through our property taxes so if you did a municipal bonding that would be potentially coming from your property taxes correct c be from property taxes sales taxes or you can pledge okay or fees as well that's been done and is also a part of the part of the reference as well okay so you have a few different what's our total debt load as opie's how much do we have left to pay let's see of course that's enumerated in detail in the in the budget itself but i think fle i think the civic center is through two thousand and twenty and the we do have a legal debt limit that's in the hundreds of millions of dollars really the capacity is driven by how much of it how much money do we have every year is the city to make repayments and i think you would all be aware that all of the city's income is programmed for police services for public works street maintenance park maintenance and all those kinds of things so we look at total city debt what does the percent mean it's very small it's extremely small yeah less than ten percent less than five percent less than ten percent yeah probably less than five percent of our total budget is spent on debt payments per year so what we have left in debt services has to do with co pays and then what else is out there and very small relatively small excuse me lease purchases for things like our police department evidence storage facility we have some smaller equipment leases but we don't have any may i say generational sized debt payments beyond that right and then i guess my last one would just be a common and that is when you look at revenues and and the the cool thing is that's a vote of the people so they have the opportunity to weigh in or not weigh in and say yes or no but when you're looking at a community that's based on retail new retail that you generate depending upon where you're at in the city because the the mills has a little bit of an exemption right but any any of those new dollars coming in essentially could just be flowing right back out via refund yeah yes that's correct so for example when the the amazon corporation licensed with the city one third of the city sales tax exempt from tabor but two thirds of subject to tabor so as that retail base expands correct it will increase the amount of the refund now to the extent that somebody would have been shopping in denver or elsewhere you know then there is some kind of revenue recaptured that's a very difficult thing to quantify i was going to request that we each be given one of those books i don't want to have to go in the office so that shouldn't be a big ask is it we each get one of those books and then we each get a copy of your slides from tonight the there's a big difference between tabor and bonding for one thing if you do a municipal bond issue and you ask the voters for approval that includes  detailer izing of that particular amount and can you tell me how much how much our tabor overage will be in the year two thousand and twenty one and come up without a taper refunds are over it's on some years it should be noted that we have had a table refund six straight years so i understand that six straight years what happened in two thousand and eleven we were know we weren't dee bruce as a community but there wasn't to refund that particular year that's right so my point is depending on tabor is not a sure bet we want to take care of business then a revenue bond would provide a certain source of income our revenue stream to take care of the capital needs is that correct more certain it wouldn't be absolutely certain nothing certain in those five but yes more certain the ceo peas for the city civic center complex would be retired in two years at the end of two thousand and twenty you said there was another one that would be retired shortly after that exactly two years after and that would be the recreation centers  urban renewal project when their sales tax will go back to the same rate as the rest of the city is that correct was that five years away i think that that's two thousand and twenty six tw twenty six so eight years so in eight years there's another source of revenue injection that'll be coming how do we get a that would waiver expires i think it's two thousand and twenty six the sales tax rate will go from one percent to three percent that increase of two percent half of that will be limited by tabor and depending on the circumstances could be refunded and the other half will be exempt and there was a question about municipal funding that i've been trying to figure out when we doubled  when we've raised the stormwater fee a few years back i believe we were going to use that to leverage bonds to take care of some stormwater improvements is that correct that's not my recollection i would defer to said about it and he said that was it start with but apparently there's something kilt and the market that has caused that not to happen i'm not aware of that i haven't seen that in in the academics at all and certainly council could authorize bonds to be issued at any time for those purposes within the storm water utility well we're not now using that increase to leverage bonds correct okay thank you very much miss johnson tabor refund this year could be anywhere from eight nine million correct that possible it could go up to ten it's possible ye would you mind telling us a little bit about the ratchet effect and how that affects tabor or is that it was a too long of a discussion that's definitely some detail i could just say it this way  even if the city's revenues don't grow at all or if there's a recession the city still could have to refund revenues due to this function of tabor whereby  if the city's revenues are above the limit year after year after year even though there's some allowed growth the city could still have to make those refunds each year so that's certainly in effect so in other words if the cit revenues grew three percent this year and tabor allowed three percent there still could be a refund of eight to ten million dollars so that's just one of the functions of it yeah i don't think it i don't know that it  property taxes probably in the nine and a half million dollar range but we've been having table refunds effectuated through the property tax mill levy so after after tabor property tax bills have been who gets the money who we were funded to do you print a check and you mail it to people's houses or what does that look like thankfully know that we don't do that but as is commonly done and the department of local affairs and  stayed in state government have allowed or and and for years other governments have refunded under tabor through the property tax so if you're a homeowner or a commercial property owner you have a property council has instituted a temporary rebate and decrease that mill levy to in the low twos somewhere in there in order to make that refund complete so if you're a visitor the city you wouldn't receive any of that refund even though you might have paid those taxes if you're a renter and the community you don't receive a rebate of those taxes it's only commercial and residential property owners who receive those refunds and  so it's imperfect no doubt but the idea is that the money is back into the taxpayers hands generally and back into the community and not at city hall government so we think that that's the most it's certainly the most efficient inexpensive way to return those monies to the taxpayers but curly if if a homeowner was in the city one year and not in the city the next year they moved away or vice versa then they might receive the benefit or the disadvantage of that other questions so it's not just the residents that are paying that are getting this money back to their property taxes it's also is it you said businesses so i was like that's walmart target what is that what does the breakdown look like of that who who gets where's it go and the reason i'm asking because i'm curious if we're paying i'm wondering if we're giving our money to to target or walmart that might have went to building you know things that people in the with as you mentioned that what the community wants parks rec centers things like that so one things i understand about lakewood is that you might there's a there's a an amendment to the state constitution called the gallagher amendment and it it lakewood plays into that really really well about fifty five percent of the property taxes that the city collects dollars fifty five cents of every property tax dollar that the city collects comes from commercial okay so that's walmart and colorado mills and every you know all of me all the property owning businesses in the community  and then forty five percent from residential by the way if you if you own an apartment complex and you have you have a property tax bill you pay that it's residential and then you yeah so that that's about the ratio about forty five cents of every dollar comes from residents fifty five cents from commercial property owners and obviously renters in the community they don't they don't pay property tax directly so i hope that gives you an idea it does thanks for answering a lot of my questions i mean all the questions i have i know i had a lot thanks retain those revenues the city would not only retain the two thousand and seventeen tabor refund but potentially future refunds and then revenues that would be retained would increase and those funds could be used either with council approval for certificates of participation or there could be a separate vote for general obligation bonds or there could be a council approved bond within the enterprise's of the city including stormwater management or golf or or those enterprises so yeah so that can that that's really just a management of the funds and and what they're dedicated to and directed for by city council so we're clearly talking in theoretical terms at this point but if we were to put a table refund issue on the ballot and the voters passed it and and said we could retain that fund and then council decided to not knowing how much each year it's going to be would what would be the best practice of trying to use those funds sure accounting for that uncertainty we have a little bit of that in the academics but fortunately the market takes care of that at the end of the day and it wouldn't wouldn't really surprise mister abel makes a good point around the idea that it's difficult to predict what the tabor refund or the source of those monies might be over the next certainly over the next ten to twenty years that's a very valid point and often if you have if you've had the experience of borrowing money for a mortgage you know that the bank wants to know your credit rating they want to know all about your job how long have you been on your job are you self employed do you have a salary who do you work for how long have you been there what's your level of education and the bond market banks are the exact same way if you're using if the city were to use it stable refund to borrow money to do capital projects you can guarantee that very sophisticated banks and investors would very very carefully and very cautiously look at that source of income and would loan money based on their estimates because of course they're there at the greatest risk of getting repaid so they wan be very conservative about what that refund is and what it might be and and on and on but clearly it would be a good sign to that investment community if it was voter approved because that's a very strong statement from the public that they want to see these things happen and and so on and so forth so they would just they would do some sensitivity analysis best case scenario worst case scenario middle of the road and in a very technical way and then back that into what's the community trying to accomplish and and how long might that be repaid for and on and on the most conservative thing to do being pay as you go each year you know just salting that money away and and then each year doing things but it's difficult to do a destination recreation center or a major expansion of a recreation center on a pay as you go type basis okay thank you that's helpful so then i'm just the refund of property tax and walmart in the same breath if i remember right a few years back representative claire levy was trying to change the way walmart does business because they put all of their property a land trust and it's not taxable by the state you are you aware of that not at all i can tell you that walmart is paying substantial property taxes that we're collecting there's a city city of lakewood yeah thank you very sure that so when it comes to kind of the best idea i think there's a lot of different things and the best idea may not maybe be just to do nothing but you look at like a denver and then we're not even close but an on nine hundred million dollar bond package i mean just to put that in perspective just to get us around two hundred million we'd have to nearly double our property taxes that accurate probably in that range and and all of it to such a repayment which is you know a lot of the property taxes being used for our programs as a city and our general fund so yeah but denver obviously is definitely different but i'm just in comparison when i first found out just to get to that number what that would do was shocking and so as we look to our financial future we are very fortunate that we're on top but we've been you know we've had great financial management for a long time lake was desirable there's a lot of plusses colorado mills may not come back to what it was right in or just we're gonna start to see and and who knows how long this boom is gonna last but when we look at trying to be strategic and if we comes down to raising fees or things like that even if we do nothing and we get to a point where we're raising fees some of those fees will just go right back through tabor and be refunded that accurate one hundred percent of fees are except for enterprises are so limited by tabor and given that the city's been over its limit for a number of years any new fee would be except for an enterprise would be refunded how about increase in fee oh and an increase in fee well yeah mister skilling question other than the direction that we all receive one of those books what are the other types of direction that you would be looking for just give me i have kind of struggling with what that would i mean i could give you all sorts of different types of direction i'm not sure that's what you're looking for so can you give me a better idea of what types of direction you're looking for well also make sure that the powerpoint slides get out to everybody in addition dude you know it could really run the entire spectrum i don't have any preconceived idea of what that direction might be it might be more communication more data more study it might be work up a resolution it could be you know can we see a quarterly financial update it could be any you know anything i i'm not i really have no idea what your next direction might be i'd have to confess i wasn't necessarily at councils planning retreat and really have a real clear vision of the context of municipal funding and what next steps might be so i'm look to you all as to really what next steps or direction there might be well and i appreciate that and there probably is the spectrum but i was just wondering since these this was your presentation whether when you put in there questions discussion i get that but then direction of staff i just didn't know if there was something in particular that you were looking for and if we could narrow down the spectrum then that's right but if it's the if it's the whole spectrum that's fine i just wanted clarity on that i certainly think staff just wants to just the facts ma'am and go with that and you know this is new to everyone on this body and we haven't been in this in this conversation in the ten twelve however long i've been on council so  miss johnson questions i would just like to request that next time when we have a discussion like this if you could put your powerpoint on on our packet i had no idea what we were going to be talking about and i did be helpful thank you so we have last i saw a hundred and twenty million dollars in drainage projects alone and that stretches back over twenty years so and we have streets to improve sidewalk needs everywhere bicycle paths you name that we need it how do we pay for that  your the financial expert it's gonna be difficult it's gonna be difficult for sure other communities are paying for those things in the academics you know by having tabor exemptions and financing bonds and certificates of participation you see it in communities across the front range you see it in jefferson county that's they're taking a bite out of it i don't know if they're doing everything they need or even everything everything that they want or everything that they need but they're they're advancing my point is for tabor we would be peace feeling it every year according to what w as left over so a revenue bond is is really the only way to target such a large expense for some time  don't get there how do we continue to grow without taking care of the mess we already so i'm getting past questions no i mean it's good dialogue and that's you know in twenty twenty twenty twenty twenty two essentially you were debt servicing how much here six million the more in that neighborhood mmm hmm so i mean that's real dollars on a pay back right it is  yeah that's that's good payback i mean that gets you some projects and i don't know what that would look like but if you could get to that point or get yourself bridge to that point where you're then have that money that you're already servicing and you can pledge that going for a couple things you know for some folks i know they want to see things fast some want to see it slow we created we've created two committees now but again i think this is a citizens type deal you know a blue ribbon but but more of a finance for the long run what does the future hold for the next ten fifteen twenty years and how do we do that so you know i don't know if that starts with the budget and audit committee to take a look and maybe bring back some recommendations i'm open there's some folks  let's do another committee so joking aside um i think that it's really exciting that we're having this conversation because there are a lot of needs in our community and we hear a lot about it  just recently we talked about the route street bridge and the angst around the union corridor the bike paths the sidewalks park acquisition opportunities all the things that you mentioned and i i for one would love to see these things happen in my lifetime or at least some of them happen in my lifetime so i think this is this is really good too have a serious conversation about this and i  think that councillor abel brings up a really good point about if we want to actually be able to do all of them the tabor refund isn't gonna get us there but if we you know i think some of this is also a political conversation and a community conversation as you know well how much is our community willing to do or what do they what do they want to pay for and and you know in terms of what in reality what will actually pass and what does our community want to do so because of that i think that it does make sense to have a another committee and engage our community  and talk about you know we've heard from you that you want these things but do you actually want to do you want them enough that you want to pay for them or is it just something that you kind of would maybe someday like to see and and if you do how do you want that to look do you want it to be a taper refund do you want to do go for everything and really see some real real change and improvements and go for the revenue bond like councillor abel was bringing up  so that's what that's what i would really love to see is is have some concrete projects that our community can look at you you did a great job of providing that and just put together that list get our community together and see see what's possible and i in terms of time frame i think it would be great you know there's a there's a deadline here to get this on the november ballot so i would like to do this sooner or later okay so i'm gonna do some so we have a public comment on this and i'm gonna open that up and i'm gonna put somebody on the spot so i'm going to ask mister wick main to come down he was a part of our previous tax discussions i think and i'm just curious how those were put together whether that was through a committee or ward committees or how that happened with the sales tax and those different things so i'm going to open public comment and if you want to come down okay all right anybody else wish to speak or anybody else have a recollection of pre two thousand and seven and committees that the city put together to deal with we had a tax increase we  do you have any cities in jefferson county i think all of the cities have except littleton but we could check on that but in jefferson county because i think they're refunding and in jefferson county itself county government yeah okay in i don't know how many dozens of city but it's many dozens what is the average return on like a like this year what would be the average return on sum or like cut on somebody's property tax like for me for example i'm still looking for my check keep looking it's it's based on the value of the property obviously you know the city's property tax i'll just say it this way  the city's property tax on an individual property is about five percent of the total bill so you all just hopefully thought of your own property tax bills and a common one in lakewood it's probably one thousand five hundred or two thousand dollars so you take five percent of that that's the city's poor of your total property tax bill okay so whether it's a million dollar home or ninety thousand dollars home you understand your property tax bill probably so five percent of that and then whatever that number is two thirds of that has been the refund or would be the check that you're still waiting for if that helps yeah so it's so if it's so it's a one thousand five hundred dollars property tax bill the city's portion that you know five percent and then of that would be the refund and so oftentimes many people when they talk about a that hurt yeah it's like really nice dinner i think i heard of the diets but  many people use different words around that to say that if a table exemption is passed it's amounts to a tax increase because people are will pay more tax other people on the other side of the argument will say it's not a tax rate increase their right to because the property tax mill levy rate is still the same and it doesn't a rate increase is not voter approved so i say that just from the perspective that there are potentially that remains to be seen you know people we first of all we don't quite have a well we've only collected we are collecting the february and taxes and reconciling them just at the end of march we we haven't had quite a full month of activity with all of the stores open there's still some major retailers that have not yet reopened at the mills they will draw people that will shop in other stores at the mill so we just don't know at this point it's gonna take a little bit of time certainly we're collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales taxes each month from the from the mills so it remains to be seen as sharpers will return and what it will be like when other stores open so either way that's not a part of the tabor conversation doesn't impact the tabor number in any way because it's completely exempt that whole geography and in another point question that i'm go so at some point i think that the committee would be a good idea as we've seen with some of these other issues i think a committee is probably the way to go on some of these things on this one though i would respectfully disagree that a committee would be the way to go on this at this point mainly because i don't think we've figured out yet what we want to spend the money or that's probably the wrong way to put it we haven't really figured out what the priorities are that we need the funding for so my fear would be that the committee would usurp this council's priorities and it would find a way to fund things but then we don't know exactly what we're funding so i don't know which way whether we're where there were the horse or the cart but i think at this yeah i think at this point we need to figure out what we want to fund we want to figure out what that bill looks like and then figure out how to fund it and maybe there's a lot of these different funding once i get my book we can figure out what funding mechanisms we need we've we've had a lot of talk about whether it's park acquisition infrastructure needs there's a lot of these things i think we need to have a clear plan of where we're going and then have a committee with how to get there and if we decide as a council look we think the options are you know d bruce to do the bond whatever it is then maybe at that point it's the committee where we form the committee to find a way to pay for these things and again i'm shooting from the hip but just my reaction to a committee at this plant i don't i don't know what the committee would do i think the committee would figure out ways of okay here's different way we can finance things but at that point i think then it stops because i don't want the committee to take the next step which is okay we found the funding now let's find a way to spend it and i think that's this body's priority is to figure out how to spend it and that would just be my two cents obviously i don't mean any disrespect to the idea but that would be my two cents on that i do have thicker skin than that at this point think it's an appropriate qualifier when i  was so maybe just to expand on that a little bit i believe that's the way that denver did their last bond issue is that they put together a community committee and they had a list of known projects that they wanted to get done in the community committee actually was part of selecting very specific projects that they wanted to get done i think that is a really great way to do it rather than having our council determine it because this is the community's money and while we are here to represent the community i think the more than engage they are from the beginning the better off that will be in meeting their needs  i think that we also are already have a very good understanding of what our needs are in all of these different areas we just went through the imagine lakewood plan that was an intensive process that highlighted the community's desires and goals we have we just went through transportation study in the union corridor that highlighted specific projects we have a bike master plan that's coming so we have we have so many plans already and ranked projects already and identified projects that have price tags along with them we've been doing that for years so now i think we are already at the point where the community could look at a list and say you know what we do want to use this money for this project this project this project or they may say actually no we don't want to do we don't want to do any of this so i don't see any harm in engaging the community uh at this point we we have identified projects and we're we're about to put back eight or nine million dollars that's enough to do the route street bridge right there more than enough based on the the estimate that we were given and again i think that what that engaging the community early an often in an issue like this that can be controversial is the better way to go then then leaving it up to this body briefly i'm not suggesting that we don't engage the community i think we can sir i hope i mean we all do that i so i don't think that those ideas are in conflict i certainly think we should engage the community for sure  i don't think that that then means that we should have a committee so i think there's just that disconnect i think certainly engaging the community i disagree that i don't think i'm at least not clear in what that ranking is and what those but i agree with you wholeheartedly that there's there's a long list of projects there i'm i don't have clarity though on which ones this council has decided to go forward with and thereby fund so i if we throw it out to the community i i think that's  what we're here to do but i think once we do that that is also going to bring in a whole nother set of priorities which may be in line with the ones that we discussed the retreat they may not be in line and we may be back at square one with that that that was my point just about the committee i just didn't think we were there yet with the prioritizing of actual projects i guess that that would maybe be the purpose of the committee is to help prioritize those projects which we could do as an entire body i the reason i suggested that is that it seems that when we have long issues that are going to require a lot of discussion it has become the practice that we have a committee and engaged our stakeholders so that they can bring back a recommendation to the entire body it's going to be a long and drawn out discussion and i just have to go to the bathroom so i'm not trying to be rude to leave okay thank you for a quick follow up on that dialogue mister door i mean it's fair to say that each department has a list it's fair to say certainly there are public works and community resources department they tend to be our project departments and that's where i organize much of the information for my so yes i think they do have fairly good lists you do have to appreciate that many of these projects they're complicated in nature in terms of what would the design be and construction cost estimates particularly you get into transportation like trout street bridge i mean you you need to have very qualified engineers spend lots of time and design and organization to understand what a project may cost in fact that alone would take months  so got to be careful with that versus a playground reconstruction that seventy five thousand dollars they can get that within five percent or thereabout so i think you you would appreciate that miss harrison i just wanted to we talked about the effect of the tabor quoteunquote refund on individuals could you clarify what the effect would be for businesses because businesses pay a larger portion of property tax they do yeah so for every dollar in value every dollar in value a commercial property pays four times the amount of property tax so if i have one hundred thousand dollars office condominium and you have one hundred thousand dollars residential condominium i would pay about i would pay more than four times the amount of tax that you would pay so yeah  just want to make sure i get that correct th of age they give you a fifty percent discount would that also apply to the city for example if the county only charges you half a rate of your taxation for your property or the case being if you were a hundred percent disabled with the veteran and the state paid your tax for the property would the individuals get the tax or would the state get the tax or how does that work fortunately all property tax is administered by the county assessor and the county assessor's office has that very carefully organized and i can say confidently that any exemption that would be in place for any population would remain in place outside of this tabor refund not being made so yeah i have to confess i don't know the exact details of each of those programs but they would be preserved then my next question is churches or nonprofits churches they are tax exempt so they wouldn't get any of the taper refund through the property tax i take it correct yes they are property tax exempt and so they haven't paid anything and they wouldn't get any refund either okay and then like the stormwater fee they would get charged for stormwater fee let's say if we were to refund tabor back through the stormwater fee which was done before would they get a certain percentage refund back through the stormwater fee back to for example the church i believe in i believe in the one year excuse me there were two years that that refund was done by a tabor the tax exempt properties did not seve a rebate for a table refund just because of the pure fact they didn't pay any tax in and we wanted to concentrate as a as a community to the taxpayer even if it was the stormwater fee not a tax it was a fee and it was rebated back but the churches are still exempt from getting the stormwater fee if if it's if we make it that we use the stormwater fee to pay back through tabor that would also exempt the churches from getting the paul i guess just a couple of points number one i didn't come very well prepared not having the slide material so i couldn't reach out to any constituents so not sure i have good quality questions but at this point just one make a couple of comments on the committee construct i just have concerns that number one i don't think we're ready for that the constituting of that i would be concerned about making sure that we get a wide variety of voices to the table if we do that meaning people who are dissenters i mean from every from every perspective i think that a lot of my folks who are maybe opposed to certain things have felt left out of the conversations so i think that that would be important if we get to that point  i'm actually thinking that maybe we want to consider some type of a ranking criteria in some way to say you know you know what's the benefit area of something what's the recent investment you know how long's the need been on the books what's the what's the cost of not doing it kind of the traditional things when you're ranking projects you go through you know what's the cost of doing it what's the cost of not doing that if we defer the maintenance are we making the problem worse meaning deferring x types of maintenance mean that we could be incurring a larger cost so i'm wondering if there's some kind of a mechanism that maybe our budget and audit committee members could go through that kind of buckets these and gets us into a more productive conversation so then we can determine if we need a committee or if it can be done by council but i think if they could take the stab at that sort of criteria matrix which there's plenty of good ones out there for project assessment that you could kind of harvest that might get us to a list that then is quantifiable for here's what we think is needed here's how it can be geographically dispersed to make sure that every area of the city's getting benefit and then when it goes through that then we come up with a now here's the dollars we need to take on the top ten then we have a number then we can decide to go forward plan it just seems like if we broke it down a little bit more almost like project a program we'd be in a better situation to then make decisions about how to administer it or get forward so just some thoughts i think i think that's well said i think the budget audit committee i mean could be a good resource potentially as well as a community survey i mean to try to go out you know but i don't know if it were too raw right now for that but eventually maybe go back go it out to the commune with the survey and get that feedback try to get as broad as we can  i think council was elected to set these priorities certainly we want the community to give us input but we control the purse strings through the budget and i think  if you if you get a committee going and some of them are from ward one they're gonna say hey we don't have enough open space on our side of town so that's where the priority is and we might have  other thoughts from ward three and ward two and i'd just maybe set certain parts of the community in conflict with others although i you know the more outreach we do the better i just think that these final decisions the priorities about where the money goes and what projects need to be done or as is our duty and we have the fiduciary duty as well so i'd also like to mention in answer to mister roy balls question since it's a stormwater fee that churches are paying and that's an enterprise fund and enterprise funds or a tabor exempt the churches wouldn't qualify for a table refund anyway because their fee doesn't go to a table reliable viable situation so just hold on real quick ten twenty five we're cool ten twenty one so we have our budget audit committee who also is piper jaffr our financial advisors stifel nicolaus i'm sorry stifel nicolaus so potentially this could be an option to take what you've heard here to the budget notic committee have our financial advisors there  and look for i think the projects certainly are going to come back here but we can have the community and button i think we all pretty much know where those are right infrastructure parks police usually is what we are good at in the community that's what we do then it's kind of drilling down from there and stormwater is interesting we're going to learn more in a couple weeks about what that looks like so is there an avenue to you know you only meet so often but to have a special meeting amongst budget and three council members and to further this conversation see if they have any recommendations and have our financial advisor there come back with something more substantial maybe something more detailed with project lists of things so we can get an idea of what that looks like and then that could help us maybe move to the next because i just not getting a sense that everybody feels quite comfortable in the direction to go and i think that's getting a lot of nods so is that something that counsel would be willing to to do and and maybe okay and set that out for i mean i don't know if a month is too aggressive or i would say that the committee has a regularly scheduled meeting three weeks from tonight and maybe we could add a little bit of time to it because it's not a very long road or you could have set that at ten o'clock i do want to pardon so when you have a regular meeting scheduled three weeks we might just extend the time a little bit but that's that's probably an a minimum appropriate amount of time for our public works director community resources director to do a little bit more fine tuning some projects and you know that what we might task the committee to do is to come whip a preparation for a small medium and large i might call it you know i got some  good kind of a small medium and large basket of opportunity projects programs whatever the case may be and i think it i think it's wise to involve the city's financial advisors early in fact that was that's one more of the things in here and so that they can have an idea of and tell us what's realistic and not realistic you know in terms of the marketplace and so forth so while if that's the direction then i'll  a few lights up and let me just finish that out but if that's an option to go forward mister betta thank you mary if you're talking about referring this to the budget in audit committee let me remind you that we have just passed the policies and procedures which is i understand now has put limitations on the terms of the members of the of the budget audit committee and so i think that may require us to  reconstitute that committee whatever that requires before we go forward with it i just want to throw that out there and if i recollect that would just be potentially one member coming off so you'll still have and and i'm not exactly sure when committee to take the first stab at this the main thing i wanted to accomplish was just you know continuing the conversation and and drill down to these priorities which this committee that which committee does it does not really frank matter to me i think that's that's fantastic and then i just wanted to add you know in addition to the small medium and large plan i wonder if if we could somehow look at once the committee has looked at what the priority projects are what the timeframe would be to get them done if we do nothing so let's say we wanted to have the route street bridge just as an example if that's a priority identified by the by the by the budget not a committee how long would it take us to get that done if we didn't pursue any of these important consideration i would i would be able to guide the committee in that regard simply but by the matter of the city's current capital improvement preservation plan is a five year plan so we this public works and community resources department if it's in our capital improvement preservation plan for five years that's a very strong commitment to do that project so you wouldn't see there would only be things that aren't in the cip p that would be a function of these small medium and large iz and then if it's not already in the cip p you can pretty well rest assured it's not going to get done in the next five years if that makes it i think that would happen naturally i guess is another way for me to put th that makes sense and maybe we can just call that out as we continue this discussion so that the community understands that if it's not in this plan it is going to potential tabor refund don tonight that's for sure i tell you what august or next august or the following august may hold but ok i'm just curious yeah i'm not anticipating that but things change rapidly and then as far as the budget not a committee goes as you know i serve on that committee and i don't know about councillor harrison and beto but i'm i'm on the skilling model where i'm definitely down to take a aggressive approach and have and plan on having a an additional meeting after the next meeting that we have or having a three hour long meeting or whatever we got to do to really dig in on on some of these issues so i just wanted to let you know so yeah help serbia's giving you a glare over there okay so to sum up the direction we would be to bring the financial advisors and projects into budget not it have that conversation and see what kind of recommendations come out i would also say to add public safety to that list we've been talking  any and all of us would come back to this body to report the findings i think we'll have quite a well my i would imagine that we would have an orientation and a first blush for the committee on april rd perhaps  follow up then i would guess that the committee working as expediently as possible would probably be prepared to return findings so would it be prudent to schedule a future follow up for council and it seems to me that would make sense well certainly but i think we're gonna have to figure out what your committee members can do because you're talking potentially two or three meetings with the budget not a committee so what i'm getting more than one sure so i mean  don't we wait to schedule it after this have first committee meeting we'll see what happens and then we would have an aggressive calendar if council was looking at something for this november but we could go ahead and still have time to work that in of a few years back public safety was supposed to get a half a percent of a sales tax increase and it turned out that public safety was not just police it was snow plows and stop signs and such while those things are needed i would hope that the public safety aspect of this is adding police officers and perhaps code enforcement because that is that what you had in mind when you said public safety so well that's exactly what i had in mind thank you not sure about the tax implementation in plication no that's that's long ago and far away i just wan okay all right so we'll go forth and for council your members if you would like to talk to them prior or have information that you'd like to share or questions that's councillors harrison and libr who will be taking on that challenge so i envy you and i don't thank you thank you mister doar good night all right so that does lead us into committee reports which first off the bat would be budget and audit and so i don't know if any of those council members have an update that they'd like to share about the committee i think maybe we can wait and have one coming up we talk numbers thank you okay i can add to that real quick if you want or just they have quite a prospect list i think they're they're always out doing different things and looking at different opportunities but what did happen is they were awarded opportunities ohms to were in the city of lakewood and those were established by the congress in the tax cuts and jobs act of two thousand and seventeen to encourage long term investments and low income urban in rural communities nationwide so the city lakewood has two of those designations i sent that out to counsel with the descriptors of where they are and at this point i don't have a lot of information beyond that or what that's going to look like i imagine it's a lot like enterprise zone type of  manatee but something to entice jobs or to keep jobs or to try to get reinvestment by existing businesses in those zones so that should be pretty cool and we need to have jeffco edc and i think miss neelam said that's going to be this summer we certainly i think we're long overdue to have jeffco edc come out and talk to the community about what they do day in and day out cml policy committee ism is johnson and mister libr anything the report underwent a assessment earlier this year and came out with no findings which means a clean bill of health we have a shorter waiting list but we do have a waiting list and we got a report last month on the progress the kids have made since the first of the year and it's remarkable very cool they're making great strides update no there's no report on that all right jefferson county transportation committee miss johnson not at this time all right judges salary i think that'll be coming our way soon i think next week here's a big one the legislative committee chairwoman johnson thank you we we have a very robust committee and i'd really like to thank the members because they work very hard this has been a surprisingly light legislative season this year it's been awesome but there are just a couple bills i'll tell you that we're dealing with senate bill sixty six sittings just say this we hear a great variety of all kinds of issues and this committee has been staying on top of of all the different things that are at the state level and i appreciate your input and hard work one of the bills that we are dealing with is senate bill sixty six it extends the operation of the state lottery vision it has moved from the senate to the house and this is one that the mayor also was in strong support of and happy to that we had the same thing the bill extends the schedule termination on july st of two thousand and twenty four of the state lottery division in the department of revenue but it's it's a good thing there was a little loophole i think in colorado springs on that right moved from the house to the senate the bills that we've been monitoring we took a leave on good friday and this was one that we would have gotten a update on we've worked strongly with  judge steve ik there's a few things that she's been very interested in that really affect our municipal court one of them is house bill one thousand and eighty nine that talks about no monetary conditions of bond for miss davene excuse me for misdemeanors the judge is handling the effort on this she's really been very proactive at the capital she's in strong opposition and we back her our judge and when and the knowledge and understanding she has of this i'm not telling you what all the bills are about because that the hour is late also senate bill two  conflict free representation in municipal courts we are taking a neutral stand if amended the judge is handling this and working with the legislators on this as well made and it's ready for the legislators to continue their process we're going to monitor to ensure that the amendments stay in place and as the mayor is aware these bills are a moving target from one day to the next oftentimes and so on many things we just monitor them on some things were also neutral as well which means we just they kind of drop off our radar but that's that's my report you guys are doing a great job and now that there's i think less than forty days left in the session it'll probably get a lot busier and you'll be chasing bills all over the meeting before that we also at doctor cog go through the bills at the state capitol and take a position as doctor cog and on bills that impact either  aging or of course transportation so we had an update on bills of there as well and then the other kind of interesting thing was we got a report about a committee examining whether or not to do to host the olympics in denver which is you can all imagine will have significant impacts if that were to move forward and discussing and kind of preliminary just options and pros and cons so we got a report on that as well which i think will be very interesting to see what happens cool thank you screening committee i think we hear just flat out not relevant and some of them we always got an o to like and i believe with planning commission we asked if they've ever asked for a variance and so far no one said yes we're going to get rid of that that sort of thing and try to make the questions a lot more relevant and a lot more timely cool sister cities program probably not much but clearly david schwartz knows a lot about our sister cities he does no report all right and then i have urban drainage and flood control which is kind of cool and we just updated the sloan's lake major drainage away plan which is with the city and county of denver edgewater in lakewood if you think probably th and wodsworth down but to put it in perspective this is just a master plan update this would take over four hundred units out of  or four hundred dwellings out of the floodplain ninety of those are in the city of lakewood implementation to have that happen is about forty five million dollars so we just continue you know to crank away but urban drainage is potentially going to look at asking the voters to d bruce and you'll probably hear more about that and see what that looks like and what those numbers would potentially look like to lakewood i'm going forward metro mayors we  also watch a lot of legislation our big one is the transportation and watching senate bill one as well as another measure within the house that looks at funding i think the latest proposal that pas the the senate unanimously actually it was a five hundred million dollar transfer to see dot and then potentially two hundred and fifty dollars each year two hundred and fifty million each year and going to the voters and nineteen to ask for bonding and then there's still in discussions of a potential sales tax increase ranging from zero thirty five to one cent that would be dedicated to transportation all of that stuff's really not going to come out until until the legislative session is over with which is the first week or two of may so stay tuned for that you'll probably hear a lot and what else so we'll just run into reports my water pledge calm if you have the opportunity go on i think i signed up today and buy my pledge i'm gonna save sixty six thousand gallons of water so we encourage all of the people in the city lakewood to take it it's a pretty cool challenge with a lot of cities right now we are ranked two hundred and twenty second of the participating cities so the more people we get to take a look to get educated to see the little things that you can do to save water the better it's a pretty cool deal forty west is just best of westward for best suburban kind of arts experience so congratulations to them as they keep rockin and rollin going through all that good stuff and then in my state of the city i encourage the community to pick one thing that they wanted to tackle mine was childhood hunger so i had a meeting with hunger free colorado what i didn't realize is the probably the largest population of folks who go without food are seniors and so it has made me rethink that to pretty much everybody who might be hungry in our community and i got a lot of information and if somebody thought that was going to be an easy task i might have picked something a little bit easier but it's it's meaningful and i think there's a lot of things that we can do and i'll continue to keep the city council up to date on what that looks like but it was it was really interesting to hear the number in the seniors and the impact that seniors how much more impactful on their life being skilling our ward four newsletter thanks to councillor frank's just went out if you didn't receive it in your email that means you're not signed up so you should probably sign up otherwise you're gonna miss out on all of the important things happening in our ward and it also has all of our updates as usual about the goings on here and for those who aren't aware this wednesday is the planning commission mixed use and housing hearing they are accepting all comment so put those comments you know you can put them online i believe during the hearing you can actually comment as well but that's the mixed use and housing this wednesday in council chambers so just reminder to everybody to come out for that one counter ward one meeting will be this saturday nine hundred and thirty at holy sheppard steve jensen from the da's office is going to give us an update on is happening there in the da's office and impacts on our communities in this neighborhood please join us mister goldstein mister graham was maillard all right and one last reminder and because something came in today via the council request for action a cic would like assignments so if you have something in mind and you want to submit it please get those in and council can start having those discussions as well they are eager to get to work on some different things