later date i ask that if you do have a cell phone please put it on silent if possible tonight we have a discussion to kick us off with a presentation by jay hutchison our public works director on the w line path alternatives will then h a presentation by robin zeitz and tracy heath on behalf of the lakewood heights mutual water company and the white lateral ditch company and they both requested ten minutes and we're going to combine that so we'll have that and then we will have public comment which add these types of meetings is a little bit different than our regular meeting it's geared directly towards the topic at hand tonight and then we'll have council discussion so with further ado mister good evening thank you mayor good evening city council my name is jay hutchison i'm the director of public works for the city and i'm going to discuss a couple of actually three options related to the the w line between oak and  since that time as well there are a number of components to this discussion that i'm going to touch on some in more detail than others but this is an outline of what i'll go through the first three or four items have to do with the actual alignment options and then there are some specific topics that seem to be of higher interest so i'm going to deal with fences and walls and there affects the irrigation facilities to a degree although you'll hear four the owners here later and then some about costs and then some distinctions between the the alignment options that we'll discuss this evening and then i'm going to put up a slide that has some options on it and after the other presentations are done i'll put that back up hoping that perhaps that'll be helpful in as a tool as a way to discuss where you may want to go from here so first a little background and and this is several slides and i'm not going to read it all some of you have seen much of this during two thousand and seventeen when our discussion on this topic occurred but i do want to remind folks of some of items i've added one the first one and that is that a long time ago but not in a land far away the white lateral irrigation began it actually preceded any of these other events the this corridor this general corridor where the w line was constructed through a variety of things happened most of those surrounded the progress that was made on the w line itself including the decision on funding by the general regional area and then selecting this i should actually start the first was selecting this corridor there was an option at one time to have the w line go down colfax so there was some uncertainty about where it would go those decisions were made it was going to go down this corridor which of course raised some question about whether or not all these facilities could fit in the same space and then the design occurred then there were some grants for the two bridges that carry the path over wodsworth and over kipling that the city applied for and matched the w line then opened in two thousand and thirteen and then the rest of this really deals with the north alignment and getting to where we are today there was a grant approved a few years ago for this north alignment i'll talk about that later and then of course it went through the normal city budget approval processes in part because the city has to match the grant and so those funds needed to be set aside and sixteen jefferson county entities the the local communities and the county worked together to identify some jefferson county bike way segments and these are intended to be the multi jurisdictional segments and this is one of those this w line segment or w line path rather last year than the city council passed resolution adopting this the north alignment that we'll talk about this evening of course some other things happen more recently that all of you are aware of this an illustration from the discussion in two thousand and seventeen and i'm not going to go into it in great deal detail but just to show where we are today the blue option just on the north side of the tracks is what the council adopted in two thousand and seventeen tonight we're going to talk about the blue option and what's shown on this graphic from last year as the yellow option on the left end it's option two of the yellow option so that'll be the tonight's two discussion points not the the green the other yellow or the red there's a little bit of a close up and you can see on the the blue option it just hugs the the north side of the rail line the the yellow option hugs the south side for the most part to the west buying some residential into the east between th avenue and the rail line and then a middle segment where there's just not space between the three homes and the rail line so that it jogs down to th i'll do a quick overview of the the two alignments that we'll talk about this evening and i should should make it clear that we're a little more precise in our information about the north alignment we've been working on it for a little while the the approximations are a little more approximate on the south but i think they're reasonably comparable for for comparison purposes these are the two alignments that we'll talk about this evening and i should point out particularly they'll probably refer to th and hopefully i always remember to say eithe segments it's it's just too tiny when you look at all of it at one time so we'll look at three different segments generally from oak to nelson by the way nelson and none of the other intermediate streets actually crossed the rail line only kipling and  the second segment will be generally that nelson to miller piece and then the last the eastern segment will be generally miller over to so let's start with the south alignment and soon after the city council decided to reconsider the alignments councillor an able and i exchanged some emails to try to make sure that i was clear on what the thought was about which alignment to look at and then last last monday there was a thought of an amendment or maybe an alternative on that south alignment i'll talk about that as well it wasn't covered in the staff report just because it didn't get published at that time but i will talk about both so let's start on the west end of the south alignment and here's oak on the left the oak station is just to the west side of oak north of the tracks and the the yellow segment coming down just represents the rest of the connection to oak it already exists it doesn't need to be constructed there's no change residential properties along th those are all residential and and the w line tracks there's a little kink there at the west end at oak street and in the next slide you're actually gonna be standing on oak street looking to the east and you'll see why that kinks there so here you are on oak looking east and you could see the corridor past this metal building here that's it's generally open that would be the corridor for the for the path the metal building is  rtd facility and this is generally rtd land that you can see in that gap on this slide and certainly the metal building is on rtd land it's owned by them it's a key component in the function of the crossing of at oak street so it's connected to the arms that go up and down it's connected to information that identifies when the trains are coming there's a lot of electronics and electricity and other kinds of things that go through this facility i highlight that because it really is not something that can reasonably be moved and that's why there was the kink in the red line on the earlier version this is this looks at that same area you can see where the signal relay house is which is what rtd calls that metal building and it would just require a little bit of a curve around that that metal building to the south for the path to connect over to oak street which is on the left side of this this picture that just came up however that does require an acquisition and one of the topics that was a key component i think in your discussion about whether to have tonight's discussion about alignments was acquisitions in this particular case the black lines they're relatively narrow but i think they could be seen fairly readily are the with the dashes are the property lines so that little curved portion of the the red path actually goes across what is today private property that little corner and so there would be an acquisition necessary of a piece more or less that shape from the parking lot area this is this is an unusual one this would actually and i want to be really clear about this this would actually require a commitment to condemn property that that buildings not going to move if the south alignment is going to come through here it requires a commitment to condemn the property doesn't mean we will condemn any property but if we run successful in negotiating for that red outlined area then to make this path work there has to be condemnation this might be a good time for me to stop just for a minute and cover a couple of terms one being condemnation and the other negotiations and i should explain context for that the city always takes the approach that we're going to negotiate acquisitions of any private property first that's our first preference and any condemnation is kind of a last well it is a last resort we often are successful with negotiations but occasionally have to do condemnation negotiations simply mean that the two parties the property owner in the city just find out values discuss the values discuss any other implications of the project and reach an agreement with any third parties really involved except those that the those two parties bring in and they reach that agreement just as an arm length arms like business deal where the the property owners are going to sell some property to the city so there's no court action involved there's an consequently no condemnation and that's the distinct distinguishing feature w condemnation the use of eminent domain or condemnation those terms tend to be kind of used interchangeably is a court process so if the negotiations are unsuccessful and an acquisition has to happen or the city council decides that it's an appropriate acquisition for an appropriate project then condemnation is undertaken which is a court action so this is one of those cases where for any any of these south options to work this property must be acquired which means that if the negotiations are unsuccessful a commitment to the south alternative is a commitment to condemn this triangle in the corner of this this residential parcel it is a parking lot it's not a building it's only a portion of the parcel it probably will remove about a third of the parking that's available to that triplex today so let me go back then to the the picture of this western portion of the southern alignment from oak to  nelson and point out just one or two other things one is that there's a track crossing on the west end and that's that you'll see is that this distinguishing feature from the north alignment a little bit later also if only the acquisition occurs on the far west end and no other acquisitions on this segment then there will be about two hundred and fifty feet or so where the path instead of being ten feet wide will be eight or nine feet wide generally we've been designing at well we have been designing a ten foot wide path if we want to limit acquisitions to just this essential one in the far western corner then about two hundred and fifty feet of this segment will be eight or nine feet wide instead of ten feet wide there are three parcels were acquisition three additional parcels setting aside the one on the far western end for a moment three additional parcels where acquisitions would be necessary to ensure that full length from oak to nelson is a ten foot wide path let's go to the central section which is generally nelson to miller and i haven't shown the proposal here yet because i want to highlight the properties here you can see that the back property lines the north property lines here are very close to the w line there's not enough space to get through there in fact the the eastern of the three homes is very very close to the the edge of the trackway the other thing i wanted to point out is that that eastern home has a very unusual lot shape i've never seen one quite like this before it's a triangle it's very long with the point way over to the east side which is almost a miller street and that'll become relevant here as we go to the next slide whoops so here's the middle section blank from nelson demille er to the west it's the off street that we described a few minutes ago to the east to the right you'll learn in a few minutes that's all off street as well this is this is the interesting segment there's also a gap in the sidewalk you'll notice that from nelson to east of moore there's a sidewalk on the north side it's a sort of narrow kind of white area white being the color of concrete to a degree but there's a gap from east and moreover to miller street where there's no sidewalk on the north side so one of the components that we've included in the south alternatives is to extend that sidewalk across there so that a pedestrian who's using the path also can use a continuous sidewalk and that's because one of the alternatives for the south is a non street shared roadway  path or actually it's not a path it's on streets shared roadway and this this was the concept that council were able and i exchanged emails on initially and in a few minutes i'll show you another one that's not on street but this one is so westbound bicyclists would would get off of the path at about miller and right on street in a shared roadway facility not a separate bike lane but a shared roadway over to nelson and then up to the path again eastbound would do the reverse and of course they're on this traveling the same direction as traffic because they're on street the result is that westbound bicyclists and pedestrians would cross three driveway eastbound would cross i think it's a driveways and streets now let's go into the other version of this segment so we're still in the the central segment but we're gonna replace it instead with an off street path so everything on this this drawing would be an off street path that would not require pedestrians to walk out in a shared roadway circumstance of course it's wider than the typical sidewalks in fact these are some of the old less than three foot wide sidewalks in this neighborhood the idea here is to keep the well let me orient you first this is actually looking west on on th avenue in this area and you can see the sidewalk on the right next to those three homes that i've been describing and then there's also sidewalk on the south but it's not particularly relevant to our discussion so that sidewalk on the right is on the north side it's less than three feet wide so the idea is to keep the north side of that sidewalk or to not move that so the north  that concrete the edge closest to the to the yards would stay in the same place but the concrete would be widen into the roadway to provide enough width for a shared use path which would narrow the asphalt of course that would make the concrete approximately that wide the the effect of that is is some cost but that's obvious the other effect is that there's really not enough width on this road anymore to have parking on both sides there's a car a couple of cars parked on the left side of the road here and you're looking in about the direction a westbound driver would be and you can see there's room for two cars but if there were another car parked not on that wide area not in the concrete then it'd be too narrow for two cars to pass going opposite directions so parking would be prohibited on one side of the street here but again this would provide a continuous off street shared use facility i did have some driveways that cross it but just those three let's go into the eastern portion of the south alignment which is generally millard down to kipling this would all be off streets shared use paths as well it would be between th avenue and the rail which is is both some city property from the old street right away but also some railroad railroad right away that's owned by rtd so this area and the western segment would require negotiations with rtd to acquire their property rights in those two segments this route is about a third longer than the north route it's about eight hundred feet longer than the north route and it does require everybody to continue to use the switchback which is on the north side here shown in yellow and those with those parallel lines i'll show a picture that in a little bit it also has a fairly steep descent as you approach kipling on the red line that's about three times as steep in the last fifty feet as the the switchback is and let's look at those two approaches to kipling this is the existing switchback approach to kipling kipling's down at the bottom there this is on the north side of the rail and it's it heads straight to kipling and that's that's what the option was it provides access to  is really the primary reason it would be there if the north linemen were picked if the south alignment is picked it's necessary for everybody everybody will have to go through the switchback with the south alignment we've done a couple of things to try to help reduce the potential for anyone going down this slope and this is about a five percent slope until the last fifty feet then it's about two and a half percent so people going the direction you're looking toward kipling we've done a couple things you can see them here one as we put stop a head on on the pavement and the actually a stop sign which is unusual on a bike way in liquid but it's that sticks out from the wall down there towards kipling to try to make it as visible as possible this is the dissent on the other side so this is the south side of the rail it's it's the red line you saw earlier as it approaches kipling looking looking east and that last portion you can see it drops pretty pretty quickly like i said about three times as fast as the switchback does that's why you can only see half of that so let me go over to the north alignment and touch on on what it consists of many of you've heard this before this is the same segments this is oak to nelson no need for the rail crossing because you're already on the station side of the  of the of the light rail line the rtd land there's already been negotiated for exchange to like wood it still needs to be approved but the negotiations are complete and there would this path would be narrower than ten feet in this segment from the oak to nelson if no acquisitions occur there are two properties there they're fairly long properties and there would be acquisitions a sliver of acquisition on the south side of both of those both of them  in order to make the path the full ten feet wide whoops the middle segment generally nelson to miller is pretty similar in this case i think i can talk about it looking on the eastern segment again it's just to the north of the light rail line and the eastern segment from miller to kipling is very similar in nature but there are some distinctions related to acquisitions again this is a portion where portion of this would be less than ten feet wide and less some acquisitions occurred from the backs of some of the properties that front on th plays and therefore properties there so on the north the north line that can the full extent of the north alignment there are six different properties where acquisitions will be necessary to provide a continuous ten foot wide path for those are located here and of course it would tie into the halfway through the switchback and you could go down to kipling or as is illustrated here continue on to the east with that discussion of the of the alternative paths now i want to dig into some of those topics that i mentioned earlier that that vary between the two alternatives the first one i want to talk about is fences and walls and i'm going to do that in three cont really quite good they're relatively straight so it's really quite good but north south visibility can someone from the north or the south see into activity on the path alignment does vary and then there are locations where there is a wall or a solid fence on the south side of these alternatives and that would generate some shade on the path which of course in the winter is not favorable so let me walk through that first a few photos this is an illustration of the kind situation this is actually the north corridor but it could be in a variety of places this is the kind of situation where there'd be no real visibility from the north or the south which in this photo is the left and the right it's it's just the path with a solid feature on either side again the east west is good in this case that wall on the right is on the south so it would cast a shadow in the winter and then there's also this condition again looking east where there's a solid barrier on the left not a solid barrier between the the trail corridor and the rail but one on the other side of the rail so people on the train could see into the the path but that's it people south of the train and north of the train wouldn't be able to see in so it's a it's somewhat improved visibility from the north and south but still restricted and then of course there's some that are completely open and i'll show you those here in a couple of minutes here's an example of one of those with a solid barrier on each side this is a part of the same path and like would farther east and it was taken at a time of year fall or an approaching fall where you can see the shadow out on the path as well so we deal with that those circumstances all of those circumstances today and different segments of the w l so this is the segment from oak to nelson and there are a lot of colors here first you'll see the blue line on the north that's the the path alignment and you'll see the red line on the south that's the path alignment so those are all things you're used to between either of those paths and the rail you'll see a continuous kind of an orange line that continuous orange line is that tall solid barrier that's adjacent to the rail so that's a continuous solid barrier through this side this this slide on both sides of the rail that's that's up it's not low you can't see over it that's the most clear part now let me talk about the south segment for a minute and this actually didn't show up real well today from oak street about half of this length on the south side of the red line there is not a continuous full height solid barrier but i put a dashed line there because i think it's likely there would be certainly not obligated that there would be but let me tell you a little bit about what we've done with the property owners on the north the residential property owners to the north east of nelson we have offered to them to make some modifications to fences or replace fences and given them the option at the the project's expense to have a six foot tall solid fence some of them have a block wall which is really not part of the discussion over there but don't worry about that right now so the assumption i've made is that we would make a similar offer to the residential properties if the south alignment was picked so that's the that area with the dashed lines there's not a solid barrier there as i said i would assume that we'd probably make a similar offer to the residential properties there to people have by far leaned toward a six foot solid fence between their residential property in the path so that's a lot of background this the eastern half to the south between the and the homes that is an existing solid high barrier and presumably there would be no reason anyone would want to take that out now let me talk about the north yet another circumstance the next slide is a little simpler on the north as i said between the rail and the blue line there's a solid tall barrier for this slide today there's some a mix of fencing on the north side of that gap however those fences will be replaced as part of the project if if there's a ten foot wide path through there they need to be moved to the north a bit on both of those properties as i mentioned earlier it is been indicated again not a certainty but it been indicated that both of those properties owners are interested in some kind of a visually open fence there may be continuous maybe with access to and from the path the access question is not a huge one in this case let's assume for a minute that it's continuous but they both indicated that they're interested in probably a open style offense so it makes visibility better if they do have access points it provides additional exits from the co the next slide is to the east from nelson roughly to miller a little simpler obviously in this section the south line is is doesn't have any of these issues it doesn't have the shade issue it's out next to to th and no barrier between th avenue and the and the red line it doesn't have the quarter with with fences on either side at all because it's in the front of homes so access shading those aren't issues with the red line here on the north side it's a it's a little bit of a mix the western half has a an existing six foot tall or higher solid barrier on both sides so you see the orange line on both side of the blue and about halfway across the slide about halfway across the slide the one between the blue line and the rail disappears and so you've got a tall barrier on the north side of the blue line but there's still one on the south side of the rail that you can see between the red line and the rail that continues almost to the end of the slide it continues past miller but it actually ends just short of the right side of the slide so while east or north south visibility is improved it's only improved by the amount of visibility the train provides and then the eastern segment you can probably tell the whole story here yourself the the red line has no obstructions to the south so none of these issues the blue line has a solid fence to the north it has an open fence on the south and the south rail fence has ended over there near miller it's a little tough to see but it's just about right here so from the blue line from that point east there's good visibility to the south there's no obstruction to the south on either side of the rail or beyond but there remains the vertical obstruction on the north side or ups or upper side in this drawing of the where the orange is and and that  that fencing actually goes all the way to kipling this illustrates just what's parallel to the blue line but it actually goes all the way to kipling on the north side of the switchback as well so let me summarize those three slides with some numbers first the shade question so this would be if there's a solid barrier of six foot heights or so immediately adjacent to the south side of either route on the north side that's true for a little less than a thousand feet for the south alignment it's a little more than six hundred feet where that shade issue could occur for visibility on the north side there's there's essentially none to the north and south because there's a continuous vertical obstruction adjacent to the past so that's about three hundred feet and then there's an additional close to one three hundred feet where there's a barrier on one side and the other barriers across the track so the only increased visibility is to and from the train on the south side that visibility question affects about six hundred feet that piece west of nelson or the third part then is the distance to an access point so the maximum distance to an access point on the north west of nelson is three hundred feet roughly if the commercial properties or the properties to the north add some accesses that would just reduce that number east it's about nine hundred and fifty feet or so the distance from any the maximum distance from any point to an exit which would be kipling or nelson on the north side the maximum distance to an access point of the south side's about three hundred feet and that only applies from from oak to nelson because from nelson east there's it's all open with that i've got a shift to irrigation and cover a few items here i'm sure you'll get more complete information here in just a few minutes so just a couple of slides this is the w line again  on the left this goes a little farther than nelson only have two slides the black line is a general representation of where the white lateral is located today and it's all in pipe the black circle is one of the locations where waters taken out crosses the rail two more times from south to north here west and nelson and then from north to south here east of miller and then it continues on to the southeast i didn't continue the drawing so here you see four circles where there are individual take outs for gatien water the rectangular box is also a take out for irrigation water but it's a little different it's not an individual's irrigation take out this is the box that those of you that we're on the the field trip on monday saw and heard some discussion about that serves the lakewood heights line which goes off to the northeast the upper up toward the upper right here and it continues beyond where i do it as well i'm not sure why i didn't draw the whole thing so a little bit of additional information before i move on to the next topic we're in kind of an awkward interim situation here the city has no relationship with the white lateral  irrigation folks or organizations today rtd and the white lateral have a contract an agreement which was the basis for the relocation and also putting in pipe of the and building these structures of the relationship between rtd and the white lateral in this area so that's an existing agreement our understanding is that there's a dispute between the white lateral and rtd on whether or not those agreements obligations have been fulfilled you'll hear more about that later i'm not going to try to explain that others can do that better since we're not actually a party to that the those are those are i'm pretty sure facts the interesting interim situation we're in is because that we don't have any uh any relationship or obligation today we don't really have a any standing to go to negotiate a deal with anybody now if the agreement to trade well if the north side of north alignment is selected and if the agreement to transfer properties that that has been put together and negotiated with rtd is approved then that property between the rtd rail and  the backs of those private properties that's currently owned by rtd will become owned by the city so the city will then step into the shoes of rtd essentially in that agreement and we'll have the obligations rtd has i think you've heard that before well we're not there though so we don't have any standing to negotiate a deal we don't have any standing to reach a conclusion we don't have any standing to write a commitment to anybody but recognizing that the north alignment was the one selected and may still be we've been talking with the irrigation folks from both entities liquid heights and from the white lateral the best solution probably is for all four parties those two the city and rtd to work out a deal that will both resolve the dispute and make provision for the north alignment if the north lineman is selected if the south alignment is selected much of this doesn't matter everything in this picture doesn't matter and everything further west that's on the north side doesn't matter there's still white lateral that would be relevant because there's some under the south alignment as well between nelson and oak and there's a couple of manholes there's no current water takeouts in that area and i'm going to talk about net city costs and i'm also gonna be really clear that this is not just a to kipling and that's because we have a grant that's been awarded that addresses two segments wodsworth and it's one grant looking at those two geographic areas as one project so the grant is for the two geographic areas combined not one or the other so let me touch on some of these and i'm actually gonna probably touch on most of the words up here which i always hate to do it but the south alignment is a reminder requires a commitment to condemnation if there's no no commitment to com condemnation there's no reason to talk further about the south alignment because we need that western peace doesn't mean we'll condemn it means we'll negotiate but if negotiations fail it's an essential piece of property we also need to have additional negotiations with rtd because south side of the rail was not part of the exchange agreement that's been negotiated if the only acquisition is the one at the west end the nestle necessary acquisition and then it's probably in the range of a two one million dollar project again both geographic areas total two one million net city cause that's because it's not eligible for the grant so it's a high number and about two hundred and fifty feet would be less than ten feet wide as i mentioned the second bullet here is about two three million this would create the consistent in foot width path it requires acquisitions from for properties one of which is the one on the west end the north alignment requires approval to the no acquisitions so we just start from the beginning saying there's not gonna be any acquisitions at all the result would be about seven hundred and fifty feet of the length would be less than ten feet wide and the cost will be about two three million if on the other hand the the the proposal that was part of the grant application is approved which would be a continuous ten foot path then acquisitions are needed from parts of six properties  lakewood heights structure would be moved out of the path and the net cost would be eight hundred thousand dollars that's because this option out of these four is the one that would retain the grant the other three would require in forfeiting gran now i want to touch on some distinctions and i'm going to do this in two different ways the first few that i'll go through and this very next slide are distinctions in in degree or quantity it's an item that applies to both the north alternative and the south alternative but maybe have a larger significance on one of the alternatives than the other so let's look at those the first one is acquisitions from private properties assume for a minute that there are ten the ten foot wide consistent path is is the goal then there are six properties where some acquisition would occur on the north therefore on the south assume for a minute that ten feet wide is not sacrosanct and will reduce it in order to reduce acquisitions then there could be no acquisitions on the north and that one that's necessary on the south and there's variations in between of course i spent some time on some messy slides on the walls and fences so i won't repeat any of that here rattling i think i mentioned that the south alignments about a third longer whoops oh and net city cost i went through that in some detail as well so these apply these four categories apply to both just two different degrees the next slide though is different it either applies or it doesn't depending on which which version of the alternatives you're looking at condemnation commitment that's necessary for the south alignment not necessary for the north alignment now if the goal remains a ten foot consistent with path and negotiations successful is acceptable then no condemnation would be necessary on the north so it's necessary on the south not necessary on the north drives and street crossings there are none on the north  between oak and kipling on the south there are some but it varies depending on whether you use the off street new path between nelson and miller in which case there's just a three driveways crossing path or if it's a non street segment then there's more the grant is four footed with any of the options on the south it's possible to retain it on the north but not assured it depends on what you all choose to do if the ten foot width is retained then yes the grants retained if it's not then there's kind of a gray area i'll talk about here in a minute their effects on irrigation either way as i mentioned on the south alignment there's  users in that segment on the north side however there are multiple irrigation users including like what heights and i think it's four or five other take outs plus there's manholes on both both north and south which would be adjusted those are accessed probably much less frequently than the the takeout boxes so it's less of an impact perhaps this could have been on the preceding slide it seemed to fit better here to me whoops negotiation with rtd is not necessary on the north for that property that's already happened we have an agreement that that could be executed it hasn't happened on the south side and affects the segment to the west closer to oak and also the segment east of miller on the south the slope down to kipling doesn't really affect through travellers on the north side now people who want to access kipling even if the north alternative is chosen still have to go down the switch back all the way to kipling but if you think about through travelers none of those have to go down to the my last slide oops crass oh i forgot there is a track crossing with the south alignment everybody has to cross the tracks with the north alignment no one does i think that's less okay this is my last slide and i'm gonna go through it step by step these are some options options that perhaps will be helpful during your discussion i realized that in my head i could come up with a bunch of them and those are always harder to talk about than to write about in trying to keep them separate and clear so i offer these just to the degree it may be helpful during your discussion the the the three it all show on the south option apply whether it's a shared roadway option for the south or it's not where we build the off street in segment between nelson and miller so either way and if any of the south options are chosen then the city council it seems to me would need to take a formal action to replace the resolution that was adopted by the city council identifying the north alignment but that's for another day so here's one approach to the south if the south alignment is chosen and the commitment of course would need to be made for one condemnation but if the decision is there will be no other acquisition that's an option and as i said the major impact there is that it would create a segment that's less than ten feet wide a second option is a variation where the commitment to condemnation would still be necessary for the one parcel and then the direction of the city staff would be to pursue negotiated acquisition but no condemnation other than the one necessary one so wherever we can accomplish a negotiated agreement for land acquisition that extends the amount of path that would be ten feet wide but this option doesn't guarantee it would all be ten feet wide because we would not do any other condemnation other than the  the third option commit to the one condemnation for soon negotiated acquisitions and come back to council if condemnation would be required to create a consistent ten foot width that was the original plan was this consistent info with that this would give the city council an option to say okay we have more information now do we want to condemn in order to make it a continuous ten foot width or not that would be a decision at a later time by the city council i to go to the north side one option would be no acquisitions some of the the path would be less than ten feet wide as i mentioned earlier a second option on the north cleverly lettered as heed not to be confused with beyond the south but anyway the only negotiated acquisitions no condemnation so to the degree were successful with negotiated acquisitions that extends the amount of the path that could be ten feet wide to the extent were not successful some of the paths would be less than ten feet wide but no condemnation would would occur f again negotiated cons and if it's necessary to retain the grant if it's necessary to condemn in order to contain the grant after the negotiations are complete then come back to the city council and give you that option here's the situation one of the one of the one of the parts of the grant is to provide a ten foot wide continuous path there is some design flexibility it's limited as i described in the staff report for a variety of reasons mostly to to retain the integrity of grant process and not people let people do bait and switch kinds of things but we think there's the opportunity for some length of path to be less ten feet wide some kind of de minimis length something that would be considered material that's this circumstance so if we're successful in negotiating enough i'm sorry that's not the circumstance this circumstance is we don't negotiate successfully enough to get enough path ten foot wide to keep the grant then we could come back to the city council and you could make a choice condemnation but no grant some amount of condemnation whatever is necessary to keep the grant that would be a choice again at a later date as a condemnation decision by the city council in the last one i could fit on the slide and the last one i thought of is do negotiated acquisitions in this case return to city council to make the path ten feet wide from end to end which of course would retain the  grant i suppose the last thing that i should well i'll put this slide back up after when you're ready for your discussions so it'll be available to consider and you see the space between d and e that was to remind me that everything above that space and d there's no chance of the grant g and it would guarantee the grant because it would be ten foot all the way through on the north f would give you a decision later on whether or not you want to retain the grant at the cost of doing some amount of condemnation ii might retain the grant if we're adequately successful in negotiated acquisitions i appreciate all the perplexed looks it's it's messy the last thing i guess i should say is that this being a study session i understand that you won't be making any formal decisions tonight will be leaning towards a consensus hopefully and as i said th you may have a consensus that's different than any of these in fact f and g could be combined if you want another one to think about right now and with that i'm going to stop and we'll switch gears here i think the irrigation folks are next is that correct mayor yes sir thank you mister hutchison all right well code call down robin and tracy we're going to give a presentation on behalf of liquid heights mutual water and the white lateral ditch company company we are here representing white lateral ditch and the lakewood heights mutual water company and what to share our thoughts impacting your decision where to move forward with the bike path on the north or south alignment if previous meetings there's been a lot of talk new bike paths we paved over existing water right of ways ditches and takeouts and since these rights precede the city it's important to understand the impacts including share hollows access liability maintenance and additions drainage and flow there are significant costs to the city that need to be considered when making your decision few key topics you want to discuss our overview of our company's unresolved rtd issues resulting from construction in two thousand and ten diagram showing pipe takeouts and elevations to explain the negative impact created in the costs and other impacts associated with the proposed land transfer we have a map here of the white ditch and the leg lights pipes and takeouts you can see by the green star where the white ditch head gate is located and how the white ditch with an underground pipe the plans were shared in advance but this construction was not completed according to the proof plan and to this day white ditch is not signed off on the final construction will show along issues with construction because the pipes and take outs were not built according to plan both white ditch and lakewood heights have been negatively impacted by this construction including redirection of water flow shows the old where the old takeout box was compared to the new takeout version it shows the location of the old ditch and the current ditch the roof of pipe and a drop in elevation has created slower  a silt and loss of head pressure two legged heights pi ditch elevations the water from the old elevations fed directly into the lakewood heights pipe because the ditches were level the new elevations caused the water to come into the takeout box lower than where an elected heights take out pipe is located this slide shows the top view of the lake with heights take out the new take out has a diversion a ninety degree sharp left turn and then a forty five degree in right hand turn whereas the previous take out was a gentle curving fork or this is a picture of the new take out as you can see we excuse me see the board that we had to put in this was done in order to raise the water level and a takeout box the backing up of water creates a turner most tremendous amount of silt that needs to be cleaned out multiple times per week in multiple take outs take out attorney and engineering fees and maintenance costs we also have costs associated with the bike path north  drainage three engineering of access to our take outs constructing new take outs and additional maintenance and repair costs the list of costs isn't that all inclusive and other expenses do exist the city would need to clearly demonstrate that it will avoid injury to person or property avoid interference with owners operations and preserve the functions for which such work was installed including how the integrity of the ditch flow will be maintain during and after construction how the city plans to address the fact that the project will restrict future water write purchases to neighbors in this section by making ownership cost prohibitive due to the fact that the ditch will be covered  concrete as well as liability and safety concerns of the shareholders and workers of the white lateral ditch in lakewood heights future water company the city fails to show how this will be accomplished and qasimi agreement will not be also concerned with the liabilities of having to clean out our take outs in the middle of the path the bike path currently now as it heads to the east of kipling is very steep and bikes fly past my house all the time on the west side you're gonna have the same incline going the other way and if you have workers out the middle the path with these bikers flying by there's no cause for injury and liability and we have concerns about that in closing these ditches were dug by early settlers of the lake wooden area and have contributed to the cultivation beauty and sustainability of our neighborhoods is because of these ditches that lakewood exists and is such a desirable place to live and is why it is so important to maintain our water rights for future generations thank you for your time thank you nicely done and you still had ten minutes left all right so now before the clerk goes and gets the roster if you haven't had a chance to sign in for public input this is your opportunity and again three minutes two and a half it will be green thirty seconds yellow and at the end it will glow red miss hudson yes thank you i'd like to make just a quick explanation you might have noticed in the past we've actually had an inaccurate clock that the mayor had on his station as it relates to public comment so that has now been corrected and we will no longer have a variety of times when it comes to three minutes sometimes that was three and a half and sometimes that was less than so from now on we will have an accurate clock and it was nobody's fault and it wasn't done on purpose it was just a bad functioning clock and i wanted to make that cl thank you thank you but for me it was always three minutes  i have three minutes and two seconds darn i will see good evening mayor in the city council it's an honor to appear in front of you as always i thank you very much for the opportunity i know all of you take your positions very seriously having said in those seats at one point myself and so i just wanted to briefly address a couple of considerations that i hope you will well think about safety and efficiency and effectiveness in terms of the option that you decide to go with safety is a major concern the safety of cyclists pedestrians as well as motorists and from a safety perspective the previously adopted north alignment with the ten foot adjacent path adjacent to the w line is clearly the safest alternative from my own perspective as a cyclist i always look for the safest off street route  best way to get from point a to point b without having to get on the street i have a lot of cycling friends who really think that you know the streets are a great place to ride they are sometimes but cyclists and motorists we don't live as well together as we should yet we're not quite at that point so providing a safe off street alternative is really the best way to go also from a standpoint of the efficiency and effectiveness i think you need to consider that there's already been considerable discussion and staff work done on this and the initial adoption was was in january of two thousand and seventeen i believe considerable work had occurred before that and has occurred since that time and we already have an approved grant for the north alignment adjacent to the w line and so i hope you'll take those factors into consideration and i wish all of you a pleasant evening as always and thank you very much for your service you minute a year and city council evening i'm forrest jones i'm on the white lateral board also and safety was just brought up and i mean there's some other ways to look at the safety as far as having a long corridor with no escape to to get help from anyone and also i mean us you know we have to get in our water take outs i mean having an open hold in the middle of the of the bike path and you know either bikes hitting us or going into a hole going into one of the take out s so those are some safety concerns also jay brought up the shade factor as far as and chemicals were concerned with chemicals getting into our water we've been i've been messing with this for over nine years and you know we were reluctant to have anyone else in this weather the ditch when we're still trying straighten out the last time we allowed somebody to to mess with it  it's i mean we need you know we're just a per all volunteer you know and we you know i've got thousand hours into this over the last eight nine years for myself as far as actual cost and agreement come into to fruition i mean we actually you know need to have our lawyers and water engineers talking and our lawyers have been trying to communicate with the city lawyers for a year to get a a fee agreement to cover our costs for engineers and lawyers fees and we it has we're still waiting on phone calls back so if this is under a time limit to get to grant it's gonna be tough to do and i mean to meet the criteria of this grant is so narrow that i actually i mean everything would have to follow right into line to make this come to fruition are there any other grants to be looked at i mean that we're talking about a tenth it could do ten foot on southside i mean to you all my name is tim cara bellow i live at one hundred and two eight o west th place first of all i want to thank you all for coming out last monday i appreciate that you took the time at least to come and visually what you have to decide on so thank you very much for that i've lived in my home for forty years since one thousand nine hundred and seventy eight and many of my neighbors have lived there not quite as long but but a long time i am not willing at all to give up my property for a bike path and i'm not against bike paths i have two bikes of my own i've liked several times from kipling down to the platte river and back like west so i like bikes as well what i feel is you have a legitimate alternative on keep avenue that you do not have to take my property my neighbor's properties remove a hundred and twenty five hundred thirty year old trees that that provide a shade beauty and have for years and years and years i have put a lot of work and time in my home and so of my neighbors too and so to me it's not a question of the four against bikes it's property rights in value my property the city to this point in just a discussion we've had can't even tell me how many feet and where you know i have a shed in my backyard that has been there since the  if i understand the city correctly they're gonna move that fence right right to it right to my shutting and there are safety issues there are safety that's a long stretch with no access that is a very long stretch and so i am concerned about our yards people come in into our backyards and so i hope that that you are well gives us the thought that that you have been giving it for way too long actually and and i appreciate again a chance to express to you just how i feel and that you will have to use eminent domain at least as far as i'm concerned thank you thank you as campbell you're doing good hot alright a little bit more there you go very good i want to thank the mayor and city council for having us all here again for this discussion and the technical descriptions are just brilliant and i really appreciated the pdf that the city made accessible also that described the situation that we've all been dealing with and i am a tandem bicycle writer throughout the denver metro area i live in lakewood in ward two and my husband and i were out yesterday morning on the shared use path i like to call it that or rather than just a bike path  myself heavily use these paths throughout lakewood jefferson county and the denver metro area for connectivity for a variety of reasons whether that's recreation or getting to work or getting two locations we want to access the safety issues are a big concern for me especially on the area that's described along th avenue where you'd have a shared use paths across driveways that's a difficult situation i encounter that weekly in my neighborhood along the north side of alameda just west of harlan where the shared path crosses many commercial driveways and it's much safer being blind and a pedestrian in those situations in my opinion than if you're on a bike going at a faster speed  visibility just with things slowed down for a pedestrian is safer but i really don't like the feeling i got when i was along th avenue yesterday trying to imagine a sidewalk or shared path being put in there and trying to cross those driveways and also the visibility in my opinion isn't as good either as far as visibility also in long strap stretches of access throughout bike paths and shared use paths through the denver metro area long stretches are common we're used to that and those of us that either walk or ride on cycle we prepare ourselves for that and it's not unusual i am very aware and empathetic to all of our difficulties with the increased growth throughout the denver metro area and how do we cope with the traffic in the density and mobility is becoming much more difficult not just on a bike for all of us or for walking but for myself as well with a visual impairment  need to get us separated from traffic i see as being ever more critical and important and how that ties into the use of public transportation so thank you again for listening to all of our concerns and having this discussion tonight thanks much right thank you kevin walter thom tom good evening welcome good evening thank you thanks for your time i'm kevin heck i've been a resident on lakewood i'd strive for thirty two years i remember the train whistles when they actually blew there well the original train whistles as you know liquid heights is a historic area and in fact they recently did that i brew hood study through lakewood and it's eligible for a historic designation and a lot of the reason that it's so historic is the water that we've had the use of since the the street was incorpor subdivided  rtd kind of messed up that water years ago and if the path goes to the north of the rail it's going to get messed up even worse because all of a sudden the ditch that's already kind of screwed up is going to be covered by concrete and the problems with access to clean it out with access to get to the head gate are going to be compounded leaving the ditch accessible by leaving the path on the south side is consistent with the way that bike path works just east of garrison where the bike paths actually jogs onto a mixed use street for about three blocks and then jogs back on to the bike  path i think it's important especially in light of the safety comments to realize that this northside option is going to put that path inside of two high walls for a thousand feet i mean you're going to be in a little alley there the snow back up is going to be horrible and it'll be pretty dark and creepy at night and finally if the council decides to commit to this north alignment i think that the lakewood high spiritual water company needs a commitment that the city will guarantee a sufficient flow of water to the lakewood heights ditch head gate because i mean that's our concern so it's a selfish concern but that's our concern thank you farik well said thank you walter tom david good evening welcome mister mayor i did not realize i signing up to speak but i won't mention something that hurt you early i live on th avenue man there's a lot of traffic on that road it goes pretty fast both cars and bikes so one of the benefits it could happen of the southern alignment if the concrete saw a sidewalk was extended it might narrow the street and make traffic move a little slower  that being said i would actually say i'm in favor of the north alignment to begin with but i do see it as a reasonable alternative that's great thank you and if and if you did happen to sign up and you don't want to talk to you so i'll say hey i agree or i disagree you can do that gladly from your seat so tom we're going to kind of do a bullpen here to keep people rolling tom david mike mister barch good evening burnie i live at ten four hundred west th place i'm also on the white lateral ditch board and i thought i would come here tonight and talk about what we raised with the ditch the fact that even if you go with this project on the north side you still have to get an agreement from white lateral ditch in order to do that crossing and as tracy laid out there are factors that must be met those factors are not met the agreement will not be given and like we cannot proceed so it's not a guarantee that she can do that so i just want to make that clear but i also want to talk about what's going on so i bought my house i'm not forty years in the house like bella but i've been there eleven years i bought this as my forever home i got married there i have an eight month old know and snowsleet was a little cranky but life goes on when we bought this house we thought we did  diligence but it seems like and i hate to say it there's always a shoe dropping from the city of lakeland we had issues with our td and we had issues with the sound wall disappearing we thought when we thought we got that resolved now we had issues with liquid trying to rezone us we thought and got that result now we have this i'd point out i'm an avid avid biker i biked to work during the summer and attended all the meetings and the bicycle plans that we looked at this was not on there this was put in after the fact basically in my mind cya it was not there everything as a north south we've received letters from the city of lakewood staff insuring us know the project is not the bike trail will not be moving to the north side of the track it will stay on the south side we thought we did our due diligence and i'm sorry to say it seems like we keep getting either lied to or things keep changing we can't get a reassurance of what we've been told we've been told one thing by rtd we have that in writing with letters we've been told by lakewood we have a variance that was granted not that long ago based on the fact that this project would not occur there would be no public use there yet here we stand today i'm sorry to say lakewood has changed it is not necessarily where i thought it would go my mother in law my sister in law lived here my wife is from this area that's why we moved here but it's constantly changing and it seems like the vision of lakewood does not include us in our neighborhood we're part of the eye bruh hood neighborhood there was a sustainability plan that was done that talked about retaining those values of those homes but it seems like every avenue it's being changed we have urban campers that are moving into our parks in our area and there's more considerations than just this track on the north it's safety of what the people coming in and where we're gonna be thank you very much thank you traffic on the street because right now if there's a backup on at colfax and kipling people take the cut around they cut through the neighborhood right there and they're going in excess of thirty five miles an hour along that straight a lot a lot of times especially during the the school hours when it when it gets backed up up there so by reducing the street it would increase that with their now with the light route lateral ditch and that issues right there willing to make the better thing if you're gonna do it you first have to fix the ditch first get the sidewalk all set but don't pour it until you've tested the water the entire way because if you have to go up and dig it up you're gonna pinch twice as much money to dig it up and report so if that's gonna be an option and i don't like the idea of condemning the properties along there because i mean before when everything was being set up they should have looked at the bike path there and put it on the north side if you don't have enough room you should have had worked with rtd at that point because they could have sled the tracks a little bit over to take it away because if you look at what you hit oak it's kind of you have to go either direction anyway you know how many people are going left to go down to the bike trail along basically tenth avenue over there or they going up to th going across one block and then having to cut way back over anyway so kind of just dead ends are right at oak anyway so it doesn't matter where you're at i was with someone by kurt tonight and i didn't realize it but they actually cut through trembles property down there to make a continuous path because they don't want to go north for a block go through the mess of the rtd station on the road and then turn around across the truck so you gotta cross the tracks once you get across the tracks on the other side to get back to where they were going when they can just go basically a straight through cut through right through that area so if you're gonna look at that office you get a look at that and then snow removal remember when it snows less than a quarter an inch you have to plow because if not like in wodsworth this last year it was a solid sheet of ice for a week and a half because it scores snowed a quarter in and with quarter inch it'll stay on there and just becomes ice you have to plow and you can't really use chemicals because of that but if you just get it off it works so great thank you very much sir mother mister mar h it's twelve feet you know and i would say that in negotiating with mister hutchison is let's say it's trying and i hope the neighborhood neighbors all taped these negotiations but getting back to it it's about property rights and taking people's property rights it's twelve feet and i also understand that there's a public service right away that's supposed to go through there to put up lights because i taught a  one of those guys measuring out where he was gonna run his power lines for the lights for the bike path so it's not just a bike path it's a noise maker it's gonna have drugs in there there's gonna be needles in there there's gonna be people opening up manhole covers let check water out it's not about bicycles i don't even know how many bikes will be on there i don't think m knows how many bikes will be on there this is gonna be five a day ten a day is it worth the millions of dollars you're gonna owe that's right you got twelve that i have million dollars to blow now so yeah oh yeah you got all the money in the world my money but you're to going to use it but  it's it's it's not your property it's not the bicyclist property it's their property you don't have the right to take it as far as i'm concerned for a bike path that maybe you only have five people a day on it that's ridiculous and every i think almost every one of you at one time said we're not gonna use eminent domain put it in a bike path you said it you said it i  hmm and i so i'm gonna hold you to it okay and thank you for using some of that twelve and a half million dollars to buy a new clock that's great news the worst news is you got to go over every time you spoke you've had four minutes can you believe that must be nice mister march mister raber  good evening good evening i didn't realize i was signing up to talk you don't have to it's an interesting issue i think one thing that's getting overlooked in this is the market value of a water share so when you're messing around with making your decision and having an effect on the use of the water market right for water share is somewhere around five to seven thousand dollars so that means if something happens to ruin the supply of water two to three million dollars value is going to evaporate from fair number of people's pocketbooks and the other thing i thought was interesting tonight was road sharing well i live on garrison street and there are hundreds of people that go up and down garrison street on the bike pa some at their own peril i must say but to use th street and a manner similar to garrison street wouldn't seem all that terrible and i realize people who live on the street going to have an issue with parking but if you get creative maybe there's a way around that and the last thing that i thought i'd mention is when you walk along in the wintertime that's just a sheet of ice so every time you're going to build some wall where the winters sun isn't going to hit the it's just gonna be really dangerous so you have that situation from garrison up to about independence than you have from independence up to kipling where the wall prevents the sun from hitting the path and they don't always plow it in there and it can be really treacherous and i've noticed sometimes people will come down the hill from kipling you know underneath on pike view and then go down whatever that is th or whatever to the path just to avoid the ice so that's three things to think about the market value of the shares of the traffic on a road share bases and walls with ice thank you thank you of the console on my on my comments because i have friends on both sides of this issue and i want to clarify some things when we keep hearing that why are we doing this now well the reason that this whole initiative started was the original design of this bike way took the north north path and it got corrupted somewhere along the line because that was supposed to be on the north side from day one and the reason it was supposed to be on the north side and i'm talking to you analytically the reason it was on the north side is it didn't contend with any driveways and this got changed around and now it's going down on th street colorado state patrol just two months ago in front of the house subcommittee testified that seventy five percent of bicycle motorist collisions happen at intersections every time you go past a driveway on th avenue that's an intersection so when this was originally designed it was designed to get the bikes and the cars away from one another the other reason it was designed that way is the whole alignment of the bike way is on the north side of the of the trail of the w line bike trail so this was meant to be a continuation directly across kipling and then go in that short section over to oak street so that anybody transporting across the bike way from denver didn't have to get off and exit at kipling and do that crazy loop down that slope and then the blind corner at kipling where you can't see past the bush on the north side it's private property and you have to turn most people will turn right some will go left and go into the neighborhoods rather it's th street th street th street or th street going on down because immediately you have a problem with bicyclists motorists collisions and that's what the whole thing was designed to avoid as far as the issue with the snow on the path and i'm talking to you from an engineering standpoint you have the opportunity if this goes in on the north side to put a solar reflector type of a fence up there which will reflect heat back toward the bike way without being a mirror that's going to blind people but just to reflect the heat back and i live in a lot of snow area and i can tell you as soon as you reflect that heat back the snow is gone there's no chemicals there's no nothing so that's the way you keep it and nobody did that on the rest of the bike way so lakewood has the opportunity to do this properly so it's a model for the rest of the community the subtle thing on the ditch and i keep hearing this back and forth about the take that eight hundred thousand dollars grant and fix the ditch the ditch issue isn't going to go away you're either going to continue it under rtd or you're gonna move ahead and appropriate the money that you need to to fix the dish issue and as far as eminent domain on property and i i've had it done to me and i resent it what i've heard tonight is you can put this thing in without any eminent domain and just narrow it down  okay i hope somebody has some questions so i can keep talking okay thank you no we don't do that okay thank you for signing in though mister misess barnett come on down thanks again for putting this together again and this is not a scare factor by any by any stretch but i didn't have opportunities we've been dealing with some major medical issues almost daily and for about ten days now so i didn't have a chance to prepare as i wanted to but the more i hear the more i did want to offer up the two cents that i have to bring to the table we have been dealing with this issue since april of two thousand and sixteen so i think i'm addressing my few words which i'm speaking on behalf of my wife w physical position to come up here this evening as well as myself when the transparency issues that dom bernie touched on briefly have been a major concern all so i think i'm mainly addressing new council people to show that i've had to have read into the record at the last study session or maybe the one before all of the resentment that i felt of being called a anti cyclist during the meeting that happened when this north alignment plan was finally approved and voted in after midnight of one of these sessions that's how long everybody was here to laveau finally happened even the police and fire house left before the voting so for a long long time this is went on there but  the very first time was in april two thousand and sixteen when the surveyors marched on to the property and announced the plan and then of course that stirred up enough rising of untold proportions about what happened to neighborhood input community meetings this than that what do we do try to cut some of this down but it's a long story jay did an excellent job of going around trying to come up with four different options as a result of some neighborhood of meetings and i think he came up with two good ones the one that's in place that we're talking about detail on tracking so point i want to make is that through neighborhood site visitations by council by staff i know me personally have been told that as opposed to what the survey people had implant in mind when they first came in early on we were advised that we would lose five to eight feet of our property which that's not a lot of ground we have a big lot but when you know what we went through with our td building our wall and that kind of thing it's a huge thing to redo all that a lot of out of pocket money now the point is that here we said again with wanting more input so at this point i've got to just reiterate that i'm still opposed to it i want to see more transparency i've been promised a written agreement that bears that my wall will stay in place and that once construction starts it's not going to change and go ahead and take property i'm sorry yep all right thank you gave you a little leeway thank you yes sir thank you all right that exhausts the roster of folks who signed up to speak no sir thank you sorry sorry you had your three minutes thank you and i are very behind on the curve on this we own the corner building where the silver rtd structure is and we also own the next two buildings to the east the two four plexus so those parking lots all joined along there  we bought those four years ago and we commit to the neighborhood we're not we will never be slumlords the eleven people i feel like i'm representing eleven families that lived there if you knocked on any of those doors when you're out there last week would i know speak very highly of us if you notice the buildings are immaculate and we push the people around us to try and spruce eras up because that neighborhoods up and coming and there's good people live there our concern and only one person really touched on it is crime our big issue our biggest angst for ourselves and our tenants is that those parking lots people are afraid to go out to our dumpsters the stuff we've dealt with is despicable as far as feces in the  just cutting through there and our tenants were afraid to go in the building so if we put it on the southside if that's your decision it's going to dramatically increase that when you have single family homes and i am retired three years law enforcement so i know little about crime waves or crime patterns when you have single family homes and people see somebody they can call like what pd is great i've worked with them they'll be there but when you have eleven families and parking lots of join people are always coming and going so people our tenants don't know if they belong there or not so they're reluctant to call the police and by you know having more traffic there when you funnel it this way across the tracks and into a bike path that would be right in their backyard that's just going to increase  issue so our stance would obviously be that we would prefer it on the north side also by cutting into our parking lot at the end unit through condemnation i meant domain would be a financier hardship on us and i obviously would challenge that i know i'm not going to win ultimately but i still on grounds of not only the financial hardship it would create to us by losing half our parking lot but also i would do it more to just try and do everything i can to prevent that from being in our tenants backyard i guess my final thought would be if you do feel compelled to put on the south side would you please strongly consider option two which would put the bike path on the street in front which is another gentleman point out that that street people drive way too quickly on th ave that would slow that down and it would keep people from cutting through our parking lots being back close where the bike paths would be it would prevent the whole eminent domain issue as well off the road on the road off the road and it's very confusing for cyclists so i will ask you to consider a third option which is just scrapped the whole thing and go all the way down th street because as a cyclist if i'm already torn off onto th going to the west there anyway i'm just gonna go out to oak and then go left or go right and i've done it before jogging back two hundred yards hundred yards back to the training lines on the south side it's just not going to work you're gonna have a lot of bikes going  down th anyway and probably over half of them we're gonna continue to do that so the safety issue is going to be worse because now you've got it designed to the east to have a large path but to the west you don't so people are gonna get squeezed traffic's gonna get squeezed because you're gonna go from a narrow street to a wider street and that's it's confusing to cyclists and it's just they're trying to just get from point a to point p the other thing that i would add is that it really doesn't make any sense there's a lot of diss ingenuity regarding ice the kipling bridge coming down that path is a deathtrap in the winter because it's steep and it's always ice so actually it's safer to continue the path going to the west on the north side if you're gonna do it because it's flat it's flatter having bikes goat and make that hairpin turn and go east downhill in the kipling is scary if there's ice there and so what i would say is let's think through it this decision was already made why it's even backed up here doesn't make any sense to me it seems like a complete waste of time but regardless if you're going to do option to where it's on the south side bulldoze all the way throughout oak make sure it's narrow street all the way out to oak street and just don't even go on the path on the south side of the rail line she just use th avenue across thank you thank you all right close public comment thank you all very much for taking the time to come out and certainly we've had the opportunity to meet one on one in different capacities with many of you i know our city manager and myself have met with many of you as well hutchison so we appreciate that i also want to thank council who took the time there were a lot of great questions that were put in ahead of time so the folks out here know that this has been a really important subject for this council and and as evidenced by the amount of questions that have come in and the responses that have been given so we have quite a few lights on and i'm just gonna i'm just going to start and try to be quick i think the last speaker did speak about this we had the opportunity to to weigh in to a lot of these topics last year what i do appreciate is the second round i've got to learn a little bit more having the opportunity to sit down with tracy and robin and understand the issues surrounding water and so i still support the original decision made by city council i don't think it's a done deal by any means we've heard that there's still some confusion and part of that confusion has been a push of where we're at tonight so there haven't been final decisions made based on where are we going tonight where the alignments what can we do without having to take anybody's property or work with property owners so i think that's led to a lot of that what i like about continuing is the safety issue growing population kids going to ib elementary i'm in the new developments that are happening west of kipling i think this could provide some relief for the water company right now there could be an opportunity for us to work with them and and bring back their flows which are important which leads to the equity part of those and we may never get there but we heard tonight about technology and commitment was made when i was elected right before i was elected to council in two thousand and six there was a lot of controversy about this city paying x to widen those two bridges to make sure that there was a shared use path on wodsworth and kipling so that the train and the bicyclists and pedestrians could go safely that was a smart decision and there was a lot of controversy at that time but it's paid dividends and i think when we have commitments to other communities to to be part of a contiguous bicycle system that's going to get people all up and down the west line in a safe matter this leads to that and i think an easy answer would be no let's just stop looking but a hard answer is yes let's keep going let's keep working please continue to be a partner with the city we're not perfect the situation may not have come out perfectly but i think there's a little way that we can get this done and so i'm going to continue to support the original north thank you you thanks everybody for your comments and your thoughts this is a very very very complex and difficult thought process for all of us i have a couple of questions that i would like to start getting to jay if we could start there or i'll just i know that there has been some comments about the trees to be removed and that were removed in the past could you talk about jay those trees because i think all of us love our trees i mean this is the tree city so would you review that sure thank you there have been again jay hutchison director of public works there there are two parts that add i think one is what happened with the rtd project and then one is what would happen if the if a path is constructed north or south side first owned the trees they removed i haven't asked them that question but i think that's the case it had certainly had an effect on the appearance or view from some of the backyards on the north side perhaps on the south i'm not as sure about the south but i'm certain on the north but but those were trees as far as i'm aware that we're all owned by rtd as to the proposed path north or south alignment there will be some tree removal on the north alignment we haven't done enough work to know exactly what it would be on the south alignment as i mentioned earlier we're farther along on the north alignment we've been working on that a while the south alignment is a relatively new returned idea  but on the north side there are some trees that would be acquired particularly a couple of cottonwoods that i think of but not just those a few others we the and a couple of a couple of them are very old and very large what their lifespan is i know is obviously an open question there's always those kinds of questions about trees is how long are they good for but they are big and provide the kinds of amenities that you're heard described earlier does that help that helps thank you um i may i ask a couple more questions mister muir okay can we review one of the difficulties i think is that the city doesn't use eminent domain very often and we try really hard not to use that i think one of the things that when we talk about taking property there may be a misunderstanding that that means that those property owners aren't given any value for their land could you go through the process of how that taking or eminent domain process would work so that those who are not familiar with it might be learn a little bit sure i'd be happy to and as i said earlier our goal is agreement where the parties reach an agreement that both are comfortable with and there's no court involvement and that's always the first step it's always the preferred step we hold eminent domain or condemnation as kind it's i'm going to describe what would happen on this project with the grant we don't do things much differently when there's not a grant but but there's a there's a document that the colorado department of transportation has that's about twenty pages of how does this process work and it includes sections on terms that are used how the acquisition process works including the appraisal process etc which i'll talk about in a second negotiations payment and possession and if necessary condemnation it's all described here that's kind of an upfront step for folks here's generally how it unfolds once the acquisition areas is defined and the effects on the property are defined then an appraiser is hired by the city or the hiring may happen earlier earlier but the appraiser then contacts the property owner and the appraiser is an independent entity hired by the city separately it's not a city staff person and it's  credential appraiser as well that appraisers job is to figure out what the appropriate fair market value is and that's the target is to make sure that people are compensated for any acquisition at what the market says they should be compensated so those numbers change as the markets change and they changed based on how much land needs to be acquired and what the improvements are on that land and those kinds of things as well so the appraiser does that in two ways first he does meet with the the property owner and there's essentially an outline put in the field that the appraiser and the property owner can look at and can evaluate the impacts and then secondly the appraisers obligation is to identify what are typically referred to as or comparable property sales so they try to find properties that have sold that are comparable in character to the property where some acquisition needs to occur and the part of goal for that of course is to to try to determine what the fair market value is and that's what appraisers do so the appraiser goes through that they come up with an appraisal amount and we will also be working with the property owners on physical things that might change and the appraiser course has kept aware of that because we want to try to figure out a way to make the impacts as ameliorated as possible can't always do that if you have to take out a one hundred year old cottonwood tree there's not a way to replace it with a hundred year old  job the appraisers job is concluded then the city's right away agent will interact with the property owner and i should should mention there's an insertion in between those two steps the state of colorado actually reviews and proves the appraisals if the appraisals are over a certain amount the property owner can get their own appraisal using an appraiser they select but at the cost of the project not at the cost of the property owner so then there may be two appraisals between the city and and the property owner and again the ultimate end result of that process is intended to be an identification of what the fair market value is how much should be paid to the property owner for the land that needs to be acquired and the improvements that need to be acquired that's a process that we put a lot of weight on that lat that step i just described and we'll go back and forth between our right away or land purchase person and the property owner multiple times trying to figure out what the the best thing is all around that's that's the negotiated acquisition part of the process if that fails and it's not possible to reach a conclusion where everybody shakes hands and agreement signed and and property transfers then the the legal action can begin and that legal action is a court process sometimes referred to as eminent domain or condemnation whereby the the city would go to the court and say here's this public project here's the land that we need here's why we need this land here's how it would be used and here's the process we've been through so far and  then the there's a couple of paths this can go on it's fairly common that the court would hold a hearing for possession not for valuation not to determine how much at that time how much the property owner should be paid but rather a possession hearing which would be the decision point by the court of whether or not the city should actually acquire the property if the court decides yes the city should acquire the property then the court can give the city possession of the property even though the valuation hasn't been determined yet the court though then would later have evaluation hearing where the the amount of reimbursement to the the property owner for the acquisition of that property would be finally determined and the city of course would make payment at the time of possession it's very typical for the court to require a payment into the court that then it's transferred to the property owner which is sort of an estimate of how much they're going to ultimately receive so that when the property owner loses use of that property they get paid at that time even if it may not be the exact final final amount i think that gets us to the end of the process okay and just to confirm it's not the municipal court that this goes to its district court correct yes correct so it's okay so i wanted to make sure then thank you very much for going for through that process my last and final question for now because i don't want to dominate you said that the the the on the north could be ten feet it could also be narrowed up a bit what would its narrowest point b i believe my slide okay given seven we'll just use seven and a half while you're looking does that create a maintenance issue because we've got plow blades that need to go through there and if it's seven and a half feet wide does that create any problems to be able to get through there comfortably it makes it tighter it doesn't make it impossible though we've got some equipment that we've actually purchased just in the last three years or so that is a size of equipment that's small enough to deal with a lot of paths that we have around town many of which are only eight feet wide some even narrower and yet have enough horsepower to deal with with the weight of the snow and get it off the trail so we don't see that as a try to be quick i've never heard of brevity being a an issue here on the council so i'll try to make it one i just want to say thanks to our director is a great presentation so i appreciate that so i'll just try to sum this up i i think we should continue negotiating with the neighbors i think we should look at fixing the ditch and helping them out with that situation and i think we should consider moving forward with the north alignment for one major reason and most pertinent reason is because i believe it's the safest option i think frankly it's the best bad option that we have so we should continue to look look at moving forward with that and just anecdotally i do have a lot of familiarity with this type of project right behind our houses we have a path that divides our neighborhood to the golf course that i do frequently walk on and i also my property goes right up to the d ten as well and we live right by the light rail as well so i frequently walk or ride my bike down the  i do understand a lot of concerns that people have but i think these things can be managed and i think you have you know just as many problems on basically every other route but i just think that safety is compromised on any other path miss vinson yeah i'm gonna say something and that is i kept quiet for two years up here because of my capacity but i'm sorry for you folks who live along that line because if anybody up here understands what you're going through it's me and the reason we're dealing with is now quite frankly is because rtd did not do what they were supposed to what they promised and what they repeatedly said since probably one thousand nine hundred and eighty nine that they were gonna do the ditches they have totally ignored that we had one that was practically covered up in our neighborhood and they went oh i didn't know people really cared about water they cut trees saying oh i didn't know people cared about trees in their backyard they actually said that we've come home we found fire hydrants in our front yards because they said that's where they showed they were going without any notification so i'm sure you've had issues i've had to spend thousands of dollars fixing water pipes because rtd drove their trucks across and said that it wasn't their fault that they did that so i can empathize with you and that's the only reason we are here tonight having to deal with things is because they didn't do what they said and one of the reasons why i've been so quiet is because now i'm in a different capacity  obviously i haven't gotten over everything that rtd did over the last two decades but now i have a citywide obligation and although i feel tremendously for you i had i had to have the cast of ben hur out because they didn't want it they wanted to pay me for half a tree they said they were only going to condemn half a tree i said what do i do push the one on your side if it falls over so there's a lot of ridiculous things that happen but now we have the opportunity to have a grant and the safest route and an opportunity to bring a bike path through and and that's why i'm going to continue supporting the d ten bike path but things need to be done you need to be dealt with you need to save as much as you can i like the idea of solar because we deal with ice all the time and for people who i will offer who say that the shared roadway is the best way come down where people are walking two way cars and and a bike path on the same place it's very tight it's very difficult i also have an obligation to this this grant excuse me if i'm wrong mister richardson but it goes from wodsworth to zephyr and that's part of this grant too which is a big obligation for this neighborhood we we were value engineered the heck out of when rtd came through and that's what happened on this path and i won't tell you what the neighbors started calling value engineering because i can't repeat it on camera but  suffice to say i'm going to continue supporting the d ten path but all of you out here i totally understand where you're coming from mister franks thanks mira paul mister hutchinson i know i had sent you an email rather late so i'm gonna kind of refer to that but i hope you had a chance to take a quick look at that basically i just want to dig a little bit more on safety i've had a few folks bring up that and so i to put it into a couple different context we have the safety issues that have been talked about as far as kind of the two walls and basically making that accord or and so i was hoping that even if you couldn't specifically that maybe in more general terms but i'm kind of understand are there other sections you know you showed us some pictures or there's some other areas but really the crime that maybe that we need to be cognizant in those areas what lighting would do to mitigate that what the potential adding of a call box would do to mitigate that just what kind of in general and that'd be all off obviously talking about the north side primarily and then from the second point of safety i want to talk about the south line if it were to go on that side we talked about adding in a multi use path there on the north side of that road but in my view then you would have bicyclists um following the rule of the road going with traffic some not following the rule of the road going facing traffic and so that seems like that would also be a safety concern so really the first question is all around safety and whatever detail you feel comfortable sharing tonight regarding those topics and i apologize for the email coming too late i can't give you any statistics but i can tell you that we've consulted with the lakewood police department and with west metro  fire and there are there are a series of things that i think are relevant one is that i did point out that there are areas where visibility to the north and south so the left and right of the path is limited and extremely limited in some cases and much more open in others the the east west visibility is good on either of the alternatives we've talked about tonight the the west metro folks are most interested in can they how do they respond if there is an incident that they're made aware of so their need is to be able to get down the path and trails and paths are common for the west metro folks they deal with that even in the mountain areas that they serve so this is not an unusual circumstance they have the equipment to do it their people are trained to do it they didn't have any real reservations at all about their ability to provide their service on either of these alternatives or the others we talked about and seventeen the lakewood police department also was consulted and there are several parts to that question as well there is an advantage to having eyes on any area  and there are there are two ways to look at that in this instance because visibility is limited in some areas from the left and right that reduces the potential for people to be able to see and exit on the other hand compared to today any traffic on a path is going to be more eyes than what's out there today and you've heard some examples of some of the issues that already occur in some of these spaces adjacent to the rail behind residential properties in addition  either either proposal would include lighting in those areas so going from a dark fairly untried area causes one kind of problem to going to a lighted more utilized area may create a different kind of circumstance but one that is less likely from the police department perspective to be a significant issue and they have good acts they have good visibility as well they can pull into nelson they can pull up a toque and see a pretty good distance down because the path is relatively straight it's a little more difficult of kipling on either either route but well not on the south route because it's all open right next to the street those conditions aren't particularly rare in fact some of the more heavily used shared use paths tend to be not associated with the street the degree of visibility from the side varies but if you think of in lakewood or the it's probably one of our most heaviest probably the most heavy travel trail that we have in fact i think we have conflict issues down there between different kinds of users on that shared use facility and it's not near a street the south probably the most used trail in the metropolitan area and it's not near a street generally occasionally it is there are certainly other parts of the w line where it's isolated away from the street there are some segments for instance  mentioned earlier where today it's on street but you may also remember that in your current capital improvement plan that segments going to be converted to an off street shared use path consistent with what's to the east and west of that segment  i think that covers that as best as i can at this point is that helpful it is helpful i did want to kind of revisit the south configuration option and kind of add a little bit more so basically if that i heard that one right and looked at all the material correctly there would be if we extended that out to a multi use path that would be the ten foot wide they would lose the parking so the people on the north side would lose parking if they that was that traffic so it'd be both the things where we would have potential of bicycle traffic then heading towards cars and we would also have one half of the the road losing parking have besides safety can you also speak to whether any of those folks who live there were talked to about losing the parking in front of their home we have not talked to them directly about losing parking and i'm not sure which side of the street it would be on i think there are fewer homes on the north side so my just initial reaction would probably be the north side would be the side where parking would be prohibited but it could be the south side but i suspect it'll probably be the north the the the question about having people on street and off street obviously doesn't apply in the north route or any other situation where the path is isolated away from roadways there is some legitimate question about what you would do if you were a typical user of the of the path or the typical writer going between oak and kipling and you did a frequently enough to figure out what all the options were you've heard some opinions tonight about what people would use my experience with bicyclists is that there are roughly roughly describ categories when my kids were little i wasn't riding on the street with my kids i was trying to get him off on the sidewalk even if it was a neuro sidewalk when i'm trying to get someplace and and would just as soon be as safe as possible i like a separate path that doesn't have conflicting traffic my second choice is on road and and a lot of commuters use on road because it's it's more consistent they don't have to go up and down the driveways they don't aren't as close to conflicting traffic so they get a little more visibility and time to react to that but as i said those are kind of loosely described in this area from nelson east where it would be immediately adjacent to the road i suspect we'd have both kinds of  riders generally bicyclists are fairly good about writing with traffic so the eastbound riders would generally be on the south side of the road they'd have to cross at kipling to get back over to the path and they'd have to cross it oak well they actually wouldn't like because they could be on the west side of oak where xiii doesn't continue so there there are some additional potential conflicts with driveways and those sorts of things but generally i think bicycl prefer riding on the road are pretty good about writing with traffic not all of them and then just the last one is more of a comment kind of to support the discussion it is going to be important for me whether it's on the north or the south side wherever we we land that the folk the water rights i mean i grew up in farm country water rights were certainly a big part of you know my existence making sure that even if we that we bring to bear that rtd has to come to do something there has to be something coming forward if they didn't leave them whole they haven't signed off on it i don't know what our role is i know now we're not you know obviously we don't have any standing but i certainly would be for us bringing to bear whatever pressure we can in order to get those restored and make them whole  you good presentation jay i do have some questions firstly there have been a couple of references for one from here and one from the speaker about a shared roadway we're not talking about a shared roadway on either designate on either alignment is that correct not on the north alignment on the south alignment there's one option that shared roadway and one option that is it's possible can we force them to go back and fix the water situation no what we can do though is we can work with rtd and the irrigation interests which would probably be the smart thing to do whether the  north alignment or the south alignment is is selected because both go over the white lateral there are different facilities but they're on both sides and and rtd has a roll clearly the irrigation folks have a clear role and if the city is going to be involved on whichever side at some point we'll have a specific role as well but so far rtd has been unwilling to address that is that is that a correct portrayal i yeah there's a dispute and i think artie he's on moreland irrigation folks think need things need to change an rtd might be open to some things and they've talked about some minor things that the the ditch folks have mentioned but not solving all the issues that were described to you earlier we haven't been in those discussions directly obviously but that's my understanding mr graham i heard some comments when we were on this the site tour as well as some tonight's that indicate only place this issue exists true no i wouldn't be able to guarantee that now thank you  there were some questions about not being able to accommodate a bicycle path to lanes of traffic and parking on both sides of th other places in town where one side of the street is blocked off from parking and the other is not yes more than a few you know i don't keep a tally seems like nearly every traffic we issue issue we run into as something to do with parking on one side of the road to another  switchback will it disappear if the route stays on the north side no it would still be available for people to go to her from kipling available in available wasn't quite the w or other character cast about that switchback earlier what is the degree of drop on that switchback as it heads off the track i believe i have on the west side of kipling both on the west side of yeah no actually the steeper one is the one on the south the one on th avenue going down the hill there that's steeper than the switchback coming off the railroad track angle on the railroad track the switchback generally is at five percent the last part the last fifty feet coming to kipling is two and a half percent the   the behind the are north of the railroad track and behind the fence of the folks on th place it is certainly easier to see the portion on on the south south alignment from nelson to kipling than it is for the north alignment west of nelson it's more comparable probably a little more visible from for the north alignment than the south alignment because of the open how many driveways would be crossed in a similar stretch of th avenue on that bike path on the north side i don't know i suspect  vaunted bicycle path although i will tell you i'm not comfortable with any path that serves a street in any place i thought i just think that's too dangerous for our bicycle riders  any idea going back to the if i'm going on too long with these questions i'll be happy to yield for a while and come back like certainly if you wanna i would just say for for sake in discussion with staff if we know an answer to a question let's not try to put staff out there to try to guess what that number would be nice point certainly but not a not not at the seven and a half feet wide and some places on the north side is that wide enough for an ambulance i don't think so okay we're talking about a twelve hundred and fifty foot pa football field for the first exit and three football fields in length for the next exit so if you're being chased down there by a coyote of skunk dog mad cat or somebody wanting to do something  half the distance between exits you can't be three hundred feet from an exit if you're between or from the nearest exit if you're between oak and nelson because that total length is three hundred feet so it's half that and i think i covered that during the presentation okay so it'd be four hundred or four hundred and seventy five feet on the other stretch i think a little longer than that we don't know how much it might cost to fix the ditch we're not in a position to negotiate with them at this point we are working with them to try to find some solutions that could work so i'm not prepared to indicate what the solution is or what it might cost  is the grant guaranteed for the northside well if you'll refer to the slide that's up there right now the the options ef and g all have the potential to retain the grant a through d do not if we cut down to seven on feet on portions of that northside is that qualify for the grant i think i mentioned during the presentation that it depends on how material the section is how much of the the path would be less than ten feet wide okay and we wouldn't know that until when well it wouldn't even  be particularly relevant until we do some negotiating with the property owners to determine how much is left and then we'll we'll need to assess that so we're really not sure what the city's share of that cost would be it might add we might have to add in considerable amount for the ditch us property acquisition us condemnation for seedings because a couple of the homeowners over there as well as one on the south side have told us that we're coming after their property it's going to take condemnation the estimates that i shared earlier include modifications to all of the ditch boxes that we've talked about and again we don't have agreements on those things i certainly understand that but we have included an allocation of funds for that purpose we've also included an allocation of funds for the acquisitions that we would anticipate what about changing the alignment of the discussing the difference that exists there today that is part of the dispute as i understand it between rtd and and the white lateral so i'm not in a position to take a formal make a formal statement on whether it's true or not it doesn't really matter at this point but yes we have looked at options that could improve those those conditions but they could be quite expensive and we just don't know what that expense is you in this i do not know a specific number i don't have one to give you we've put some estimated amounts in the in the project as i've indicated on a on a two plus million dollar project it's it's relatively small cost of fixing the elevation of the ditch would be relatively small it's not a major cost on a two plus million dollar project okay  i think that'll do it for now thank you thank you mister roybal miss johnson councillor abel took a lot of my questions but i we're still dancing a little bit i just need some quick clarification the power lines you know we have the easement right away there the power lines to put lighting in did we  ccount on the north side for the power lights versus on the south side to having streetlights have we looked at that or is that too far in advance yet the the plan for the north route does include it wouldn't include power lines they'd be city owned lights designed for path illumination not not comparable to streetlights and so there wouldn't be the need for an additional easement there wouldn't be need for excel to provide power except at terminal so this would be new technology and this would be solar lighting mm probably not solar but they be led lights that include a connection to the  excel wouldn't have to provide a cable along the path route they would just need to provide power at the end of the the string of lights okay and then getting back to the ditch water  obviously one of my main concerns is that you know rtd is responsible for any and all issues that are there and by going in and assuming that piece of property you've even said yourself that we may assume the liability of cleaning that up and making sure that that the water company and the ditch company have the correct system set up and i would like to ask and and this is not a gotcha but in the future before i'd like to get a general idea of what that that cost might be if possible in the future and then getting down to the crime rate  you know councillor franks came up with a great idea and i think this is something that would probably look at citywide is maybe the call boxes throughout all the routes emergency purposes not just that area and i would like to you know propose that to councillor franks and and and suggest that's a great idea to come forward and maybe take a look at that in the future and then the the maintenance north side versus south side regardless of if it's seven and a half feet or eight feet obvious it's going to take specialized piece of equipment to just do that area and if we did it on the south side could we use the regular plow trucks to plow so we would need that extra piece of equipment we already have the equipment and actually a contractor as well to your question about whether we'd use the plow trucks i think not and there's a couple of reasons for that and it applies perhaps in other places in the city as well on that south area where it would be near the road which would be nelson to kipling the the plows are our production method of moving snow so their job is to keep going move a lot of snow on a lot of miles of road so that's what they'll be focused on and from miller to our hope is to actually detach that south alignment from the roadway a bit i'm not sure that that will happen but that would make it even more difficult for the plow the the street plow to plow that area as well and then from miller west to nelson it's the the attached path would be attached to a curb so actually be elevated up above the road a bit so the the street plows probably wouldn't be the answer in that location either okay thank you that's all i got for now thanks i have ms johnson ms go wine mister betta ms harrison mister abel thank you mayor oh appreciate your presentation jay this is a difficult night for everybody on many levels in many ways i do have a few questions but first i just want to say that m been going on for two years and to be frank with you i think it's been mishandled since day one but i want to say too i am not against bikers my kids are all bikers and i'm not against bike lanes what we're trying to do however is retrofit streets to accommodate bikes and it's not an easy fit it's a difficult balance all the way around  i think i know the answer i the city has reached out to the gentleman that has the property near the metal station or that metal box the relay station i'm not really sure what it's called we have reached out to him and talked with him okay so we really don't know if there's condemnation without actually talking to them is that right no we do know there's kind of there's the we don't know that there's condemnation what we know is that we have to acquire part of that private property for the south route to work the and  begin work or to choose the south route without being willing to commit to condemnation simply sets us up to get a long ways down the road do a lot of design work perhaps acquire other properties and then we get to this one and if we're not able to negotiate an agreement we have to condemn and if we're not willing to condemn then all that effort is lost so while we certainly don't intend to condemn we'd much rather negotiate an amicable settlement  my point is that it's my belief that this council has to be has to fully understand that the south alternative requires that this council be prepared to condemn that area on that private property from testimony tonight it sounds like we have to be prepared for eminent domain on the north side as well so it is on which of the options are chosen and not all of those options that are on the screen right now require acquisitions consequently they don't require condemnation what about tim cara bellows property he is pretty adamant yes and with with none of those options require that his property be condemned if the city council decided to condemn it they would have that choice at a later time what is the height of the lights for the o on the north side because i it seems like i've heard but it's changed and they're actually pretty high we actually purchased one to do a demonstration and we've met with different to neighborhood groups two different times with the light out in the field to to give people a chance at night to see what a what the light looks like how the light distributes  from that's that fixture which is geared toward the tracks not towards the backyards and to distribute up and down the path more than it does north and south that was a long way to try to remember how tall they are and i don't recall they're much shorter than a streetlight i think i might be guessing but and i will i might guess is that the the top of the light is in the range of ten feet i'm not sure that's the exact number okay because i was thinking it was closer to fourteen but that's that's out of the ballpark it sounds like that's not right like i said i don't i i don't know for sure also just because of the intrusiveness of having those lights can we rethink again and look again if there's going to be a solid fence next to the property on the north to have the lights within the fence itself we can certainly look at that again we've looked at it two or three times yeah  i keep hearing about the switchback is access to get to kipling well i drove over there today and on the south side of thirteen avenue there is really no bike path there so i'm not sure what the access is there and then on the north side there is a sidewalk up to th place so i'm i'm a little confused when we talk about the switchback being  a access there did we have we actually talked with doctor cog about the grant for the south alignment i'm getting confused i've been i've read a document a couple times and i'm still a little confused on that yes we have and there are material differences that are meaningful to doctor cog had the south alignment been proposed it would not have scored the same as the north alignment it's has a number of features that are a substantial change or a material change from the what was provided to grant doctor cog wants to protect the integrity of its process and frankly we do there's fifty or sixty agencies that apply for these grants and it's it's best if it's all consistent and aboveboard and things don't change significantly so i think you've already been asked this the true cost of all the ditch issues that we would inherit we really don't know what that is or have you actually given an amount i'm getting confused with some of this no i've not given a specific amount we've included some some funding in the the estimates that you've seen for that there's a variety of reasons that i can't give you a specific number one is we're not officially in any discussions with anybody now we don't have any standing to work out a final deal with anybody we have been working with the ditch folks the irrigation folks to try to begin working towards some things that might be a solution we're not there yet so to put a specific number on it would be premature and not having any standing i'm hesitant to go much further i'm also not able to talk about because i don't know what rtd might do in the meantime which could reduce the city's costs or avoid some costs for the cities there's a number number of variables that make it really not possible to put a number on it right now this is just a sidebar but based on our t ds past experience i don't see them doing anything ahead of time to help us out the historical use of eminent domain has always been to what i understand for large highways things that have a great deal of public use do we know how many times eminent domain has been used for a bike path remembering that this is a shared use facility we have first of all lake woods pretty successful at negotiating agreements with property owners so in our experience because of that success there aren't a lot of cases over many years where we've had to go to court and have him in a domain there have been instances including recently where we have it's fairly common on transportation project the projects that that includes facilities that would serve people who will use the shared use path sometimes those are shared use paths sometimes those are sidewalks but they tend to be on the outer edges of transportation projects so if acquisitions necessary it typically includes the sidewalk or bike facility on the outside edges of those facilities so if that acquisition translates into condemnation it's typically for  e lakewood doesn't build major highways we do work on state highways arterial streets in lakewood and condemnation has been used on those when condemnation is used it is used for whatever has to be acquired from a particular property owner that's generally the outside edges of a transportation project those outside edges typically are occupied by a pedestrian or bicycle facilit think in my tenure which is the last decade maybe three times one was somewhat recent it was a special situation on sheridan boulevard for the sidewalk and then i think a couple slivers maybe on kipling and colfax and kipling and again had colfax he playing in colfax which would have had to your point the turn lanes which would have then add the shared use sidewalks that were put in yeah so those ron land things that's the nation they read times in the last decade that i can remember you talked about negotiations if something like this actually gets to a court situation that you're looking for comparable property  when you're dealing with a hundred twenty five year old trees and beautiful homes being next to a light rail are there many comparable properties to compare that that kind of residence that's what appraisers do and they're they're certified in how to do that they're trained they have ongoing ongoing education we require the independent appraisers that we hire to be certified appraisers for that purpose so that they have that knowledge and training they that's what they do and they will find the best information they can and they have ways to adjust recent sales that are in not quite a perfectly comparable circumstance to to translate it to a fair market value for the specific circumstance because on the north side we're actually asking for a second bite of the apple if you will these people have already given trees vegetation property fences have been moved and now we're coming back and what is concerning to me is the four letters that they have that are apparently meaningless but they had trust in rtd and trust in the city that we would never get to a night like tonight may i respond a part of that please we have looked because we well let me back up we have heard that the property owners on the north side of the north  did have land acquired by rtd we have heard that said and so we went looking in the records and we have found no cases along that north alignment where the backyards of any of those homes were acquired or any parts of those homes or  lots were acquired by rtd none and that's all the way from oak to kipling i talked about trees earlier and the only trees i'm aware of that rtd took down were trees rtd owned it did change the view for people north of them just like it would change your view if your neighbor took down a tree but it was the neighbor's tree that our titi took down as i understand it actually we have conflicting information it was my understanding that the oak trees are excuse me the cottonwoods that were removed were on private property but that they over hung on the right away of the rtd and to be honest with you i can understand that you can't have large trees hanging over the real there so but i believe that the fence at that part of the wall at that point was also relocated on the same person property but we'll have to have them address that which property is that i think it's jack barnett's also in our handout tonight on page six at the bottom when we're looking at the north alignment it says no permanent land acquisitions resulting in portions of the path being less than ten feet  wide the grant would be fortified or excuse me for forfeited the length of the path less than ten feet wide would constitute a material change in the design from the grant application  if this option is selected the city would reimburse costs billed to the grant to date of approximately ninety five thousand dollars it sounds like what i've heard tonight is a little different than that that if if the width is less than ten feet that there is still a way to continue to keep the grant but this sounds very different  please talk to that thank you i want to make sure i'm oriented correctly because i think your numbering may be different than my numbering it's on the presentation is that i did if i said page six i'm incorrect it's at the bottom of page five okay page five and it talks about the north alignment it's that first black bullet point under where it says north alignment right we're in the same place a key to reading that is to notice that it says it starts with no permanent land acquisitions that would result in the path being less than ten feet wide so if no acquisitions were made then there would be too much path less than ten feet wide and the grant  footed let me just make sure that i'm understanding on the north side it looks like we're looking at six acquisitions and on the south side i count three potential land acquisitions is that right so there's quite a bit of difference in land act number of land acquisition is that right there is a difference on the north you're correct there are six different  lots from which acquisition would be necessary to have a continuous ten foot path so six on the south side there's actually four if i remember correctly the the one right at oak that's that we'd have to be prepared to condemn if necessary and then three others but let me let me check myself before i stop talking i believe that was accurate from your presentation it doesn't sound like if that's relocated that the city would pay for that or the block wall seems to be a little different than a regular fence could you please address that sure if the if any part of the block wall needs to be relocated for for the north alignment this the project would pay for that the private owner would not have to do that eight feet or six feet high it's existing height so that's what i don't think they're consistent summer six summer eight i think but whatever it is it would be replaced at the same height that it is today in the new location okay and the variance was for eight feet yes and that was for the fencing not the block wall i'm sorry i shouldn't say it that way because there was a variance issued a number of years ago for the block wall the more recent variance was for the fencing to allow it to go to eight feet as well okay so then the fencing could go as high as  but if we had to relocate the block wall it would only stay at six feet no it would stay at the current height and some of it's more than six feet okay okay i guess that's all for now thank you thank you mister rogerson you've been on the hot seat for quite some time so we're gonna take a quick break and it's nine forty five and we'll come back at in ten minutes and next up i have you i like to reconvene the lakewood city council study session at seven zero know at at nine fifty eight p m and so we're gonna continue through a list i just want to set a first just wanted to say thanks to everyone who came out who have now pretty much all left at this point but to those of you who are remaining thank you particularly for sticking it out with us and you know this has been a really this is a difficult decision it's complicated there's a lot of different people's rights on the line here with water rights and property rights and safety and you know one that we haven't really talked about very much i think two issues people get the most passionate about is their property rights and then also taxpayer dollars and the potential that switching the route now could could potentially cost us at least one three million dollars more in taxpayer dollars which i think is important secondly i just wanted to say that you know i think there are issues on on both routes like we've talked about i think if we end up losing parking on one side of the street i experiences anything to is anything i know that we'll be hearing from people about that  as well so you know there's just there's no way of doing this without impacting somebody and i i'd like to see us work on the ditch see what we can do to fix fix that see what we can do to you know improve that situation that rtd and you know really wish that hadn't all happened but it did so see what we can do to fix that as well um safety this is this is so important to me and i think to our community and it's also really important to doctor cog i'm the representative on in lakewood on doctor cog and as was mentioned you know it's fifty different communities and it's something that whether you're in a rural community or a big city everyone cares about safety and making sure that whether you're on a bike or in a car or on the street you are safe and you're going to get where you're going the reason why there are such strict requirements for this grant is because it is so much safer when you separate cars and bikes i will take my chances any day on a one hundred one hundred foot or three hundred foot or whatever it is separated in between two walls versus a cat or versus the coyote or whatever else the examples are then hitting and hitting a car because if you hit a car on a bike a bike or car hits you on a bike it's not pretty and so you know when it comes down to it there's just no comparing the safety of these two options it is significantly safer to have it detached that's why the grant requirements are so strict that's why it's so competitive so and i wrote i rode the the route today  know people keep talking about this scary scary switchback it's pretty scary it's steep it's a blind turn the traffic is going forty five miles an hour i think it's thirty five as a speed limit but people are probably going forty forty five this this is an opportunity to do to make it significantly safer there were many many bikers out there today just in the the hour that i was out there and finally what i'm going to say about this ride today is that to me this is the the reason why we're here the big reason that we're doing this is about planning for our city and planning for our future that is what i am here to do and and you know we have this comprehensive plan that in our sustainability plan that and our bike master plan that our community  invested hours and hours and hours on and when i was out on this ride today and stan you know i went from the the two different stations the one on garrison the one on kipling they're beautiful we have there's public art there there's this safe facility you go past to room o bct which is one of the largest employee employers in the city and you i can just really see all of the effort that has been put in by our community for years to make this a regional amenity and to create this future where people can ride their bike  transportation not just for fun and i think that for a lot of us who are used to riding car or driving cars everywhere it's hard to imagine a bike as a mode of transportation but that's that's where we're trying to get to and you know really excited about where we're going with this and i'd really like to see us continue on the the d ten bike path and do our best to continue negotiating with with our neighbors thank you of clarification so are we on the question phase or comment phase or are we doing them both together it is a hodgepodge so you can mix them up or all right yeah thank you for asking but and i kind of started out with comments and there's been questions and comments so okay floor is yours okay well first of all i want a mister hutchinson thank you for a great presentation on a very difficult and complex issue  and and in the way you've narrowed it down to the to the different options and so forth took a lot of thought a lot of so i really appreciate it that really helps us a lot so secondly i maybe i misunderstood it but i thought there was a kind of an alternative to the southern route and which would possibly include the th avenue from nelson to oak and then that would eliminate the condemnation there on the corner was that not an alternative or did i misunderstand that i may have created some confusion by using a slide from two thousand and seventeen the one that proposed as one of the reasons to have this discussion did not include on street from oak to nelson so i think i may have caused that confusion okay so that's not part of the discussion that we're having tonight then is that option i would like to say absolutely not but it's actually a choice you could make as the city council okay and if so if we were to include that just for clarification now then on your little chart up here that would then be in like a d under south which would require no condemnation correct yes let me let me think through this for just a minute i'll think out loud today there the the route that bicyclists are directed is that route it's on th avenue from kipling to oak as a shared use facility so they're on street they share same space as the cars what i described for an off street facility east of oak where we would narrow the asphalt and build the ten foot wide path that could be done between oak and nelson i'd offer a couple of thoughts for consideration there historically it seems like parking is at a premium on street between oak and nelson it's it's common to see many vehicles parked on both sides so eliminating parking on one side there would probably be significantly higher degree of difficulty automatic i think so and  and i guess i'd leave it at that okay i just i yeah i saw the other alternative and and i lost it thank you oh and then my other question was now as i understand on this presentation here if you go with under north you're saying anything past d so ef and g if i understood you would qualify us for the grant ef and g each have the potential a through d there's no potential e f and g there is the potential obviously if f were chosen that would retain the grant because that specifically says in there that if necessary condemnation would occur to retain the grant if if g were chosen which is to have a consistent ten foot wide width that would also retain the grant so those are certainties he is the one that's uncertain at this point where we would negotiate for acquisition but commit to not condemning any properties right and the reason it's uncertain is that if if we were unsuccessful and acquired no properties that would essentially become the same as d no acquisitions no grant if we were successful and got enough properties that had fall into a category where we could retain the grant oh so so e is possible if we had enough voluntary acquisitions and okay the only other thing since we're doing comments and i don't know how about how the rest of y'all feel about it but it just really bothers me to have doctor cog telling us how to run our city yeah i kind of resent it and i'm sorry but  i that they have their strict requirements and everything but it's our city and i think it's up to us to decide how we want to do it and i just really don't like them holding the money over our head and i know it's a lot of money i got that but there's something there's a principle here involved and that is we're the ones that should be making the decisions here not of some board and denver telling us what to do so i just want to throw that out there that's all i have f something at break and i'm sorry you wanted to clarify on something i've made at least one mistake tonight i'm that was supposed to be a joke because i'm hoping it's the only mistake i've made tonight but one is clear and and and i think mister burney for pointing it out he had asked the question or i think councilor johnson had asked the question about the recently issued fence height exemption and my response was that it applied to the fences but not to the block walls and i'm incorrect the recently approved fence height exemption applies to all of the properties between nelson and kipling which is also where the block walls are so whether it's block wall or wood fence they all can go up to eight feet now thank you and i would just clarify there's a lot of things that are unique about doctor cog but that process certainly is we applied for it and so that was kind of the game plan as to what those strings were attached to that so it's it is their rules and they're the the mpo and that's where and you know right wrong or indifferent a lot of our transportation dollars are actually pretty much all of our transportation dollars flow through and so then it creates that compared nature but certainly understand its i certainly understand all right i have ms harrison mister abel and mister okay are you ready for comments at this point and not questions okay my concern is safety based exclusively and as i've said many times driving up and down kipling i've seen that corner and it makes me very very nervous for that reason alone i would like us to continue looking at ef and g whatever we can come up with knowing full well that we still have to if any condemnation is actually required that it would have to come back to council so the north alignment andor ef and g would be my choice thank you  abel one thing i forgot to ask mister hutchinson could there be cost savings with the southern the south side of the tracks because it is more open and accessible to applies all the way from nelson to kipling so the longer stretch and we've factored that into the cost estimate so these estimates reflect the conditions for each side north and south also how many driveways would be crossed in the same stretch and i certainly did not mean to put him on the spot i'd thought that perhaps with our policy of asking questions well in advance  that he had the answer handy but i guess mister hutchison didn't the didn't recall the earlier conversation so my apologies if i put you on the spot giving a thorough presentation on the good the bad and the ugly so thank you you know i now understand a little bit better  did take a tour out there and take we took a look physically looked understood what was going on you explained every point which made it quite clear for me when i'm a visual kind of person so one of the t now that we're getting into comments my comment my thought is that i understand that we have a grant and and i and i realized that it is it is a good amount of money but again principal and for me i'm having a hard time getting past the mistakes of rtd and for us to inherited it's it's difficult for me to get past that so that's number one for me the other thing that i there was a lot of questions and answers that you put out there and and you answered them very clear  concise and i want to thank you for that and one of them was security lighting on the north side and i also asked about the south side and and those were pretty clear but i would like to just my humble opinion would be as i would be more in favor of the south side and keeping it on th avenue all the way across so we don't have that little leg that comes right down next to rtd and going on the back side i'd like to keep it on the street to keep it consistent all the way across and i understand that we're probably going to lose some parking spaces but i think that's probably a better choice than taking property or and obviously the cost is is going to be very expensive kind of you know taking the concrete all the way around if we can keep it on the street and and keep it pretty straight as much as we can i would prefer that but my humble opinion is to thank you i just have a few closing thoughts as well on when i'm looking at the differences between the north and the south the south has less shade  there's less acquisition for sure however you cut it you're able to have the bike path wider without acquisition and as far as safety goes it's actually and the bikers i mean we can look at safety of all different ways on the north side you absolutely have six acquisitions and there is definitely going to be eminent domain we've been told that  the path would be narrower with no acquisition and the tunnel effect to me is an issue and plus you've got a thousand feet of shade on the north as compared to the south for six hundred there's easier access on the south and just a couple of other things i agree with councilman roybal that on the south i would personally like to see stay on the street the entire way rather than going behind the homes there between i think it's nelson and oak we've been doing this for two years now and as i'm looking at everything i'm thinking of some lessons that we can really learn from this first off it's pretty apparent we need a more transparent process when i first learned about this this was in the budget but it was only described as the d ten bike path it really never it said federal grant money it really did not describe what what we were going to be looking at and what our citizens would be looking at and as long as i'm talking about grant money i'm i am struggling frankly with the city applying for grant money for land that isn't even ours the land belongs to rtd and yet we're actually applying for the grant the residents on the north side have got four letters telling them that this land was going to never be part of public use and it and i've said it to them and i'll say it publicly you can see why people don't trust government they believed that those letters had meaning  the hairpin turn is going to remain whether it's north or south dana it's still going to stay in place period and j already said that  for me the bottom line is you do unto others and if i had had my backyard taken or used and had to deal with what these folks have to deal with they've lost privacy they've lost vegetation and now we're coming back for a second bite at the apple with this very same people it's called do unto others and that keeps you out of a lot of trouble and then the last remark i want to make and i'm not trying to pick a fight and i don't mean it to be in a mean spirit but i think mayor when you tell people right from the very getgo what your vote is it tells me that you had already made up your mind and i think you do a solid disservice i'm sorry thank you thank you and i appreciate that i actually didn't make up my mind last year when i voted in favor of the north alignment so the felt it was important to reiterate that i still felt that way while i've learn more and i think there's a lot of things that we all learn that we can try to do and make this a much better process so i stand by that and keep in mind i think that a rail line actually ran through that area prior potentially since the early 's they went once the morning and once in the evening i remember when it was right so different than every seven minutes fifteen now m abel i'm sorry i failed to do one of the things i should have done it to get go and that is to thank mister hutchison and his public works staff because at every address all the issues that were brought up by the neighbors and how many public meeting or how many meetings with the neighbors to joe conduct here in the city hall you know we don't count them these you should have not in there that and there are different varieties we held a workshop out at the oak station invited all kinds of people there been a couple of these kinds of meetings we've had meetings that were the group of neighbors immediately next door of the north alignment we've had individual meetings with many of those folks as well i don't know what the number is it is as you described a process designed to reach a conclusion not one designed for certain number of meetings i do admire the effort y'all have put into the  the discussion so thank you very much  and i wanted to remind that the request for council action was to put a pause on future on expenditures until the number of these questions can avenue it called for a reassessment of that route so how you want to handle that as a consensus item there i'm not sure but i think it is the call for the pause that we need to be considering so we can have that counselor skilling here in a minute but just to be clear and i think it's been in the presentation until council gives direction to staff to go forward we will never know what the relocation costs will be and what a sort of agreement would need to take place that's why there's a spinning of the so that's a pretty good segue into what my comment was going to be and my comment was i didn't so this is a pretty heady issue and just the the presentation by the ditch folks alone on most nights could warrant an entire study session and i have a feeling if you unpack a lot of these just the issues that they've outlined in their packet i mean this is truly a study session in itself which leads me to i mean are we making a decision so i guess this would be a process comment are we deciding tonight north versus south are we saying okay we've got all this information including the ditch folks including what mister hutchinson all the questions all the answers everything we're digesting and then we kind of take that schedule a fall a short follow up maybe half a study session to come back and say here's what we've learned and here's what we're gonna do as i'm sure after we leave here tonight people can have more questions that you're gonna think of i certainly will when i go through a lot of this but so i guess would just be a process question what we're looking to do because i kind of feel like i'm not in a great spot to say right now yes we're just south is going away forever and we're gonna go ahead with north and then we've got the north subparts i mean he looks good but then we bring back the rtd issues so what i don't want to do is be put in a position i mean i'll do what i'm called on to do but i don't want to be in a position where right now i'm making a decision at the conclusion of this study session and i'd like to see if maybe especially with the rtd issues maybe we can get some clarity on that because i think that's a pretty big issue maybe and i know time is of the essence i know we don't keep spinning our wheels so is there some times we can come back shortly and discuss just throwing that out there so i mean we have a full the scope that potentially need to be looked at there was a question to understand a better understanding of the monies committed and the dollars that potentially could be that is laid out in our presentation so i think that provides what the request was as far as financing and then there's also this list of what those next steps would be you know this was a decision to move forward with this like it or not in two thousand and seventeen that has been the direction that was given to staff and so if you want to study this if you want to continue to have these conversations and this didn't suffice tonight then i don't think that's the direction that one meets the spirit of that decision of council and so if the majority of this group doesn't like what was decided by that council then the direction should be to staff to undo that and start over if not i think we owe it to the community members who are in limbo and the most affected as well as the folks who granted the grant and all the stakeholders to continue pursuing the opportunity that was laid out that night which was jay go forth figure out work with all the neighbors we even talked about you know making nice enhancements things like that that helped with the community coming on board whether it was fencing screening things along those lines we laid out a whole kind of things that encouraged that and so by tonight's decision would be say continue and go forth we've seen this we understand better if not then then staff needs to say we're done or we're not that's what i think i mean this is two years sure my father would be let's say and just hypothetically that ii where it's the negotiated acquisitions no condemnation because that has been a sentiment we've heard that no condemnation is an important aspect for a lot of folks is this process continuing in the sense that they're now going to come back and at some point say hey these are properties that we need to condemn or not condemn is that what we first see happening are we gonna get so far down the tracks that then i mean i guess that's my concern because we've got all of these options and i'm kind of are we picking north versus south b or maybe i can help a little bit because the condemnation questions seem to be a precipitating component of this discussion i've broken it out the way i have so if you  interested in the north as as a hypothetical to start where you did he would be telling us that you really don't want to hear back from us you want us to go out and do the best we can to acquire land in a negotiated way and and build the best north corridor we could with just negotiated acquisitions and we're and and that's it f and g are are perhaps where you were headed they both say go out and negotiate as much as you can but we're not sure yet if we want to condemn so come back to us if you need condemnation to either make it a continually ten foot wide path for the whole length that's actually g or f if we get through the negotiated stage and with condemnation we could keep the grant without condemnation we would not have the grand so f and g are intended to be a chance for the city council is to make that condemnation decision at a later date rather than making it now is that helpful at all just wanna make sure that if we're making a decision to move forward with south or north at this con we're not i'm not agreeing to any acquisitions at this point we're not at that stage i'm just you're not agreeing to any condemnation you're not agreeing to any condemnation that would have to be a separate action by the city council i realize what i'm saying is i don't want to be in a position to where somebody comes back and says well we've got this condemnation for you do you remember way back in august when you said that this is the way you want to go and now you're throwing this all and how we've lost the grant now this not all i'm saying is i'm forecasting for you that  there is some issues regarding that and i just want to be clear on that if we are making a vote to move forward in a direction i just want to make those points clear and i appreciate that our perspective on the staff side for  would be that we would proceed with no expectation that there's any certainty of condemnation but also with the expectation that the city council may want to consider that possibility at a later date and and make the decision at that later date  now on the south versions a b and c hopefully it's it's become crystal clear that that if we're going to expend the effort that it takes to do a b or c then in my view that i just want to make sure the city council is aware that implementing any of those options in a circumstance where the negotiation fails on the far western property would require comment require condemnation i was just gonna say two things one is that i heard a comment earlier that the north requires condemnation but that's not correct it does not require condemnation that will be a decision at a later p that would be a decision later there are consequences if we're not successful with negotiation and there is not condemnation and i've talked about what those are and we'd lose the grant potentially which is i think very likely what could happen and i think that's okay and you know the the city council is going to decide what you know will come up we'll come to that decision at a later point but to me pursuing the north option means that we have the ability to do this without condemnation and back a year and a half ago and we first had this conversation that was the sticking point for the body was we the body felt that they did not want to do condemnation and we can move forward with the north option without doing condemnation we might lose the grant and to counselor be despoina city and we can make that decision getting the federal dollars has some strings attached to it and you know i guess i've made it clear how i feel about it but it's the body's decision and and to that point also a year and a half ago we went past midnight till in the morning we had twenty people speaking for this i read through the comments again i mean there's a certain point where we're never going to know every single thing about this issue but you know looking back on it the condemnation was a big thing the water issue was still a big big issue then it's an issue now and they the water ditch companies stated that until there is an agreement they're not signing off on it so i know that that is going to continue to be a part of the process so i would like to reach consensus and ask my fellow colleagues to reach consensus to pursue acquisitions and then we still have the option to do the north without condemnation so that f g and e is always on the table thank you okay this is always easy so you know i guess the yeah i mean that's that's what's before us so there was a council direction to to do this and i don't remember the vote but the then we came back and had this presentation so there's not consensus to do anything on the south as their consensus to move forward with the south pattern  e okay so there's not consensus there's there's not consensus to move on the south one two three four it's not consensus so then we go to the north and i heard somebody say north ii is there consensus on north so i don't have consensus on north ii so i need some help then ye i'm basically obviously would love if we could get to e that's that's the goal to get to e but i'm still north side and i want to continue the negotiations we have a lot of things to work out i just feel it's the better path long term and so i think if we he through g knowing that we want to push forth and we certainly need the folks with the water to understand that we've got some other issues but i think we can possibly get consensus around ef and g well i'm seeing a lot of nodding so it seems like we can get there and let the negotiations continue forward it's not an easy decision but my i was a yes last time  and i'm a yes this time for the north but i'm certainly not yet saying yes to i want us to go and do all those negotiation things that we've all been talking about much better sad so with that said as our consensus as to what councilor frank's just said so yes that is clear thank you okay all right so go forth do great things that's not even close to being done or easy and you know we we need to continue to make sure that we have open and honest communication as you state earlier make sure that you have a clear understanding you and your neighbors as to what the future holds as we move forward so thank you both for coming out yeah and i would just say lastly mister hutchison well done you are an honorable man and this issue has brought unwarranted and unmerited potshots your way and rude public comments and i'm sorry for that but i appreciate you and i know this body does and your presentation tonight is evident of how much you care about our community so thank you i'll just be quick i know it's early it's late now but the census is coming up in two thousand and twenty and that's gonna be a big deal for our community there's gonna be a census office in lakewood potentially a thousand jobs that they'll be hiring for it's gonna be a challenging time because it's a presidential election so everybody will be competing for bodies to get out there and work and so cathy and i had the opportunity to sit down and we'll be looking at creating a complete count committee so coming to council to get a better understanding what that looks like every person counted is about one four hundred dollars to the city and the state of colorado is in a position to potentially gain a congressional seat so we're going to be having a lot more information it's only two eighteen but that office is getting ready to open those jobs are gonna be getting ready to fill and it'll be a great opportunity for us to get out in the community and really i just like to say that i attended the ward three picnic saturday and they are upping the ante to make it very difficult for the rest of us to also there was a picnic  and it was awesome they put a lot of love and time and energy into the gerald lopez picnic and want to thank all the folks that did them well that's their second picnic they've held in ward three so they're really raising the bar miss vincent no it was not late i'd be telling everybody about the wonderful little thing about pasternak's forty west that was in the life and culture section on sunday but since it's so late i won't mention that a clerical could you mention considering our discussion about your request for council action i'd like to pull that for right now about the historical because there's so much going on so i'm sure nobody will be heartbroken that i'll pull that temporarily temporarily though thank you mister betta miss franks mister roybal well i guess i'm going to have to ruin it a little bit  just wanted to give you a quick update in ward three councillor bina and i we're proud to announce that we have a brand new school called a montessori school off of sheridan and center and it's fantastic it kicked open about a week ago and then again i also want to mention our community picnic and the regrain opening for l park fantastic we had a a great turnout mother nature on us a little bit but it made us stronger and i got to tell you we really enjoyed it the park is phenomenal if you get a chance walk through there you'll have the exercise machines you'll have all kinds of different instruments that you can play in there then you have the swing sets tennis courts volleyball  hoops you got so much stuff there that'll keep you busy it is just fantastic and i just wanted to reach out and let staff know that they did a fabulous job so thank you well said and i  would add we learned something a lot of the areas where you sit or the tables is reuse sidewalk that they tore up on florida avenue so a really cool way to reincorporate a lot of stuff and keep keep it  stealing i would like to publicly thank mister betta and mister roybal i thank them a couple times but thank you for having us at the picnic and the dedication of that park is exactly why i was pushing so hard for as many dollars as we can humanly get for parks and that was the perfect example of that and thank you to all the staff that were there we did learn some things i could learn stuff from ralph stand in that playground forever about the history of playgrounds and  it has the extermination process is done for the time being the they have found asbestos in the home there will be a remediation process for that as or i should say abatement not remediation that take place the homeowners at this point have taken on all these costs which is absolutely fantastic when you think of you know what they've had to go through so at this point the city has other than being the facilitator and a lot of code enforcement people hanging around there the city has not invested any dollars in remediation in this house the homeowners have done it all it is their right it's their property they need to do it and they're doing a great job so i just wanted to let everybody know thank you treville thank you there's good wine i'm glad you mentioned the kids going back to school i will mention the traffic problems we're having now apparently a dunston the addition of sixth grade students has added about fifty percent the drop off and pickup and i had some calls from folks concerned about that next year the rest of the sixth grade transition to middle school will will include crichton and some others that haven't been hit with those traffic problems yet and i want to make sure that we're doing whatever we can to help handle that  increase flow miss hudson thank you and please be careful folks when you're driving with those kids going back to school i just want to commend staff we've had some difficult houses with code enforcement issues and we've had some homelessness issues and we've had some police activity in our neighborhood and they've just been really respons looking good so just excited to see that thanks i didn't that's cool i have to go by and see