music evening i'd like to call to order the lakewood city council and lakewood reinvestment authority joint study session in the city of lakewood colorado on september seventeen tw yeah the beer yeah you have a quorum right all right well welcome to everybody who's here in chambers this evening looks like a lot of familiar faces who probably have to be here this evening to welcome you and those who may be tuning in or tuning in at a separate date tonight is a big night for the city of lakewood this is when the budget is rolled out this is something that starts early in the year and has had a lot of work and council i want to thank this year for all of your due diligence ahead of time there's been a lot of great questions asked and they were pouring in so thank you for that and thank you to staff especially today for  marathon answers that you were able to get back to us on time for the discussion tonight this is the first opportunity for the presentation of the budget and unlike most ordinances this actually will have two public hearings so we'll have  more opportunities for the public to engage going forward and with that i'll now turn the presentation of the two thousand and eighteen revised two thousand and nineteen city of lakewood budget over to our finance director mister larry door of city council once again larry door city of liquid finance director and city treasurer welcome to the two thousand and nineteen budget study session and i want to give a special welcome to our three council members for whom this will be your first budget study session councilors bita skilling and libera now i've been told by many council members over the years this is really one of the most memorable and exciting experiences you can have as a council member in fact i i still email the budget link to former council members that i've worked with i don't know if they're clicked or not but nonetheless thank you for your engagement in this process sincerely we have fielded a number of questions and i can tell that council is very highly engaged both the budget not at board and council as a whole and so let us just commence we have quite a packed show for you tonight that will probably feel familiar to a number of council members who've participated in this over the years but of course they're always updates and new initiatives to bring up to speed on we have had for the city council a paper copy of the book for some ten days now it's five hundred and forty plus pages and it's got charts and graphs and paragraphs and columns and numbers everything that might appeal to anybody who's looking for any information on the budget of course and you know we keep in mind our sustainability practices at the city we won't be producing another copy of this unless there are just major substantial changes we probably would just produce a few extra pages for you should there be any changes but of course it'll be online it's been online since the th of september and available to the public and council members and  so forth so we won't be producing another paper copy but i know that each of you will have you know dog eared pages and tabs and flags sticking out so we've we've got that had that out for several days if you're wondering the sculpture on the front hover it was one of the city of liquids first pieces of public art that it acquired in one thousand nine hundred and ninety four this sculpture is snapshot and it is displayed a addenbrooke's park and it was produced by ms d dekker at the the artists that produced the sculpture so if you're wondering about that you've got it there's actually more to that history as well is that i think michael jackson is portrayed in it as a child thank you mayor yes and i understand the scalper had the chance to meet michael jackson at some point during his life so thank you for that you know we have a large team that works on the budget and i want to give thanks to all of those department directors and all of the division managers and budget coordinators in the various departments who've worked on the budget for the last number of months now to get to this next big step which is your study session tonight so i want to thank all of those individuals and of course really i think the person at city hall that works on the budget the most is our budget accountant kari murky and she's here in the audience helping me tonight with the presentation and is really our facilitator and coordinator  budget making sure that we are in compliance and we keep all of the the details in order so that further ado let me just talk a little bit with all of you and the public about what has been done so far of course  been accumulating our revenue forecast and spending initiatives we've had some study sessions related to infrastructure needs and so forth across the city we've been doing some work on that but our budget not at board met formally on july  ludwigssen and may i just give a shameless announcement that the city is recruiting candidates who have to be a resident of lakewood to be members of the council's budget not at board you have until tomorrow night to submit an application please do so and the city council's screening committee will view those and make a recommendation for the next appointment to the budget and audit board so please apply please check out this very interesting opportunity to serve your community and if you want more information of course you can go to our website liquid org and read about the board but you can also check page nineteen in the in the budget book and we've got some information there that that you can see well after this study session the works not done we will still always be accepting questions and the portal is open for you to submit questions through through council members council members you can send those directly to me i've been sort of the quarterback with all the various departments in terms of tracking down all the questions and i want to tell you the majority of those were answered by others not me so i want to give credit where it's due there but we still have some five weeks before the budget will be adopted in the fourth monday of october so plenty of time for questions adjustments changes this is just yet another stop along the way but it's a big one and then as the mayor mentioned we'll have two public hearings that the public will get a chance to come down and three co presenters who will be coming down our police chief dan mccaskey our public works director jay hutchison and our director of community resources kit newland they'll be doing a variety of things for you updating you on some initiatives that we've accomplished things are in progress and then proposals for two thousand and nineteen i'll get into a little bit of the budget background and and sort of how it how it all comes together and how it might make sense to the audience and to all councilmembers it'll be a little bit of a refresher if even if you've been through this i do go into a little bit of detail the revenue forecast that's probably the most probably one of the most important things because it's the thing that we can't control as a city it did the income varies and we need to pay special attention to that and then even for you seasoned veterans even for me we have a little twist tonight and that is the tabor budget i'm just gonna call it that because it's easier but it refers to city council's resolution two thousand and eighteen thirty six council adopted a resolution setting forth that it would produce a separate budget and i'm going to guide us all through that and take input and suggestions as we get into it that will have some more details about what might be next steps by the way i should say that while i'll just have three co presenters i will be speaking about spending initiatives in the information technology department in the municipal court and in our human resources employee relations department i'm still still working on getting that name just right so then of course we'll have discussion questions and answers i'll address a number of the questions that city council has and has mentioned a moment ago the city has an urban renewal authority and it's a separate legal entity it has its own tax id number its own bank accounts its own mission and purpose it's not subject to tabor and you are sitting as commissioners right now of that board and i'm gonna walk through the budget presentation for the lakewood reinvestment authority so that we can talk about the spending the responsibilities and authorities and of course any and all questions and answers regarding the l without further ado back to the city budget and just gonna go ahead and dive right into it you know the budgeting process a lot of different ways to go about it some cities do things a little bit differently we've certainly adapted the city of lake woods process it in your out little bits around the edges to try to make things more efficient primarily from via feedback from from city council and the public on how we might approach things a little bit differently and more efficiently but first and we're all started in tonight's presentation is on estimating income for the city or revenue because it's again it's the thing we can't control and if i can draw an analogy if you grew up in a self employed household as i or if you live in a salaried household you can you understand the difference between the two of those things if you live in a if you if you live in a self employed household you know that income can go up and down from year to year and you need to plan for that just a little bit differently if you live in a household with a fixed income you can predict that income and you can again budget a little bit differently well the city as a going concern as a financial entity really is like a self employed household  income to the city will go up and down based on a variety of different factors and so we need to approach that with that mindset and make decisions accordingly but the first step in the process is what do we have to work with and then maybe what do we want to do with those resources because while we get into the next step and that's prioritizing expenses you know one of my colleagues said a long time ago we can do anything but we can't do everything  we have so many competing priorities for example obviously public safety employees there are many many needs we want to do things as a community in the area of sustainability we have infrastructure needs and infrastructure is a broad abroad term a broad word it includes buildings like our civic center and includes our recreation facilities also buildings but a lot of twists and turns a lot of differences we have many infrastructure needs in the area transportation you can start and transportation itself of courses pedestrians bicycles automobiles all those different things and then we have needs and technology both inside city government and outside in the community so we have many many priorities they all compete against one another and we just can't do everything we just can so that's the difficult that's the more challenging part while estimating income is very complicated and challenging figuring out the right priorities is difficult and that's what the policy makers are here to do we also should save for a rainy day because boy we've had some rainy days in lakewood particularly may two thousand and seventeen which was quite a stunning event in lakewood and that was the hailstorm  colorado mills and i've got a few numbers on that to show you but that was a four million dollar rainy day and i'll tell you that's that's that's a whopper that's that's a big rainy day so we we should save for a rainy day because the community expects the continuity of services they expect to you know call nine they expect their signal lights to be on they expect to show up in their parks and if their recreation centers and and on and on so we need to be prepared for that and now i'll get a little bit technical we do budget by fund and you might wonder right off that sounds like jargon and it is and so i want to i want to address that particularly for those who might not be familiar with it there's a here's another page in the budget that gives you an outline of all the city funds and you'll see of course our general fund and i'm gonna spend the majority i'm gonna spend almost the entire night talking about the general fund but our second largest is the capital improvement fund but it's much much smaller than the general fund in fact the general fund is is  of the entire spending in the budget which means it's twice as large as everything else put together of course we have all manner of internal service funds we have our enterprise funds like our golf water sewer and stor utility and on and on of course i'm open to any and all questions regarding those funds but because the general fund allows the greatest amount of flexibility for city council to provide services to the community i'm going to spend i'm gonna spend my time there so i mentioned we want to start by estimating the income to the city so that we can then have you start to prioritize what might be happening there and you all know that we are driven by sales and use tax use taxes is a complement to sales tax it works exactly like it it's primarily paid by by businesses and then you can see we start getting down into some of the other sources of revenue and they're they're much smaller though significant i mean obviously consider the idea that one percent of the general fund is over a million dollars now any one of these can add up to a pretty good amount by the way i always whenever i see the word other and it amounts to eight percent i get of course we can talk more about that but this is things like fines in investment income and things like that the city's reserves are invested in bonds and cds and things like that and so we have interest income but none of those accumulates to greater than one percent so that would start to get kind of fuzzy if we added more of those so more about the sales tax what is it how does it work if you buy any tangible goods in lakewood or have them delivered to your home you pay a seven and a half percent sales tax but only three percent of the seven and a half is the lakewood sales tax now there is a transportation district in the south part of jefferson county and that touches lakewood just a little bit and that it's just a little more of the sales tax but this gives you a little flavor for what's there jefferson county open space state of colorado the regional transportation district and the scientific and cultural facilities district i mentioned earlier that the second largest source of income to the city is the property tax well how much of the property tax bill comes to the city and as you can see on a three hundred and fifty thousand dollar home in lakewood that i'm showing my age just a little bit i would have that i looked that up for many years ago and it was two hundred thousand not very early on in my career at lakewood and so obviously there's been quite an escalation in the affordability of housing well lake woods property tax on in the total amount be fifty four dollars you can see that obviously the lion's share going to the school  district and at the county and the county's a primary source of income and the school district and the fire district for that matter being property tax all right so one of the first things you might want to know before we got into predicting the two thousand and nineteen revenue is sort of how are things going this year how are things going so far you know we've got a full eight months in the books and that means seven months of sales tax because the sales tax comes in a month later but that's still a lot of information how are we doing and i mentioned colorado mills well we've had a slight increase in our sales tax revenue and you'll see that the mills now a year to date has collected more than it did last year to date and that's favorable so that's contributing to the increase use taxes have decreased quite a lot and everybody is aware of that i don't think they're any surprises because this really dates to the hailstorm and during the first half of last year people were doing roof replacements they were replacing automobiles and so forth and there was a just a flurry of activity doing that and those those revenues have decreased not surprisingly and we've predicted these in our in our original two thousand and eighteen budget and then you see intergovernmental revenue and that was one of the questions i got from city council and i'll dive into that in a little more detail later but i've got this highlighted in the presentation because thirty six percent is a very large number as is one million three hundred and eighty four thousand dollars and this relates to the state of colorado's the legislators senate bill one thousand eight hundred and one you may have been reading about this you may have heard about it but it's essentially a transfer of the gasoline tax to local governments for transportation improvements this is really just an increase in revenue i do the highway users trust fund this wasn't in our original budget because it obviously it hadn't been passed last year when we were coming about this so this is unanticipated so i got a little asterisk next to it but you'll notice i also need to remind all of us as we go through the budget every year that there are tabor revenue limitations and that source of revenue has no exemption at all so it will it will it would just increase the the refund so that's that's kind of the story around that i need to highlight that for each of these things charges for services we've had some increases here as well and  been very productive and then lastly how are we doing in total five two percent so we've got an increase in revenue we are sort of managing that relative to tabor and i'll show you what some of the tab limitations will be here on the next slide also related to revenue and i don't have a bullet for this but i wanted to talk about it just a little bit because there's been quite a bit of media attention around a recent united states supreme court decision in the case of south dakota the state of south dakota versus the wayfarer corporation now if you don't know anything about the wayfarer corporation let me just explain they're an online retailer they're quite large they have billions and billions of dollars in an sell through the internet they sell all manner of you know home decor and accessories and so forth if you want to go right out and check them out you can if you're a shopper with them you know them well if you if you're not a shopper of those kinds of things you probably never heard of them anyway it's a multi billion dollar company and they only sell online and the supreme court decided in the favor of the state of south dakota and what they decided was that the wayfarer corporation had economic nexus and meaning they're doing business in south dakota even though they don't have a physical presence and that's that's all changed really the landscape of things and so you might wonder where is that in the city's forecast not today it's something that we've been studying a mid summer it's only late summer right even some studying that since mid summer as to what might be the impacts and we had been anticipating you know that we might need to do some analysis so we weren't completely silent on the on the activity we've done a few things one we're consulting with our city attorney's office to determine whether or not the city would need to change its ordinance to present some statement regarding economic nexus by the way the state of colorado has they've just made a they've just done a memo really from the department of revenue and they think that's probably strong enough but we're going to get our own legal advice and if the ordinance of the city needs to change we would have to bring that to city council and then there's also a concern that that's a ancient tax policy with a revenue gain and that that might require voter approval so we're navigating all of those waters but at the same time we're keeping in mind that two thirds of that sales tax revenue would be limited by tabor and it's something we'd need to keep in mind and then also when i've just done a thumbnail if you take the population of lakewood versus the population of the country and then you'd check that against the sails away fare it's not it's probably not more than six figures in total income to the city of lakewood from sales tax on the on the high end so  it's probably not a material change to one hundred million dollar plus general fund revenue budget so i want to give some attention to that thank you we don't employ any full time economist at the city  help us forecast sales tax rate growth or consumer price index change or any of those things so we we rely on outside sources and it's worked pretty well we in the last year you might say how's how are we doing and could you give us a report card and i'm happy to do that last year our revenues collected we're a hundred and twelve million nine hundred forty six thousand nine hundred twenty five dollars and our forecast was off fifty thousand one hundred and sixteen that is point zero four percent we will never do that good job i can almost guarantee you that ever well i guess we got lucky in addition and we're pretty good too though i might say in addition our operating revenue exceeded our operating expenditures by two hundred and eleven thousand so that's putting the tax dollars to work for the community to my mind and that's also helping our policy makers make very precise strategic decisions in their budgeting so so far so good we have forecasted sales tax base growth for two thousand and eighteen of three percent and for two thousand nineteen four percent and i say base growth because we've got all this stuff going on in colorado mills which i'll talk a little bit about and that's businesses that have just opened which is exciting and businesses that are about to open and which is even more exciting so  base economic growth three percent four percent and you can see that the state economists the top one is the governor's office and the bottom one would be the legislators of course the governor proposes the budget the legislature adopts it  not unlike our process quite honestly to two different branches there but you can see that the sales tax forecast for the state is quite high it's quite high population growth disposable income and so forth by the way these are all phd economists they're a team of phd economists these people they're very impressive and then of course what i also have to put up here is the consumer price index and that's not just any cpi that's the denver aurora lakewood consumer price index that we're looking at because that is what the city's revenue is limited by under tabor and so we need to look at both this number we have to estimate local growth because the county doesn't give that to us until november and then we have to take a really best guess at what the table refund might be it's very challenging but we know pretty comfortably that it's it's not going to be a level that the state is forecasting it's probably gonna be closer to cpi that's been our experience in the past in addition so we've looked at how are we doing so far this year what are the economists saying and then we asked what do we know about lakewood well we know a few things we look around and we have a feel for what's going on in the lakewood economy and i've said this for years are one of the biggest indicators of prosperity and quality of life and a safe community is outside investment because i can tell you the marriott corporation has two hundred and ten million dollar hotels i feel like we're the monopoly building to ten million dollar hotels in lakewood so so get your mind around that a little bit and this is the marriott springfield suites at the colorado mills and what i love about this is not only do you stay in the hotel and you have a and sales tax and construction tax and all those things then you go out to dinner across the parking lot anywhere i mean you've got fifty choices that you can walk to and so i don't know about you but if i was visiting the area what a great place to stay because you can go to them you can go to two couple movie theaters right you've got restaurants you can go shopping i mean that's just that is just a way to go so i'm excited for this hotel project and also excited for the  fairfield inn as well which is also coming to lakewood someone give you a few more highlights because i really i really get excited about this stuff these are the alameda shops at belmar this is a two million dollar retail project at six  must give kudos to our building our building department our permit counter they really provide us in the budget office all of these details and we get to kind of check out what's going on in the community also this means jobs right this is five eight hundred west colfax this is the carwash that is happening out there it's open you know now and all of that it's very exciting and not not only have i shown you sort of the private sector but i want to show you some not for profit education this is colorado academy  they're investing six million dollars into their school that's fantastic for multi purpose facilities also in the education space this is the rock mount hall dormitory at colorado christian university this is a multi million dollar facility just just a stone's throw away from here at civic center and of course i love bulldozers love to see those out in the community i know that they're disruptive to the neighbors i don't want to discount that for a minute and they can be dusty but we  mitigate that but this is this is you know investment in the community and it speaks to prosperity so how's the colorado mills doing boy lots of things are opening that's exciting i mentioned th sales tax revenue has exceeded the place where it was last year to date and clearly we've got we've got a ways to go so that feels good h and m is open and i put that in all caps because it's really exciting if if you don't know what h and m is you should you should and you probably don't have kids in your home if you don't know what h and m is over the age of eight or nine anyway hmm is very critical to the success of colorado mills because it drives foot traffic and it drives foot traffic in the most critical demographic to retailers and that is young people who spend one hundred and ten percent of their disposable income and that's important that is important so h and m is open go there b something for someone and i have to say i've i don't care where you go to htm around the country you can go on park avenue in new york or you can go on michigan avenue in chicago and i'm gonna tell you this h and m store looks is every bit as good as any one of those and it's a really nice facility and congratulations to the company for getting reopened i'm happy for them and their workers not open however is the nike store and forever twenty one and i bet you know about the nike store but you may not know about forever twenty one forever twenty one is it is as important as h and m to that critical demographic it's a very large footprint that they have there it appears as though nike will open before the holiday season but it doesn't appear that forever twenty one will quite make that which is disappointing but i think for the long run that will that will be okay and forever twenty one is intending to reopen so that's very favorable and by the way i believe and it's gonna take some time for people to remember to get back out to forever twenty one and h and m because they've been going to cherry creek and flatirons in other places but it's going to take those two businesses nike and forever twenty one open and thriving to reach the two thousand and sixteen levels at colorado mills that's just that's just what it's going to take so hence we're watching that okay so i've talked a little bit about our economies i know what's going on with the state  level how are things going this year to date and now i'm gonna flip the discussion over to the expense side and as you know we are services organization we know how many patents we don't have any finished goods work in progress we have no raw materials we have no inventory we have some inventory of course at our golf course but i'm trying to communicate the idea that we're not a manufacturer we're service organizations so we spen all of our expenditures on people and the other fourth is on stuff mostly probably another fifteen percent that helps those people get their jobs done vehicles equipment buildings all those kinds of things obviously we spend a small amount on light electricity and things like that that's a little bit indirect but that's important to keep in mind in terms of providing services to the community that's that's really what we do our expense is going to date well i really wanted to let you know that we've budgeted quite an increase for our police department which of course is more than half of the general fund more than half of everything we do and so and so far that's happening we are increasing our our numbers and we are spending more as the community on police so year today eleven five percent i i've not seen number i don't remember seeing numbers like this during my career in terms of increased spending for the police department or for any department for that matter so that is happening i think that you can be encouraged by that that it's already happening and then our police chief dan mccaskey will be taking the podium right after me in just a few moments and he'll be updating you on a number of things happening in the police department and he'll be referring indirectly to some of these numbers so i mentioned earlier chief mccaskey will copy coming up in a moment he'll touch on the following subjects you'll then meet rc our public works director jay hutchison and he's going to talk about transportation utilities happening in public works kit nuland is gonna talk about parks our fitness program when she had you haven't necessarily seen in prior budgets you who are veterans and of course facilities seems like just a never ending need in these particular areas but let me just slow down for a moment and cover these three bullets for my colleagues and first in the area of our information technology department you should know that this budget will invest in equipment for example we have many city of liquid workers that use a mobile radio in our parks department in our public works department for example the headquarters at our quail shops they have a radio and they communicate out prices as the police radios but they're old and they wear out and in spite of our great efforts to you know keep those working over a long period of time they reach their end of life then they have to be replaced in addition information technology department in this budget would fund updates and replacements to systems and amongst those is something that we're all familiar with if you if you have a smart phone and all of you do because you shop at h and m and forever also if you got your smart phone and you update your apps every now and then or they happen automatically right well we have to do that with multi million dollar systems but they're not free there are hundreds of thousands of dollars but we need to do that you have to do that on your phone you have to do that on your desktop computers you have to update systems so that they're all compatible and continue working and our information technology department will continue to focus on that and then also we have mandates that you'll hear a little bit about now in our municipal courts we need to we have been ordered to provide certain opportunities for people who are accused of crimes to receive justice in a short period of time okay that's a state mandate we've got just got to spend money on doing that and that's having access to judges attorneys and all those things very quickly and so that that is also a call for additional systems for our courts to be able to do that also we're adding funding for our marshals our marshals keep our communities safe when they are visiting municipal courts so we need to continue to make sure that the equipment of the marshals is up to is up to snuff and then also we're needing to spend more money on interpreters we are not only having a slight increase in the need for interpreters but the number of different languages spoken by our citizens is increasing and we need to be able to respond to that not surprisingly some of those languages are not as popular or as common i should say and so therefore those interpreters are quite expensive quite honestly so we need to be responsive to that and then in our human resources department we have long been successful as an organisation in the area of employee compensation and that is our our process and the approach be it engineers police officers accountants over the case maybe is retention through competitive compensation and this budget would provide for that so i mentioned excuse me i mentioned save for a rainy day and so let me transition to how are we doing on that as a community and you need to take a look at this if you're new to this budget process are three council members you might be looking at this and thinking i came to city council probably a difficult time but rest assured this was intentional city council's over the last few years had seen just the left side of this graph and felt like it was probably a time in a bull market to begin investing in additional community assets and i could tell you the twelve million dollars in reserves spent or is connected to a list of projects and initiatives  it's quite long to be honest some of them are not done some of them are still in progress and i won't steal any of the details from my colleagues we're about to come up and tell you about them but they'll describe some of them and we've reached that i think that level i've said before it's not too big it's not too small it's probably just right but it's probably closer to two maybe small as you'll see here in a minute so this is a large this this is thirty million dollars a lot of money obviously that's a that's a very large number but all that everything's relative right first of all it may also say that these monies are invested in bonds cds secure investments that pay interest so they're not you know just  sitting on a piece of paper and a balance sheet somewhere earning zero interest they're earning earning interest and that's contributing to general fund income which some of which is living in by tabor and on and on but nonetheless those interest earnings are available for services but here's i think maybe another report card and a good check in for city council and the public on how our reserves doing now denver is right around ten times larger than lakewood in terms of general fund expenditures you know jefferson county is larger it's a smaller factor but it's bigger but a way to measure reserves this is something that is been done for well nearly a hundred years of the government finance officers association the rule of thumb that has been very common is you're saving should be some your savings account or your reserves should be some percentage of your income so if your income is twice as much as mine you probably would want to have twice as much in the bet in your rainy day fund then i would that's that's sort of the comfort level there's also this sort of old expression about keep six months of your income or six months of your expenses in the bank and that would amount to a fifty percent fund reserve or a fifty percent reserves that'd be half a year or if it was keep three months expenses in the bank that'd be a twenty five percent reserve and i think you get where i'm going with this so whether you're denver or golden i think that the golden might be the smallest one i've got listed here it's all relative so while golden might have a lot less of money in the bank they might have six or twelve months spending in the bank so it's all relative that's the reason for the percentages and not dollars because because you know denver would you know that they would have three hundred million dollars in their reserve and that would seem amazing for lakewood but not so much for denver okay so how are people doing you've already had a peak here at the just obviously and you can see a lot of cities you recognize you can also see the county in broomfield of course is a city in county so their their needs might be just slightly different  you can certainly consider that but we're getting down there we're getting down there as a community so i would bet that many folks would probably look at this and think we're good we're good but we need to be mindful of  using those reserves either for additional strategic projects or another rainy day as it may as it may happen so the median or the midpoint in all these is thirty one percent we're just a little bit below that as a city so we've been aggressive in investing in those projects now you see two others up here centennial and we reach out i mean to tattle on them but i just want to do this for disclosure because you might be looking at well where's wheat ridge on this thing and they just haven't done their audit that's all they just haven't quite yet well they've probably done it but they don't have their statements yet and they haven't put them on the website and we can update this later and ah october if those come about and it could change the median and so forth but we always want to know what our neighbors are doing and then centennial is you know a hundred thousand population so we always want to have them sort of on the list so thank you for that hopefully i've covered you know our income and how that moves and talked a little bit about how that's going to date and how it might have go next year i talked a little bit about the rainy day fund and how expenses are going but now let me please introduce the city of lakewood police chief dan mccaskey who will talk a little bit about what's been happening in the police department and what is proposed in the two thousand and nineteen budget  evening mayor and city council members thanks for your atencion tonight so i just wanted to talk a little bit about start with what we what you all approved last year in our in our budget and and talked about some of our successes so last year you approved for agents and a sergeant for our newly formed community action team and for those who were part of that approval i want to say thank you and that's probably in my career one of the best things we've ever done in the lakewood police department this team has had such a tremendous impact in our community and let's all talk a little bit more about that as we go through this but also approved in last year's budget process position for the jefferson county regional crime lab a dna analyst and our dna submissions have increased dramatically i don't have the exact number but they're over close to a thousand a year right now and dna has been really important tool for us in our crime fighting efforts and probably you may have recently read in the paper and saw on the news that we have made an arrest and a thirty four year old homicide case in lakewood that was also related to a triple homicide in an aurora back in one thousand nine hundred and eighty four and that was based on dna evidence and the dna and that was dna that we collected from our crime scene and so that's a really something that were we're happy about that was one of those cases that i never expected that to be solved in my career so means a great deal to the the police department and i know our community also last year we approved a an investigative technician for the auto theft task force and as many of you know there's a metropolitan auto theft task force that a lakewood police commander is commands and it's a multiple jurisdiction task force with denver pd lakewood aurora and several other jurisdictions so and it's been a very successful task force last year we also approved a digital evidence system upgrade and with with the advent of cell phones that we're using and all of the different technology this was a this was a much needed upgrade for us the technology has sort of passed me by a little bit i think some of you might understand that but i know our detectives and our crime lab personal and our patrol agents are really pleased with the upgrade in the system and it allows us to collect a lot of digital evidence that we weren't able to do so before and then we've also last year approved seven patrol vehicles and to add to our fleet because of the continuing additions to the police department and with that we also you also approved a mechanic for the public works department because you need somebody to work on these vehicles and and i tell you we we are probably a little harder on our vehicles and than others so unfortunately they do take a little bit of wear and tear and then last years you also remember arapaho house withdrawal management services was taken over by jefferson center for mental health and we were required to fund a portion of those expenses also were the largest users of withdrawal services in jefferson county were the know municipality we used withdrawal management services for our citizens over a thousand times last year this year were we're not quite asking for for as much fortunately but we are asking for two additional police agent positions one position would go to the community action team and one  would go to our traffic team the community action team is i'm as i mentioned has really been an incredible addition to our to our police department into the organization the city of lakewood and our citizens you know and we're doing a lot of different things as well we i'll be here later this year in december talking about a lodging license that will sort of regulate some of the activities that are at some of our hotels and motels in lakewood we have four three hotel motels in lakewood and we probably respond close to a thousand times a year at some of these locations and it's a been a significant burden on the police department we had one of our police office agents was seriously injured at one of our motels earlier this year so we're gonna try to do some regulation and mandate some different things to to to lower those calls for service and and and you know just to kind of regulate some of the behavior that goes on there and  agent will be partially responsible for that it's gonna take a lot of work on our part but that was one of the things we're looking at but you know as i mentioned that we're seeing a big increase  homelessness and the issues surrounding that and our community action team has been big in helping helping with some of those issues this year alone we've posted four hundred and sixty eight homeless camps that we found in five hundred mental health referral calls this year alone so we're seeing a huge increase in those numbers as well so the cat team i say in my career this is probably one of the best things that we've ever done and i think you're all go a for our community i think you should be proud of the fact that that you approve this and the great work they've done we're also looking at for community service officers and i'll talk a little bit about them as we go forward but then we want  we'd like to some equipment for the new csos and with two vehicles and just some of the other equipment that they that they'll need and just briefly as i wanted to just talk about the cost of outfitting a new police agent  with these two positions that were we have now we are paying approximately eight thousand dollars probably even a little more that for every police agent that we hire to outfit them with the equipment and that includes  uniforms exterior clothing coats boots gun belt vest ballistic helmet police radio and now we're also going to with a new mdc or new computer system we're going to be outfitting them with computers as well so just wanted to share that with you just the significant cost of what when we hire agents what it takes to to outfit them as i mentioned that the csrs they have been very beneficial for us right now we started with two under chief paletta when he was here we tried him as an experiment and it's been very successful they've relieved a lot of the duties of our of our sworn agents and then so we have added three positions so we're up to five csos now and we'd like to take that to nine we're gonna increase some of their duties where they're going to be in investigating minor traffic accidents minor criminal events and doing additional parking enforcement and i know we've had a lot of conversations the past couple years about parking and and it's it's one of those duties that i would prefer not to use a sworn police agent to enforce and so hopefully these additional cso's will will take on those duties you know and one of the things about the cso's it's they're easier to hire they're the requirements aren't aren't as significant as they are for a sworn person the college degrees not there and so it's easy they're easier to hire they're easier to train the trainings much less and one of the things we've we have found is that where we have recruits that have not made it in the police academy they've adapted well to the cso position because sometimes you know you get in this pretty you're in the academy you think you want to be a police agent you get out there and you realize that maybe you're not cut out for this job and it's not what you want to do but the cso is a different a different sort of job and and we've had good success with that and we also are looking at it as a pipeline for the police department to if you can come in and do the job for a year or two and you get to know the culture in the organization and things like that and we get to know you there also we look to hire them as police agents so but they do a lot of different things they you know they do our crime scene work they do parking enforcement they pick up found property they would look at abandoned vehicles they they process recovered stolen vehicles and this year alone we've had they've handled almost six thousand calls for service so it's really  a valuable unit and it and it allows us to free a police agent time to do some other higher priority activities so so with that unless unless there's any questions and i don't know how what the plan is if we're gonna ask you also coming back for quick okay so thank you for your time and i'd like to introduce public works director jay hutchinson he's up next so thank you thank you mister thank you mayor good evening council thank you chief i'm going to talk about capital improvement and preservation plan which is in the back part of your budget it's the pages after the last green tab no the next to last green tab and it's a little bit different than the rest of the budget the budget including a portion of the capital improvement and preservation plan is for the two thousand and eighteen revised numbers and the two thousand and nineteen plan and and numbers that you would actually adopt all tamilian october one of the things that we do in the capital improvement preservation plan is that we look a little bit further so the plan that you see in the back of your budget goes out through two thousand and twenty three and that is primarily because some of these projects take a while as and you'll see some pictures and projects that you've seen more than once because of that fact and they're expensive and and so making some planning that stretches out a little bit farther make some sense i'm going to start by talking about some projects that have recently been completed these are already in in the budget they were adopted last year in previous years but i want to give you an update and unless you know which ones and let the community know which ones have been completed recently and we'll start with some transportation projects this is a picture looking north on pierce north of colfax this is the condition before the project and here's the condition after and this one that was actually phased it's a project funded with community development block grant funds which are federal funds that the city receives as long as the federal government continues to make them available and it's in the northeast part of town and the most recent project included the lighting and the landscaping that you see here the sidewalk was actually built at an earlier phase using the same kind of funding in total this was about a five hundred thousand dollar project for  relative well you can almost see the whole project in this photograph this is a project that in the before condition on the northwest part of town on rob street there was a gap in the sidewalk the neighbors proposed a neighborhood participation project a program that you've adopted and utilized for a number of years and here's the after condition with the urban gutter in the sidewalk put in place the third one that i'll use as an example is a capital improvement funded project and that's a roundabout down at grant ranch boulevard and crest line this is a location where a major arterial street was going through a commercial corridor and then it dropped into a residential area and the intersections traffic volumes have been increasing the the crash potential was growing it was to the point where a traffic signal warranted but we looked at other alternatives and chose the roundabout which you approved in an earlier budget for a variety of reasons first of all it's safer roundabouts tend to have lower crash incidents than than traffic signals they're also less expensive in the operation or maintenance side the investment upfront is relatively comparable it's a little bit more expensive for a roundabout in this case it varies by location in this case we happen to have enough land area to be able to do this project and we had some really good partners we worked with the neighborhood of course to the southeast the businesses cooperated greatly and in fact crestline was closed during most of the construction and it goes through some of the commercial area and we had talked through that with them ahead of time obviously we also had a really good partner in the local metropolitan district which is the residential area to the north and east that metropolitan district paid for all of the landscaping in the center of the island the round island in the middle of the roundabout also landscaping on their side and they'll maintain both of those as well so it's been a good partnership this is right on the edge of denver so they of course were a part of the discussion as well this is now complete this is a project that is actually in its third of four phases the very first phase was the intersection of colfax and wodsworth which occurred a number of years ago the second phase extended the improvements down to tenth avenue also completed a couple of years ago and then this phase was from tenth avenue down to highland drive it included the gulch crossing that i suspect you've all seen the transportation improvements included the additional lanes which show on the left picture here with three three lanes in each direction and the shared use path one on each side that shows in the upper right hand picture as well this has been a joint project between the colorado department of transportation in the city with a fair amount of federal funding the colorado department of transportation has managed the construction they also did the design and paid for the design work they also did the rightaway acquisition that was necessary for the project and  the city provided the matching funds and obtained the federal grants to do the actual construction actually both on this piece and the piece of north of th avenue this piece for construction was about fifteen million dollars the fourth phase is the interchange at colvett wodsworth and sixth avenue it's about a seventy million dollar project all by itself and it's unfunded there are the the the design has gone well through the preliminary stages so we know what's going to actually be built there there's been a long involved public process as part of the right of way acquisition that the colorado department of transportation completed north of the interchange they also did the acquisitions that are necessary at the interchange area so it's it's ready to go all it needs is a of money and i should mention that there are a couple of opportunities for the general public to contribute to the funding with this coming election there are two propositions that are on the ballot  hundred and ten both of which deal with transportation funding statewide but they're very different i'm not going to go into great detail tonight i'm probably not the best person to do that but i'll give you a little bit of an introduction to both proposition one  existing revenues that the state already receives and it reallocates some of those revenues and it authorizes some debt it would generate or could fund about three five million dollars worth of projects billion thank you three five billion dollars worth of i'm not used to those numbers millions feel like a lot of money to me three five billion dollars worth of transportation projects in the state using existing revenue only on state highways and the list that's that's been used publicly with this proposal actually has about five point six billion dollars worth of projects so the colorado department of transportation or the transportation commission the state transportation commission is is planning to will that down to where the project lists fits the anticipated revenue so the public can have a little better understanding of what could be completed with that approach the why it's worth and sixth avenue project is on the list it's on the five point six billion dollar list whether it'll be on the  and a half billion dollar lists we just don't know yet proposition one hundred and ten also on the ballot and this isn't an eitheror each will be voted on by anyone who wants to vote on them proposition one hundred and ten is different it does include additional revenue and it would generate a larger amount of revenue and there is a project list associated with that that it could fund and that includes state highway work it also includes funds for counties and funds for local municipalities as well and all transportation types so there's a little bit of a primer and only a primer on what those will be like you'll i'm sure hear plenty about those in the coming weeks talk a little bit about a traffic signal in the northeast part of town xx and pierce this project is also complete and was a project that it replaced a very old signal we have signals in that's in the city that are as old as fifty years old i don't know the age of this one but it was on a what we call a span wire the wire that that carries the the signals across the intersection as you see here and if you were in that van trying to see the signal that's very close to you it would be up really close and the  things that were substandard here it was completely re reconfigured for about three hundred thousand dollars and it was a joint project with one of our neighbors a lot of our transportation projects are joint projects and as i've mentioned earlier in the  there were a couple of planning efforts in the transportation area that you were also involved in in this past year there was a bicycle master plan update this is only the second time the master plan has been adopted and it was adopted after public participation and council consideration back i think in april and i want to make a little bit of a plug here because the one of the things that has come out of these efforts to improve bicycle safety and automobile bicycle interaction safety is an upcoming training called bicycle friendly driver training it's going to be held on october nd right across the plaza in the cultural center and that'll be at six zero p m and it's open to the public you do need to register if you're interested at bicycle colorado org again that's october  the second planning effort was triggered by transportation concerns on the union boulevard corridor and generally that's the area for this planning purpose from alameda to th avenue maybe a little bit north of th avenue that process was concluded earlier this year as well it recommended a number of projects that came out of the public discussion and and some technical analysis fairly substantial technical analysis and you'll actually hear a little bit more about this quarter a little bit later when mister doar talks about the proposed taper fees that are then used only on stormwater improvements the next several slides are projects that were funded the stormwater management utility this first one at th and lee was a local drainage problem that was impacting a number  properties in that part of the northwest section of town and while we don't have a good before picture this is an after picture with the new concrete and and some inlets that in that redirect some of that water away from the private properties and ultimately into a stormwater system this little project was about one hundred and forty thousand dollars the second one it was a little bit bigger this is a before picture now this was a significant storm event some of you may remember this picture this is a backyard that's a bench in a back yard over in the left side of the picture there are a number of properties south of twenty is generally around nelson that would flood because it was an area that just simply didn't have a place to drain a substantial amount of money and some sizable pipes went into this area that have since been completed and it includes a pipe underneath this walk that was then replaced as well as out into the street where some curb and gutter and inlets and pipe were placed as well this project again fully funded by the stormwater management utility was about a six hundred thousand dollar construction effort one of the other activities the stormwater management utility is maintenance and sometimes that's maintenance caused by or the need for which is caused by major storms and that's what these photos illustrate it's a little difficult with the shading and all the vegetation to tell but these are blockages the left one is in the channel of i believe it was lakewood gulch near sheridan which overtopped in this storm and the so out in the northwest part of town and then the other is in this kind of southwest part of town along alameda where some of gulch had had structures plugged as well when there was a very intense storm actually we had a couple of very intense storms on green mountain this year so that gets cleaned up by funding provided by the storm water management utility as well this is the after picture of a great similar the one in the middle picture after it was clean this is a different location on green mountain that looked very similar to the one in the middle we also replace infrastructure with the storm water management utility i want to compliment the council over many years of paying attention to dealing with aging infrastructure we certainly have some of that these are three locations listed here where the pipes had completely deteriorated in the bottom  that usually shows itself on the surface by creating some kind of a sinkhole or a collapse or some other kind of problematic circumstance in all three of these cases that's what happened the one on the far right which is actually rotated ninety degrees so in that case we didn't dig up the whole pipe instead we used a method where we could line the pipe essentially create a new pipe inside of the old one so it's it's not always the best answer but in where you're trying to keep a business open and  obliterate a parking lot for a number of days this turns out to be a good solution moving away from the stormwater management utility for a minute but staying with the theme of infrastructure maintenance and preservation the street resurfacing program i mentioned here because we spent a lot of money on it we have a very extensive street system spent over eight million dollars a year taking care of it and keeping it in good shape for the community and one of the the things that occurs well there are several methods that we do that we seal cracks to keep moisture out we reseal the entire surface to reduce the oxidation that makes the pavement more brittle and more likely to crack we patch places that create potholes or have the potential to create potholes we resurface streets entirely at a regular frequency all of which is designed to ultimately reduce the ongoing cost of maintaining the streets because if we let them go too far then we're at the point where we simply have to rebuild the pavement and they're not not maintainable at that point some other things happen during street resurfacing as well and i'll use the example of jewel avenue this past year creek boulevard to yale where the street didn't get any wider it was due for an overlay but because it was being overlaid that was the optimum time to implement a part of that bicycle master plan that you saw earlier that section was scheduled to have at some point on street bike lanes that was the time to do it so essentially for the cost of a couple of stripes we were able to implement a significant amount of the bicycle master plan on that portion of jewell avenue during the resurfacing i should five and their condition is driven by what the state is able to do one of the next projects that you'll probably see done by the state and resurfacing as wodsworth   a new pavement as well it's odd to see a waterline leak on a photo that says street resurfacing but we care a lot about those things because when they happen they often happen under streets and they can damage roadways this particular waterline leak was not in a liquid water line it was one of the water lines owned by one of the other many districts in the city of lakewood but it was on a street that was relatively newly resurfaced in the last few years so we got very interested very quickly when we began to see the street having effects and the the  the water utility that owned the line which is one of the smaller utilities wasn't in a position to be able to find quickly where the problem was so our staff diverted and got involved and identified the location which is shown in this illustration and ultimately the water district did pay the city back for the efforts to find the the leak but it's one of the other things that we try to keep an eye on with streets and all the other infrastructure that are under streets another area that you've invested in year after year is making sure that the the organization has the equipment necessary to provide the services that it does to the city and that's not cheap that street sweeper in the left picture is over a quarter of a million dollars and that's just one street sweeper and of course we have to replace vehicles regularly and equipment regularly at different schedules and we always evaluate each one individually when it reaches its schedule to see if it's really time or if we can extend that and occasionally we've been able to extend the the general target schedule as technology on vehicles is improved projects that are underway again these are projects that have been in the budget before but i want to give you in the community an update on some of these as well the first one we're really a secondary player we the city are actually a secondary player in it's a primarily a liquid reinvestment authority project so you'll hear about about it some more when you talk about the lakewood reinvestment authority budget here in a little while but this is alameda between pearce and car is where the city is involved although there's work also to the east of pier and then the city is also involved in teller from alameda up most of the way to first avenue up to the elementary school and it's a split project a shared project actually that's a better way to look at it because the the lakewood reinvestment authority at things that it wanted to do for the downtown area the city needed to resurface these streets the portion of alameda that i mentioned between carr and pierce we actually deferred knowing that this other work was coming and it would make sense to do it all at once and then teller also is coming up on the on the list for resurfacing we at the same time there was an old signal at teller and alameda so we're replacing it at the same time as part of this project so two funding sources came together actually more than two but those two at least and you'll hear more about that in a little while reaches girton i think it's well into the through lanes this is as a grant money as well about five hundred twenty thousand dollars in grant money in about a hundred thousand dollars is budgeted and of city funds to get this project done squeeze over into the two through lanes and then as you go north there's side by side left turn lanes so the idea here is to utilize some of that space in a different way there's not a lot of left turn movements on kipling through this area north of here north of the interchange so the idea is to add a third northbound lane the reason being multiple but a primary reason is that when traffic is on its way into lakewood high school one of the main entrances is from kipling because that's the access to sixth avenue and it's a right turn onto ninth avenue and then another right turn into the school property well that that school traffic by itself backs way up onto stops the use of that right of the two existing northbound lanes so there's third lane would act as an acceleration deceleration and frankly a storage lange during school pick up and drop off mostly it's a  the colorado department of transportation is planning to resurface this area so the restriping would be logically done at that time there's some concrete work the road does narrow just at the far end of this picture here so i have to do a little bit of reorientation there and a couple of other locations there will be some movement or some term movement restrictions at th avenue if that access is open to the school we also have grant to replace the traffic signal dates place so we're trying to coordinate all that at the same time primarily  seedot funded project but the city is right in the middle of it with our friends at cdot this just shows the school markings and this is an eighth avenue so this is the potential additional access into the liquid high school property  without moving the curb line that you're seeing here we could create the third northbound lane let's go to the east side of town the northeast side of town this is sheridan i'm sure you've seen these pictures at least twice and i feel bad about that but it is the nature of the process this is a this has about a million dollar federal grant money comes with strings and those strings aren't all bad and they have very very important causes and reasons but they don't accelerate the process so here we are looking at one more time at the shared use path from th to th on the west side of sheridan those those dirt areas are where people walk near high speed high volume traffic that we want to solve with the shared use path it'll be separated generally from the curb line it's about a three two million dollar project the design and land acquisition is complete were almost through the cdot process for final approval last year which is a connection between the garrison station in estes street on the north side a total of about three six million dollars also scheduled for two thousand and nineteen construction i want to use this as an opportunity just to mention the that the demand or desire maybe that's a better word for additional sidewalks and shared use paths isn't declining we have a list of about fifty million dollars where i'm sorry fifty miles of those kind of facilities that people would like to have probably in the seventy to one hundred and twenty million dollar range as you know we're funding about a half a million dollars a year what we can get in grants and other kinds of projects that's not based on an inventory of need that's based on requests that have been brought to our attention so there's there's probably more out there if if we if and when we make enough progress for it to be important to go look for more another one of those kinds of pads is on lamar this is going west from lamar in the left picture on the south side of th avenue it's a connection from the the recently completed west line flats project which built sidewalk along its frontage over to lamar where there's a light rail station there's three properties here three private properties we've had interactions with all of those owners they know what's coming they know the reasons for it and are generally supportive there is acquisition that needs to happen as you know it's about a quarter of a million dollar construction project i keep turning to slides at on traffic signals there are two kinds of activities that happen with traffic signal some we replace like the one on the left some that i've already mentioned some we improve to make them either safer or more functionally adequate for our current control systems we as i mentioned earlier we have signals that are upwards of fifty years old not all of them the city owns about one hundred and twenty of those so we're now in a program which was in the first approved in the budget just last year of replacing about two or three of those  they'll be replaced when they need to be that doesn't mean we'll always do two or three some years maybe we won't need to do that many but that's that's the plan they do cost a lot new traffic signal can easily be three hundred and fifty thousand dollars so  million dollars and sometimes they can range higher or lower depending on the the roads that they have to reach across and other factors we do have grants for some of these the the two kipling signals both have grants the two odds or signals both have grants that'll pay for about eighty five percent of those four signals and i'll actually talk about the wads or signals a little bit later they ended up getting them on the wrong slide so i'll talk about them in a few minutes yet as you know on october st you're gonna have a study session that includes an informational discussion about dhoklas bicycle and scooter sharing they're a wonderful tool if used well they're also a troublesome tool sometime in most communities in one way or another the dilemma is to try to figure out how to how to how to walk the line to where there can be helpful scooters began showing up well in fact here's two pictures of scooters in lakewood the one on the left at the lamarr light rail station  on the right at colfax and last week literally while i was writing this the staff memo that you'll get for your packet on october st literally while i was riding it lime showed up out here at the transit center right here at the civic center and unloaded scooter so these are these may have come from denver but they are unloaded now and like with bicycles i haven't seen yet but that doesn't mean they are here so we're trying to find out how to maximize the opportunity without having the problems and frankly we won't have that answer on october st but it'll be a good time to start the discussion let me shift back again to the stormwater management utility with some projects that are underway and by underway this may mean the designs underway it may be in the constructions underway on all these projects that i'm mentioning in this segment this is the the mcintyre gulch crossing at holland street it's just north of nd avenue some of you may recall a flood that we had that showed water going over the street that caused this kind of damage this is a project plan for two thousand and nineteen construction it's about one three million dollars of construction these are not inexpensive and that's that will reduce property damage both public and private property damage in that area again it's all stormwater management utility funding several other stormwater projects are in the works we're doing some planning just initiating some planning in the applewood area there's about six or eight different problematic locations that are somewhat similarly with liquid gulch in these two locations that i mentioned here the district is also paying for those independence streets south of th avenue you may remember some testimony on this one where there was an irrigation interest in irrigation water interest in this location as well we've been working with those folks we found a solution that will work for everybody so that's being designed right now and plan for two thousand and twenty nineteen construction it's about a five hundred and seventy five thousand dollar project xx the union is actually the first implementation up on the applewood area and you may remember at the end of august you received a copy of a notice that went out to the folks in that area that we were going to begin the surveys so that we could start on the design work there also the the the gulch crossing is that is north of th avenue we're doing that now it's a little earlier than we'd originally planned because we have to replace the sewer in that area as well as long as we're gonna tear up the road why replace it twice why the interruption to the neighborhood twice it's on the list we can fund it so we'll replace that crossing of draggled south of th on lamar at the same time that's about a seven hundred thousand dollar project here's some problem locations that we'll fix within the next few months the left one is a pipe that's completely rotted out in the bottom similar to what you've seen in earlier pictures near beach park we've got a sinkhole problem probably created from the same issue in jewell or near jewel avenue and i should also mention the beginning of two thousand and nineteen we're going to have the equipment to do a routine methodical visual inspection of all of the storm sewer system in the city so we're beginning to make a stronger shift to some anticipatory replacements rather than reactionary replacements we do some anticipate anticipatory replacements but we'll be able to do it more methodically throughout the whole whole system and all across the town with the the advent of having camera equipment that we can run down these pipes as you know you also manage a storm water or a sewer utility and a portion of town mostly the northern part of town there's three projects listed here that are sanitary sewer replacement projects to sum total of about two hundred and two and a half to three million dollars for those three projects we have a waterline and fairly small li water utility in the northeast part of town this is a picture of colfax after the repair was made on the waterline and this is the reason that we need to replace it is we're beginning to have more frequent issues and the repairs are not efficient because they're spot repairs and we don't know where the next problem is going to be and they're expensive it's a it's you may be able to tell in this picture that the upper surface on colfax is asphalt there's actually a concrete street underneath much of col x and then you've got to dig down to the pipe so it's not an inexpensive process so we're gonna go ahead and replace this the existing pipe that's problematic it stretches all the way from pierce to sherrod and so about a mile but we've looked at the arrangement of the other assist of the system and we we don't think we need to replace all that we're working with denver water to ensure that but we thinking we can replace about one thousand six hundred feet which is about a third of a mile and use access from the north and south of other water lines to provide service to those facilities rather than tearing up a whole mile of colfax and still going to be about eight hundred thousand thousand dollar project for that little utility again plan for two thousand and nineteen construction and i wouldn't like to see a mile that torn up where we're going a master plan for the quail parfaite maintenance campus this is an older facility that serves the community in a variety of ways it's located up near streets and and that's a greater demand on the site the number of vehicles our fleet maintenance facilities there as well has increased significantly since the s and we've also added some things to the site in the s the city did not have sewer utility and now those maintenance operations run out of this site the city did not have a water utility and those maintenance operations run out of this site as well and we didn't have a recycling center and it's been kind of shoehorn into the site as well so  we have an immediate a relatively immediate need that i'll mention here in just a minute that that suggested that maybe we need to go ahead now and look at a master plan for that area and those services to see what the best way to provide for those is a couple of the more immediate needs are that the sand or the salt storage building has deteriorated when you put salt up against metal it's not good for the metal and that's happened it's also half the size of what we need we get our salt from out out of state and we have to fill that thing twice a winter in order to cover the amount of volume of salt that we need for the streets in lakewood that works great as long as the trains run at the right time and the salt gets delivered well we've had some years where that hasn't worked out so well we've also shared the facility to some degree with the school district which is across the street one year we had to ask them no longer to use that salt that so they had to travel farther to one of their other facilities to get their material to deal with their parking lots  another year we had delivery problems because the trains didn't run as quickly as we had hoped delivering salts not the highest priority for a railroad company and so we need to look at a way to increase the capacity this the the sec need there is related to vehicle maintenance since the s we've gone from about four fluids that are needed in the various kinds of vehicles we have to two or three times that many fluids so we need that much more storage and and with the additional vehicles that we maintain that's a challenge so we're trying to work on a master plan at this point after we get that we'll be back to you to talk about what makes the most sense finally two things that are newly proposed in the budget that you're looking at today can see that it's an offset intersection the parcel to the left and then in the near part of the frame is actually owned by rtd that's a vacant we're hoping to work with them and try to align this intersection so it functions better but both of these signals are very old and need to be replaced  we have a grant a safety grant that will pay for about eighty five percent of that the other two are the two that i mentioned earlier the two watts or signals at yale and girton those won't be replaced but they'll be modified to provide better safe or more safe conditions than they do today i can't remember all the specifics but that includes at yale realigning the head so that they fit with the lanes better and i believe at that location adding a flashing yellow arrow so there will be some changes there then again that's eighty percent grant funded and those are the the two new project area actually for signals included in the new budget that were not included in earlier budgets with that i'll stop my comments certainly be happy later to answer any questions and i'll introduce from the department of community resources director kit new you sir thank you so i'll be doing as my counterparts have walking through projects and proposed ongoing completed ongoing and proposed and i'll touch on neighborhood participation projects as well so first completed and forgive me you'll hear some of the same information that i spoke to you about last week since we did the imagine last week so i won't dwell on it but i do want to mention again leslie park was opened on august th we well we celebrated with the community and if you haven't had a chance to go visit you should it's beautiful and then lakewood heritage center we did a amphitheater roof replacement there that was completed in june just in time for the summer event season that was funded in and seventeen if four hundred and fifty zero and it was a complicated project and difficult to find a vendor but we did and i think it's worked out beautifully next i wanted to mention the median beautification this is one of those projects that was funded by council in two thousand and fifteen actually and then we've been working on design and construction since then so the the medians that have so far been completed include wods worth boulevard evans to woodard jewel avenue wodsworth to pierce jewel excuse me pierce jewel to colorado wodsworth florida avenue to bales and then still under construction or to be completed are the two entries on to bear creek boulevard one at jewel and the other at morrison road and then also on kipling parkway to be completed as hamden to bellevue so that's still in process total cost of this was it was originally funded at eight hundred zero and cost will be eight hundred and sixty so we contributed some open space funds to that to get that completed to have those all completed eventually this year park pat budget at one two million and to date we've done we've completed both o'kane and belmar and this winter we'll be completing adhan brook so all in all we'll have come done will have completed replacement of more than two miles of concrete pathways and this was a grant partially funded through a jefferson county open space grant and so with some of the property purchase here the portion of that trail that you see in pink will be completed by the west line village so and that is project is under construction currently we continue to work on tennis court renovations this year we've completed south sims courts this is south's image here that you see and then we also completed daniels parks i mentioned to you previously or last week about the big belly and i think larry might have mentioned that as well the smart waste system that we've we've implemented in seventy sites throughout the park system we have a hundred components and hopefully sometime mid year next year we'll be able to give you some data about how this is working out this is funded in the two thousand and eighteen budget i mean excuse me seventeen for one hundred and twenty six thousand a year ongoing and then really fun event the big boom bash i think many of you were there turned out really nicely and were really pleased with the event and the positive comments from the community we did a survey online after the event and we heard from three hundred and thirty three people and ninety one percent said the fireworks high quote were high quality or very high quality so we're thrilled with that we know that there's some areas that need improvement and we'll continue to work on those going forward and here's some projects that are underway currently i think i mentioned this last week to the carmody splashpad has not been working well for several years it's time to get that replace so we're working on a replacement a complete replacement of that feature in addition to that we're doing drainage improvements at the same time and then we're going to add an outdoor workout facility with an expansion of the deck there so that should be a nice a nice addition that was funded in two thousand and seventeen at two hundred and seventy thousand we're going to contribute some open space and conservation trust fund of our own conservation trust funds to complete the project and i mentioned this last week as well but we are continuing to work on this glennon heights pool project we have some construction documents that are starting to go under design now and as you can see kind of in the conceptual there w for six hundred thousand next the washington heights historic building on first avenue needs some needs some upgrades and so we got we requested  received five hundred thousand for in this two thousand and eighteen budget and we just completed construction documents i think they actually received those today so what we're looking at are a floor replacement in the pottery studio and masonry work around the whole exterior of the building there's some plumbing upgrades that need to occur on the interior of the building and then the other very large piece of the work is an hvac system so there's one system on the roof right now that'll be removed and an air conditioning unit will be placed in each of those rooms well we'll also be adding one office right the staff do not have office spaces there they're just kind of crammed into a little hallway so it's going to be an improvement yeah quite an improvement from where we are now i mentioned this last week as well weird working on this energy performance contracting with the state energy office we've already completed the clements community center and the green mountain rec center improvements and we're working on carmody pool right now lots of those are the four and then the public safety center as well those are the last two buildings all of that work should be completed by the end of october we're very excited about that and the work is being done very quickly public safety center we're looking at upgrades this doesn't show the drive lane the drive lane that they've been working on is up against the public safety center so we were looking at improvements that you see on the left were where the concrete had really degraded and we had leaking and so forth so the the drive lane is going to look similar to what you see here this painted  concrete this project also entails involves some interior work on the public safety center restrooms and locker rooms as dan mentioned one thousand nine hundred and eighty four was when the lot those haven't been touched since then restrooms and locker rooms so the the police staff were very excited about those upgrades and then oh here we go thanks larry got it in there i think we had the old one in the new one this shows you the drive lane and some of those improvements oh here's another one and then i mentioned it also last week the new community garden at jefferson green park will be getting the site prepared our staff will this fall so by spring the gardeners will be all getting going and working with denver urban gardens to get their plots planted so really excited about that and i know many of you and your constituents are very interested in liquids fiftieth this is the the new logo for the th anniversary the staff have the hca staff have been driving this effort they've recruited folks from all departments so we have a big team and all the feedback that we got originally i think it was last year or the year before from a see i see that was what we used to put all of this stuff together so we're using all of their recommendations almost all of them for the activities that we're going to be doing so i'll have some more information you but i can highlight a few things there will be a new history book though there will be an art exhibit a public art exhibit at adam brooke and we're gonna we're gonna have that out on liquid together for the citizens to vote so we'll have some some then let people vote on what they like the best to sort of you know display or you know i can't think of the word but to talk to show what lake woods history is all about we're gonna have all of our events next year we'll have something incorporated about the fiftieth so there'll be some sort of incorporation and for example big boom bash and the concert series and the all the events that we do typically saturdays and so forth will have a th theme in november is when we expect late october early november we expect to roll out a lot of information on this on lakewood together about the th so there'll be a lot of opportunities for people to submit stories to participate in activities and events related to lake woods history so it's going to be a lot of fun and then regarding the neighborhood participation program updates i just wanted to give you a brief update on that this was  connection from sutherland shire park to main reservoir that was submitted by the neighbors and it was completed in january this year and it's it's been a nice nice addition for those folks that live in that area hodge hudson park we added a ramp as you can see on the right there this was not a good entry into this park it was dirty muddy it was basically muddy and rutted and now we have nice easy ways for people to push up at the top of that drawing there this was a park that had only a few little pieces well it does still now but it won't for long a couple little pieces of playground equipment it's gonna have a beautiful landscaping so when you enter from from that north side of the park it's gonna be really beautiful and then we're gonna add some play areas some really nice landscaping a new playground and some shade and seating seating areas so it'll be really nice for the folks that live right around there there's a couple of apartment buildings that a older apartment buildings that have been there for a long time and so it'll be well used i'm sure and then two of these npp projects are currently underway well the under way means they're in design so the shelter at glendon heights and playground replacement at you trail we are getting feedback from the community from the neighbors at ute trail we had twenty three people respond to ideas concepts they wanted to do that online so we've had twenty three people respond we gave them the three choices so that's how that that equipment will be selected and then these are new proposed projects and you all are well aware of the taylor property we are requesting a three hundred thousand dollars for the planning and construction of the site so as i mentioned last week we're going to start the public input process towards the end next to projects that we sort of new park projects one is the meadowlark cottages on south cody and the other is what we're referring to based on denver water the quail street park so street this is the moffitt water plant property that belongs to moffitt water that's how they refer to it it's owned by denver water it formerly was the ymca property and  we have just entered into an iga with denver water to get use of a portion of this park for ten years so it's a small piece of the property it's about three quarters of an acre on the southwest corner of this property where will i'm talking about the coil street on your right now where we'll be able to get neighborhood input about a couple of park amenities so just throwing out the idea that we might put a playground in or some fitness equipment potentially for for adults or maybe some ninja warrior equipment or something like that anyway so that's one of those projects and then the meadowlark cottage is what we are suggesting or proposing is to take those cottages down they're not being used the way they originally intended which was for children's programs and now we have an opportunity to pinched intentially take the buildings down and and get ourselves a little pocket park there that again we would we would take lots of input from the neighbors about what they might like to see and we're asking to do those two for four hundred thousand dollars to make those improvements at both of those sites but keep in mind the iga with denver water is ten years and then larry mentioned the fitness equipment if you visit our rec centers especially green mountain or the link you would know that we have very old fitness equipment in particularly those two recreation centers the fitness in this fitness industry things move very quickly trends change technology changes and upgrades so we want to try to stay up with those trends and we're requesting one hundred thousand dollars to upgrade the fitness equipment primarily at green mountain rec center and hopefully in future years we'll be able to get some additional money to do that same thing at other wrecks and then last but not least the carmody recreation center gym floor the picture on the left this is what it's looking like now this these spots are all over the floor this is the tartan rubber surfacing that has been there since  ninety two starting to peel so we get a trip hazard but in addition to that we also have kind of stinky stinky floor here the staff scrub and shine and do everything they can but it's just collected a lot of sweat yucky tennis shoots stuff overseers and it's really gross so what we're we're proposing is to replace this floor with something that looks similar to what you see on the right this is a floor that can actually come can actually go right on top and those stink won't come won't seep up through so and it will last for a long time so there's one hundred thousand dollars we can completely replace this floor and get something that will be much more usable nuland is always a hard act to follow i'll do my best thank you well if you recall from our agenda i promise to address something a little bit new that we haven't done in the past and when we've done it it's been a little different and that's related to just the last opportunity that this subject came up this is this is really the first chance we've had to talk about this the next step in the process and that's councils resolution two thousand and eighteen thirty six and to refresh your memory so many resolutions obviously it's about the course of the year the key phrase it's a very long resolution multiple pages and it was the result of many public meetings i can't remember six or seven or and a number of discussions dating back to councils planning session in february and it culminated in this resolution which will lead to a vote on november th i think that's just some weeks away obviously so the key caption excess revenues shall be maintained and presented in a separate budget and this will be the first step in that direction now across the course of our work on this subject it was generally proposed at the twelve million five hundred and thirty six zero five hundred and four dollars in tabor funds would generally be split across to transportation acquisition of parks and open space and public safety and the result was a little different and that's just great we can adapt to that in serving you with the ideas and and how all of that will work now really the last time we came close to this or did something similar was in two thousand and five and that was quite an experience there was a lot more riding quite honestly on that particular election that was the increase of the sales tax rate from two percent to three percent and there were two budget there were two entire budget books produced and  hours that went into that i can tell you and but what it allowed the community to see was really two different visions i recall mayor burkholder at the time describing it quite that way and that was either the city at a two percent sales tax was going to have reductions and that was a long process or with the three percent sales tax was going to restore all of those reductions and do other things and one of the more memorable things was well not reducing the police force but also adding the signal intersection countdowns and all manner of other technologies we replaced our telephone system which now needs to be getting close to being replaced again here at city hall and variety of other things so we produced two entire books two separate ordinances and and the second ordinance was conditional upon a yes vote of the people of lakewood and so that that worked really well that was people understood it whether you chose to vote yes or no didn't didn't matter the point is is transparent open and honest communication which is of course a core value of the cities and and that everybody embraces so the idea is to have public hearings have decisions and an ordinance similar to two thousand and five that would take effect upon  yes vote of the voters of lakewood on november th so the staff the budget team and it really amounts to my three colleagues who just were up at the podium here presented have sort of reconfigured the council agenda item you know subject to amendment requiring a vote would take thirty days to take effect etc etc and yet it would be contingent again upon a yes vote but again it would i believe very confidently and i've discussed this with all manners of this with the city attorney that that would constitute as you put in your resolution a separate budget conditional upon the approval and then what we would do if that if that weren't voted up we could just ignore that and move on and proceed with the refund and so forth if it if it was voted up we would ultimately make it a revised two thousand and nineteen budget we would incorporate it into the existing book in such a way that future generations or somebody in january could look at the budget and see that second ordinance so i'll address i'm gonna address each of these very quickly so my colleagues don't have to come back and forth for a couple of slides and of course the city  presentation out on the website here i'm sure tomorrow so that others can see it and of course we'll have a public hearing here in a couple of moments so first let me address that the in the resolution i can quote eight million five hundred thousand dollars for acquisition of parks and open space well there's there's there's an any there aren't any particular acquisitions to propose or i'd be here telling the addresses and negotiations and so forth but how that would work in such an ordinance would be relative to frankly accounting standards and pronouncements that are already in place these are generally accepted accounting principles and getting real excited we've got five cpas in the finance department i'm one of them this is our rare occasion to really talk about governmental accounting standards board statement fifty four which is in the city's financial statement audit it's a really popular section no doubt and it's regarding fun balanced reporting and these are the standards these are external auditors are looking at these and expecting you know to see this i'll quiz you later on the total number of gatsby pronouncements over the years but teasing on that but it what fifty four describes is that there are restrictions that automatically in place and of course the constitutional amendment the taxpayers bill of rights requires a three percent emergency reserve gatsby statement fifty four implements a restriction to that fund balance it's easily done as described in our audit it's reviewed by the auditors and it  they are amounts that can be spent only for the specific purposes stipulated by constitution charter external resource providers meaning creditors or enabling legislation well your adoption of an ordinance of this kind would be enabling legislation that would restrict those funds in a separate account for just the purpose that the vote would describe of course all of these are hypothetical and contingent upon a yes vote on the coming initiative so what the ordinance would do operationally there would be words to this effect is that there would be a transfer of eight million five hundred thousand dollars from the general fund to the open space fund and then under  y statement fifty four there would be a restriction of the fund balance of course if the november election were approved and that would just take place automatically when the ordinance took effect so so that's that's a that's probably the easiest one of all now what gets difficult is the next step you know sort of criteria and identification of potential acquisitions and all of that and that may take weeks or months or probably years you know that type of thing so that would be the first leg it's obviously the biggest dollar amount but there's that's probably the least complicated and i don't know necessarily there's really any decision to make but next up i mentioned two million a moment ago was to be spent fo police equipment and other assets and what chief mccaskey and his team have gone back and done that that's different because it would have been closer to the four million dollar level and he's gone back and reconfigured a few things and also looked at his priorities of course and he's proposing a swat vehicle three hundred and eighty thousand dollars police agent ballistic equipment foreign twenty teaser replacement seventy five and patrol car light replacement to eighty five and you know this is now's a good time i think to talk about project estimating and project costs relative to their budgets and so forth you heard director nuland talk about a recent project and the spending related to it and of course mr hudson the the the spending gets very very large on the projects done in transportation for sure but even the acquisition of a swat vehicle or replacement of patrol car light bars is frankly a sophisticated and complicated really a capital project you these things come with multiple different accessories we would of course do a request for proposals or a bid for these things you know no doubt they will not be two hundred and eighty five thousand dollars to the penny they just won't and so some of the things to think about related to project costing is i can tell you our building managers our construction managers our civil engineers  our technology department they they all learn from every one of these projects that they undertake one of the things that's interesting about being at a non competitive industry like municipal government is that we collaborate a lot with the state with the county and other municipal agencies to really understand product and project costing and what the latest trends are now recently in our in our bull market in the united states materials and labor getting more and more costly technology as well so some things to consider first none of these projects but many construction projects will require design and you have to spend money on design to complete a design in order to estimate the total cost of the project well sometimes it wouldn't make sense to spend taxpayer funds on design on a project that may or may not you know make the list for city council so consider design cost we want to try to we want to minimize waste of course we don't want to spend money on design for a project that's just going to be wildly expensive or something that we just can't complete for the community of course we do have cost escalation we do have some bidding processes where the cost comes in a little bit too high but we also have projects that come in a little bit low so those those two things tend to balance each other out over the course of time and i can tell you our procurement department has been certified as sterling and we have lots of experience in that team i can tell you our supervisor purchasing is a benefits in a given project you know typically we throw everything against the wall they try to bring as many features and amenities to the community as we can for a given project but ultimately we have to eliminate a few of those but during the job we might be able to bring one back if something's running below cost but brings it in just a little bit higher so that's one of those things as you get opportunities in the field you know to do some of those things  about who are really good consultants out there to advise the city on construction projects technology projects you name it and we're working with folks out there who can help us best estimate our project costs and then also we have timing and speed you know with weather and high use times of year and our recreation centers and golf courses we have to get projects done sometimes in a very very tight timeline so you should wonder well what will happen if the patrol car light bar replacement project is ten that comes the bid comes in ten thousand dollars higher well we may do a few less light bars or perhaps the swat vehicle  slightly under budget and we will we will manage those things to work so that each of these initiatives gets done if in the event each of them may be over budget in the thousands of dollars we may utilize  contingencies to get all those done so that we can meet the promises that are set forth in resolution one thousand eight hundred and thirty six so thank you for allowing me just a few moments on project cost learning and project cost  implementation you know just to use the swat vehicles in another example they're just not lying on a mobile dealership lot you know you you've got to practically build these things with all manner of technology and lights and sirens and and they're all many of them are virtually custom so i'm sure you appreciate that so thank you for indulging me for just a moment they're also in the police department is an infrared uav camera that uav stands for unmanned aerial vehicle or better more commonly known as a drone and i'm told by our police chief we now have two licensed pilots authorized to use those in the community and that would these those would be on the list and next is police agent health and wellness assessment and i'll take a little moment on this because it's i learned much in studying the process with the police chief i became educated on and i'll read just a few captions here cuz i wanna make sure i do them justice the profession of policing because of shift work and you know what that means holidays and the whole thing sedentary conditions o patrol car and if you've done a ride along you know how long are some of our police agents can be sitting stressful situations i think that's pretty self explanatory we're of body armor and heavy equipment belts i've never tried on all that stuff but it sure doesn't look comfortable and also here's some i hadn't thought about because i work a traditional schedule eight to five but our police agents do not a lack of convenient access to healthy eating options during overnight shifts think about that that's why they've all got those ice chests i see you know sometimes so they don't have the convenience of just going to your natural grocers or wherever and having a nice you know meal break that that's difficult at four o'clock in the morning right okay so because of this also think about how the police agent goes from that very sedentary situation to the immediate terrifying action right that's difficult that's hard on the body obvious things but it's been studied for a number of years and the united states department of labor has determined that the average age for a first heart attack in the united states civilian population meaning us civilians the average age is sixty five the average age of a police officer so bring a first heart attack is forty nine at age forty nine and a police officer is twenty five times more likely to die from a heart attack than a gunshot so what this wellness assessment will do is assess the cardiac condition of the police agents and determine if immediate care is needed and there have been some of those or if things can be modified through behavior lifestyle nutrition and other things to help those police agents just be be safer obviously a more healthy before it may lead to a catastrophic event we've piloted this program at lakewood it's been very popular we've done this with fifty police agents and it's a very intense process meaning via this ordinance next up license plate readers i think this is fairly self explanatory but this would assist in the stolen automobile enforcement and you heard chief mccaskey talk a little bit about  initiatives in that particular area and the effectiveness and the belief is that these license plate readers which frankly amount to high technology and cameras and computers and so forth can read the automobile license plate both  an affixed basis and mobile and can have some impacts there on that need okay so with that i'll shift gears to transportation and these are proposed by  his team you know projects are very very large obviously in the public works department some of them can reach to tens of millions of dollars and we saw that in our work from the spring and summer regarding a municipal funding so is on the border of unincorporated jefferson county and then this this is one that i think also speaks to my project planning and project spending and that is a very precise number you almost never see in my presentations which is wodsworth shared use path one million thirty six thousand five hundred and four the purpose for that i'm just gonna confess it's a plug number which means your resolution says twelve million five hundred and thirty six thousand five hundred and four dollars and so is this ordinance i think that's obviously the purpose of that and of course those numbers may move around in reality as we go through  again those would be the items proposed for an ordinance for your consideration it would be a separate budget it would be separate from a traditional budget but adopted in october and i think that's in keeping with counsels intentions to be very clear and honest and communicating at a very high level with the public the public would be able to see this ordinance you would be bound to it the department's would go out and begin commencing they would commence on these projects instantly after the election so those would be as i often say real not sort of hypothetical and so forth okay so let me just close up with just a little bit of housekeeping and then i'm gonna address some questions that have come in  some of which have been answered during the course of the presentations and i others have to have not and they'll be useful to counsel in the public so i will do that first let's go through the requirements we have we'll have a reserved not less than three percent so we'll be in compliance with colorado statute the the charter dictates that we can't borrow money to fund our operations we have to use reserves or and or revenue we're doing that a city manager shall present the proposed budget by september th that's checked off that was done on september th so that one's met the only thing left is really the budget shall be adopted by november st and that's up to you all so we've got the proposed and and we can make changes as we go along no i would be remiss if i didn't point out that for the th straight year the city has received the distinguished budget presentation award and i was honored to have kari put the brass on our wall in the finest department conference room to show the purpose of this being that we have a very high functioning open and honest fiscally responsible budget that meets a very high standard of the government finance officers association and last and most are really the core community values of the city every single thing that we do every day is connected to these core community values it's so important that when we link the activities of all the divisions all of the departments a sales tax auditing be it animal control you name it every single thing as described in this budget book is eventually linked to each core community value we've got it in a matrix format we've got it in a narrative format we've got it in our short term goals our long term goals our outputs and our outcomes because that this is what we're all about and  so it bears repeating and i know that a few of you have heard that a number of times from me but i want to stall keep that in sight as we proceed with discussions and questions and so forth so just as a reminder our next steps would be public hearings we're not done we've got plenty to do and we're excited for additional questions and you know more discussion on the subject i know the public will have the chance here in a moment so if i may i'm just going to get into some of the questions that have come and then we'll take any new ones that may have come from your from the presentation from your review since this afternoon well i think what we might do is take a break if that's okay before we get into questions so i know there's some folks up here it's nine five so we'll come back at nine fifteen so that was nice too hours of the presentation i think some folks could benefit from a break  into council conversation thank you thank you for that break mayor and members of city council once again larry door finance director and city treasurer let's see i got over sixty questions from city council in the last a couple of days so i'm just as recently as this afternoon and responded to every one of those but one that just needed a little clarification and many of them have been addressed during our presentation here tonight but i want to cover some others that were not and some large questions that could be clarifying i think for all council members and first let me just touch on this one that says is and oh and by the way let me just warn you and thank you as well your questions all typically included a page number that referenced hey i'm reading this and this is my question that was very efficient for me and for the other many others who worked on the answers to these so thank you for that and in the other instances it said i don't see a bit anywhere so can you guide me so that was very consistent and very much appreciated so this first question and i'll give the page number so you can either flip back and forth or even without that i try to put it into context so you don't necessarily have to be flipping through the pages because this is sometimes even difficult to turn so the first question was related to a sustainability which is important and one of our core community values is the police department has made a reference on page three hundred and forty five to the implementation and use of alternative fuel vehicles and the question is really for what purpose and how will that you know how will that be done was the question and i hadn't had a chance to respond to everyone on this i want to take that first and my whatever it here is that the police department will attempt to implement alternative fuel vehicles for non emergency roles when possible examples would include the victims assistance team animal control and other public services when police pursuit would not be necessary so of course when we think of our police department we all think of the black and white patrol cars there they all have lots of horsepower because they're very heavy to carry and all the equipment and technology as well but we have a lot of maine state non emergency are critical emergency vehicles in our fleet police department and our chief is mindful of that and has made that reference on page three hundred and forty five so there's that so i'm gonna go through the others that weren't necessarily addressed during this during this presentation so these really started coming in last week and this first one is related to  where is the information located for any loan relative to the green tree metropolitan district so the question is i've learned that the city gave a loan of three million dollars to green tree for the clover leaf if i'm paraphrasing this just a little bit but that's an intersection at c four hundred and seventy and alameda has the loan been repaid and if not where is that in the budget and has lakewood loaned money to a metropolitan special district and and there's a little bit of a history behind this and so bear with me in two thousand and six the lakewood city council approved an agreement with jefferson county to fund efforts for the interchange by the way the the word efforts is appropriate because the first major step in that intersection was an environmental evaluation that was very complicated and lengthy and rather pricey jefferson county committed six million in lakewood committed three million dollars no reimbursement for the cost were anticipated in the agreement and there was no there were no provisions related to that it was recognized the center interchange as a benefit to the county and the cities and both residents both entities residents and the lakewood transportation system as it provide relief to the union corridor and the union and sixth interchange because we have lots of vehicle traffic in those corridors this intersection would benefit liquid residents and hence the investment which was made from the economic development fund  later in two thousand and seven the greentree metropolitan district was formed and committed to manage a construction of the interchange and the owner committed the remaining necessary funds for the interchange which was an additional ten million dollars that's just that's a a nineteen million dollar interchange and it's if you can see it literally from a mile away obviously if you've if you've been over there so lakewood entered into a subsequent agreement with green tree metro i've sent those two agreements to all city council members and anybody in the public can see those the agreement didn't change the funding however the city successfully negotiated a potential reimbursement of the cost contingent on certain events the agreement includes a provision that the districts will reimburse the city if it's such a time in the future bonds are issued that related to necessary construction of the site that covers the metro district a reimbursement would be made properties within the district today are undeveloped and the districts have not sold bonds therefore the city has not been potentially reimbursed however this is not an unpaid loan to the city it's a contingent reimbursement so there's no reference in the city budget book and it does not constitute a loan the city's external auditors are aware of this agreement they've reviewed it as a part of all of their  it is appropriately not presented as a loan on the city's books and the city has not ever made a loan to a metropolitan district so none are presented in the budget so thank you for that that was a bit of a long winded answer to frankly a complicated and long history a question as well but it's not present in the budget and it wasn't covered in our presentation so thank you for indulging me and allow me to get to that question an answer the next one is a bit of an update and i think i think the city council members might be aware of this but let me talk a little bit about the taylor property and you'll recall at the time of the acquisition the city had applied for certain grants from great outdoors colorado and the jefferson county open space to receive grant funds from both of those agencies and so here's an update and because on one end this is  something not received then you'd understand why it's not on the budget but on june th of this year the great outdoors colorado board denied the city's application for grant funds however the city has received a grant award of one million six hundred and fifty thousand dollars from jefferson county open space which will be received by the city over two year time frame currently we're working on the process of having an open space  placed on the property so that if it's such a time the city council or the people of lakewood voted to convert that to something other than open space then the land would convert back to the ownership of jefferson county open space that's a complicated process  we're working on it once that's complete the city will receive its first sum from jefferson county open space and that is expected this year so thank you for that question i had another question on the just the kind of big picture the context of the community development block grant and it is a very meaningful source of income to the city and we do good work in lakewood with the community development block grant and so i felt it was important to just raise that up to all of council and the community  as well the fund that the block grant is expected to be consistent for the next several years but i'm understanding that as the targeted areas are increasing that the c may lose the funding should this item be considered and seeing a stable and that's a real that's a that's a good question we do all manner of things our community development block grant i won't repeat it for city council because you approve the one y action plan via ordinance every year you know the details of it so you know the importance and is someone who's watching tonight can go back and look at that and have a better feel for it but what i wrote in response is it would be would be prudent for the city to recognize this funding source like many others is is vulnerable in the long run federal administrations frankly have been hot and cold on the program over the years but however had that said the city's been receiving  question and what that means is the number of eligible areas across the country is growing right but the pie is not growing right so the slices have to get smaller so it's diluting the amount of available funding potentially for lakewood but we don't think that this will be material in the short run but over the long run that could be challenged and i do recall an era some years ago particularly during the great recession when federal had in mind that that could very well be a thing to cut entirely across the united states and that had our i had my attention and i think it had the attention of many many finance administrators across the country many  communities have lots of leverage meaning borrowings against those grant funds so there were there was a question here i did talk about it just a touch regarding reserves and it said if the city were to increase its reserves and i did talk a little bit about saving for a rainy day how does that happen and how would it best occur so the question is if the city were to increase its reserves where would that money preferably come from and what we've done over the years it's grown der due to surplus revenues or savings from annual appropriations that's how that happened for more than ten years more than ten years straight detail question chief mccaskey talked about his community service officers and police agents those two initiatives in this budget are five hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year and the question is does this cost include long term liabilities the reason i wanted to touch on this is that there's sometimes there's a misperception of pension costs because many police officers firefighters state patrol troopers are in a defined benefit pension plan and and our colorado public employees retirement association is struggling you're probably reading about that but our workers  of lakewood do not participate in such a defined benefit pension plan but rather involved in more but what i call the k style where the worker puts in a portion of their earnings the city puts in a portion of their earnings in they're invested in a style of investments at the choosing of the worker so we don't have those long term pension liabilities okay another question that came up a little bit earlier and was we addressed this partially was  lights and radios and all those things necessary to get the job done they're not inexpensive they're also capable of hauling a lot of equipment and you can see that funding is described on page five hundred and nineteen small detail question but it's worth that answering and i found this interesting does the city currently pay for police agent vests and the answer is yes and chief mccaskey talked on it just a little bit each police agent vest is eight hundred dollars for a primary protective vest  touch on that here's another one that mister hutchison and others have been working on for a number of years and there are funds there's a there is a large number in this budget for a slash facility so it was i think it was a good idea to address this question it's my understanding that we have not located a slash facility is that correct and if so will the monies be carried forward and the answer to these questions are no a site has not been located and yes the money will be carried forward and and this remains a priority for the community we will actively search for a appropriate site but the follow on question was could these funds support special collections of yard debris and those are two different activities collection yard debris is an annual activity it's an annual program slash facility we have believe it's one point one point five million waiting for an acquisition so that's just a one lump sum and we don't want to dilute that by spending on an annual collection that can be can be done separately okay let me see if i've got a couple of others uh oh here was one that relates to this building that we're in a question i particularly wanted to address because this came from a constituent through a council member lakewood city hall was acquired through lease purchase many years ago were the additional buildings in the civic center complex acquired the same way what's the current ownership status are they owned by lakewood if not when did these agreements complete and i think that the author of this  city hall and i think that person might have been referring to as chief mccaskey pointed out the original well one of the original city halls was is now the public safety center building the all offices all administrative offices were in there and that was acquired through lease purchase in the s and it's been paid off and that building is wholly owned but in two thousand and one the city was leasing a lot of space over in the iron gate complex and and elsewhere and completed this this civic center project and that also was completed with proceeds from lease purchase and those obligations will be retired in december two thousand and twenty and at the moment the buildings are being leased by the city from the lakewood public building authority which is an independent board whose sole purpose is to assist the city in the financing of pub buildings they mean once a year it's public meaning and really the authorities serve functions as a pass  they don't have any employees they don't you know they don't have any expenses all they have is the money coming in from lease payments from the city and then obligations to the certificate holders and that's that but these facilities will be paid and twenty i did get a question on the table refund amounts and i appreciated the candor of the question it says is this just a guess on what we may be refunding or are we using a formula it's a mix quite honestly it's a mix we of course understand the formula for tabor very very carefully and there are a few key variables and i got to tell you it's a very very tricky thing to do you know we this is one of the areas that was challenging for us in our last year we originally budgeted i think somewhere on six and million for a table refund for two thousand and seventeen we revised that estimate up and the first well just after year end at eight million and then it came in at twelve is if it's a very tricky thing to do the main reason is is the tabor cap is dictated by two factors one the denver aurora lakewood cpi and two local growth now local growth is a variable that is provided to us from the county in november so the two thousand and eighteen tabor refund we need that variable which is in our budget but we don't get that until november so you can understand the dilemma it's very very tricky and i will tell you that local growth has been quite dynamic in liquid i don't have to tell you that you know that so the number is going to be very difficult you know to estimate so we understand the formula we make our  best guess and i think it's a very educated estimate so that's what we're doing there on page four hundred and fifty two and seeing that page number i realize i'm not doing a great job of calling out the page numbers but i hopefully i'm speaking at the right  context what is the number and name of agencies that the city is in revenue sharing agreements with and the numbers are large the numbers are larger so i appreciate the question and and we'll i think we'll add this these words to those pages in the future so that can be more clear but just to and i'll talk a little bit about the city's philosophy on this over the years in my lra presentation but the two districts are the denver west metropolitan district and you know where denver west is which is effectively the colorado mills that was voter approved by the way and then also the plaza metropolitan district which is effectively belmar so we're sharing revenue as the city to really fund those two projects at the end of the day and they're funded from the revenues that are created on site at those projects  okay i think it'd be useful for the public to know there was a question here on the council budget and you know the council has a budget at nearly half a million dollars for a for a variety of different things that first of all we track  the amount of money that's paid to city council individually and then there are trainings and and other things that occur on behalf of city council and the question was there's a fifty thousand dollars difference what did we spend it on and i appreciate the inquiry because this relates to things that actually council is doing itself but it goes back to what i described often times there are things that aren't spent throughout the course of the year but we but the city council wants to have the ability to spend those in a subsequent year so we would have a n i've got a question on art space as an update because there's not really any narrative on that wasn't in our presentation where do i find the update has the project officially died and i'm just going to read this what was written by my colleague the city anticipated receiving tax credit for the project to be issued by the colorado housing and finance authority this process took a fair amount of time and unfortunately the tax credits were not granted because of this change a revaluation of potential locations for the project can occur as a next step so it is not dead it's in process it's been ongoing i know for a very long time but the money is there and it's really just a matter of one door has closed and it's time to open another okay i've got a number of questions on tabor but i think i addressed those in this contingent ordinance and i've got a question on page four hundred and thirty seven regarding the comp plan and two hundred and thirty five zero for implementation a question is what are we implementing this is money budgeted for city wide identity and placemaking initiative among other items this initiative includes new city entry signage bridge identification and wayfinding so implementing the comp plan okay i had a question on the mcintyre gulch project on page four hundred and ninety seven question reads the hollins street or excuse me where is this project on mcintyre goltz and the answer reads the holl that particular project i did get a few questions regarding jeff comm and i just want to perhaps summarize those in a little bit of a narrative first there was concern about the drop in the personnel number in the police department and the question was i thought we were adding agents how we lost thirty people in our police department what's going on there and that's a good question but all of the workers that were dispatchers at the police department communication center  they've all transitioned their employment to an outside agency so we've appropriately reduced our full time equivalent workers in the police department and those those people have made a very brave and difficult transition to this new regional communications center and it was noted by the police chief that we are saving some funds related to that yet we are budgeting for a slight cost escalation now the city is a part of the board and obviously has a very keen vested interest in the financial operations at jeff comm and we're monitoring that very closely and we don't anticipate that we'll have a you know any kind of an automatic increase of that level you know every year but it was a good question and it was a major initiative the technology and the human resources dimensions were just quite immense in getting that done earlier this year i've got a question on medians and director nuland she showed you some of the the medians that were doing and she talked i think a little bit about the cost but they're very expensive to construct and also to maintain and i learn something about planting and the width of these that we can do here and i'm grateful for that but the question is the medians from wodsworth south of twenty six look shabby are they planned for improvement and the answer is  these medians were painted concrete are painted concrete due to their narrow width generally a minimum of four feet is width is necessary for the planting to see success with landscaping nothing budgeted or planned for these meetings okay just a few more i got a question on metal art cottages what park use will be accommodated and a director newland talked a little bit about this project  why not similar sized parcel at maple grove reservoir trail and the answer the response was parc uses will be driven by neighborhood input why not similar sized at maple grove we have previously identified metal art cottages property as an underused site the cottages no longer serve their original purpose and the buildings would be costly to renovate renovating a property into a pocket park offers better use than having the building sit empty and this can be done with a relatively small budget i appreciate the word relatively because it's we were talking hundreds of thousands but in the big picture compared to some of our regional projects that is indeed limited efficiency for the pump system so i know that we've had some comparable projects and that those have been received for favorably by the community okay i got some questions that i think big picture would be probably probably important for all council members and it has to do with a particular memo on page twenty nine from the city manager and this is related to a resolution adopted in two thousand and five which was contingent upon the  approving vote of the people of lakewood the budget proposes to take the reserves down thirty million from thirty million dollars to sixteen million dollars at the end of next year that's a big difference right especially based on what i just showed you this is a reduction of half i'm alarmed it indicates that were spending our revenues over spending revenues significantly and referenced in the memo is that these are special circumstances andor  some sort of emergency and is that defined so let me address that each year the city has unspent appropriations we've had that very consistently can't overspend our appropriation we you know we're cautious a bit and it's a it's a reasonable percent but a reasonable small percent of a hundred and fifteen million dollars and amounts to a large number so it's common to have contingencies and to expect under spending over the last five years the general fund is average and unspent appropriation is six seven million dollars and so the lowest of the five years was five seven million dollars so i think i can say pretty confidently that i believe will have unspent appropriations in this two thousand and nineteen budget and that those reserves won't reach that level of course that is subject to change you know we've had a long bull market in the country and in the world and things could change very soon but the alternatives we don't we're not you we're not proposing utilizing those reserves for some list of projects that we could otherwise not do  delay or what have you these are really in this would be a use of reserves for operations but again we have those opportunities for savings in the future i also touched on our accuracy of estimating revenues now that's where you could get some concern if you had a lot of volatility and estimating revenues you could get concerned about a surplus or deficit as it was related to reserves and the alternative frankly is to read these services it doesn't make sense to do that because during two thousand and seventeen and i also wrote here the city's operating revenues in the general fund exceeded spending by two hundred eleven thousand dollars so last year had we not transferred funds for things like lasley park and a number of other initiatives we would have added two hundred and eleven thousand dollars to the reserves as opposed to spending the millions on the list that i described okay two thousand and seventeen which has been done for the tabor refund does the mill levy automatically return to the four point seven the next year could the same thing be done with a reduction in sales taxes for one year for a table refund instead of a mill levy reduction so thank you each year the city council has to community we know that as it's certified to us from the county and we're able to do that in time we get that from the county in november and council authorizes a reduction equivalent to the refund sales taxes and the amount of sales subject attacks from year to year vary so if it's impossible to know how much to reduce the sales tax rate in order to accomplish the refund so if we did an estimate we could reduce our sales tax by a quarter of a percent for the next year in order to accomplish the refund but sales somehow went down we wouldn't be refunding enough or if they went up the city would be refunding too much so those being prospective very very difficult to do i got a question on the strategic plan and it was related to belmar and the question is when does piff run out and how much money will that mean for the city and let me just address that first regarding the piff the the owners of the belmar project they can keep the piff in place indefinitely that's there it's a privately imposed fee it's a legal fee they have the ability to do that the city can't regulate it however the city has waived its part of its sales tax at the belmar project and that waiver will terminate in april of two thousand and twenty seven while we're doing the two thousand and nineteen budget so we've got a few years to go before we really need to get concerned about that so you don't you don't see that sort of prominently displayed in our budget okay just a few more promise there was a question on grant funding for sidewalks does the city of lakewood match these grants the answer is yes we've got a project right now in our budget that is calling for a two two million dollar city match to construct the shirt and boulevard a sidewalk a very very notable project and  i believe we're gonna be breaking ground on that still yet this year tobacco products tax is really going down are we having less fewer sales that's correct and that's been happening for a number of years  think a lot of people are using perhaps tobacco like products that are not subject to that tax so that could be a big part of it too so just be aware of that okay let's see i got a question on huge culture in the art spending and there are some interesting things happening in the hca and i got a couple of questions i'm just going to do them put them the other first it was regarding the variance and the spending has increased for one year versus another and why there are a few interesting and significant projects going on first the caretakers cottage at heritage center is being renovated and updated and also the art line project is in this budget as well and those are both interesting and meaningful changes i also got a question about the transfer from the general fund to the hca and is this normal and the answer is yes the reason the hca is in its own fund is it receives special revenues via a grant from sc fd and so it's it's segregated in a separate set of accounts i got a question on the change or a very large appropriation on and eighty nine for land acquisitions that's related to the taylor property i i know that you'll all recall that and just a couple more how many roof inspectors were added for the hailstorm  approximately five temporary roof inspectors reutilized and then last liquid paid for school signals on page four hundred and four how many did we put up two rectangular rapid flashing beacons one in each direction of travel at wright street and they're associated with dunston middle school so there you go that's some of our spending related to school traffic safety marion council thank you for your patience thank you for your questions there were probably i think ten pages of responses that my colleagues and i put out in the last couple of days thank you for your attention to those i think it's time for the public to have a word or two on all of this and i'll be available for any questions thank you okay thanks nobody has signed up to speak anybody wish to speak no public input will be taken at this time and thank you again thank you to council i think that sums everything up we can go home at almost ten p m right so let's start with questions and comments and as you can imagine we went through quite a few but people probably still have some more and you know i want to make sure everybody has a chance to speak so if we can ask a few or say a few things and move on that'd be great miss franks i actually don't have any questions i really appreciate the long lead in time where we got to ask all of our questions also i wanted to comment mainly for the community that this document of all five hundred plus pages oftentimes i would have a question that would be answered a few pages later or in another section so it is one of those things where you have to kind of keep going and digest an awful lot of information i also wanted to comment how much i appreciate the level of detail that was gone into tonight by all the various departments i appreciate seeing the photos i appreciate hearing the numbers and as a project manager i appreciate hearing the project management processes and best practices that are applied it's easy when you when you say well the money came from this other area but we know how much care goes into that i was definitely cross checking all those things in the book to see where those funds came from and as a professional project manager i really just had comment to say how much i appreciate this level of detail and the level of transparency that we put in to our financial documents so no questions because they've all been asked and answered thank you so whoever put those smiley faces on there thank you for the ch it was presented in large part as an attempt to raise enough money to float revenue bonds to more aggressively tackle our storm water problems  four years ago that was our intention we haven't done it yet why thank you i think earlier this year mister hutchison had facilitated a council study session on th subject and i believe this is relative to north dry gulch and an option in there are two ways to alleviate the storm problem storm water problem in that area of lakewood and the idea is to have an open channel solution or an underground channel solution and what mister hutchison his team are doing is reaching out to those property owners that could be affected once he has a recommendation and i think a good direction from the community he'll bring that back to city council and at that time city council will have the opportunity to as mister hutchison puts it accelerate those large projects and they be accelerated through the issuance of bonds and a much quicker construction and i think there will be the possibility at that time once the opportunity to borrow arises to gauge the size and scale of the amount of money that could be borrowed by the utility and then the utility could potentially do additional smaller projects it doesn't make sense to issue bonds in the amount of five hundred thousand or a million dollars or even five million dollars those projects they get very expensive to finance with  bonds which the council has the authority to issue on behalf of a utility but rather to do a larger scale a group of projects with bond proceeds and i think mister hutchison will probably have some guidance on that some another question and that is and we and i'm impressed with the amount of what we call local projects drainage projects those are neighborhood generally neighborhood issues and we've done  impressive amount of those but still we're spending something in three hundred zero a year on neighborhood projects local projects and  would seem that if we accelerate some drainage work we could add some of those smaller projects to it that cause just as much damage in a more localized area in fact i  as far as the police budgets go the jeff comm went up four percent and i saw an explanation of that we don't expect a four percent increase in our contribution to that every year no we don't you know one of the things happening with jeff comm is the leaders are it this is still a new function and they're really getting a really good idea of efficienc and workload and staff and necessity and all those kinds of things so i think you could i think you could believe that the early escalation is conservatively high so that there's enough money to make it all work but i think you could expect overtime to not see a continued compound growth rate of that size that wouldn't be sustainable but they need to get their efficiencies together and get i think a year or two under their belts in full it's just been i think about six months as we're sitting here so as they're preparing our upcoming budget we need to do the same thing and we're just gonna see where that goes and and i can i can tell you that if our contribution increases but the money is completely unspent i think chief mccaskey would expect the contribution to either decrease or i can tell you what's budgeted in the general fund and i should i can stand behind that i think that's a fair and reasonable estimate represents you know again our our best look six million two hundred eighty three thousand page one hundred and forty five and i that should cover everything so far thank you i'd like to follow up on the stormwater question so to be clear then when we were talking we were talking about the dry gulch project in the thirty to thirty five million dollar range but there is potential to actually increase that bonding to do more localized projects it doesn't have to be that for one large project yes okay well that's that's good to hear and then is there an opportunity when looking i see that we have the master plan and it probably considering some of the constraints you said that the shops have could the slash facility be part of the potential master plan of the shops if that is something that we have the recycle facility so i don't know if we're too constrained already and it might not work but it could be an opportunity we can sure look at that i think the issue is land mass absolutely because though that's pretty intensive use as far as you need a lot of space considering what comes in we've been looking for about ten acres and twelve so yeah and that that site itself right now is pretty condensed probably less than that right now i imagine anyways that's cool that answers my question thank you m meera just a couple of questions i want to follow up on that on your answer mister doar about the special circumstance in that and the six million dollars more or less that consistent so is that is that what you mean by and i know it's the city manager's letter but is that what you mean by a special circumstances is that what you're referring to as a special circumstance which allows you then to treat it the way you do in the budget that's just it and the context if i could take you back to two thousand and five was that a base budget revenues and expenditures should be equal that became impractical over the years because what was happening what's led to the situation just two three years ago was that whenever we worked up a budget where revenues were equal to expenditures and then we had that savings we were just increase in the cit reserves by three four five million dollars per year which was very prudent in those first ten years but that became unsustainable it wouldn't make sense to continue to grow the reserves of the city at the same time there was an intersection of need in the community to add to our police force which we've done some twenty plus or more personnel during that during that period of time to where now those two things are coming to intersect we're still seeing a very consistent as i said six seven million dollars in savings five seven it was the low during that five year period so that's what i mean by that special circumstance is that we can accomplish those services without just adding to the reserve each and every year okay i get it so then there's a follow up then and this is probably an accounting principle kind of thing why wouldn't you just reduce your spending in the areas that would correspond to the six point seven million why wouldn't you just reduce that and transfer it to other areas like publix public safety or whatever to basically balance the budget without worrying about having to take the excess and go to reserves because now it seems like it is just the opposite we're anticipating that we're going to be drawing down the reserves i mean it's saying that and yet that's what you're telling me is that's really not true but that's what the budget says so why wouldn't you do with the other way certainly could be i think from a practical standpoint not accounting not a finance standpoint but from a practical standpoint what we find is that the savings comes from different areas in different departments and different initiatives in different years and so would be difficult we get all the way down into the line items of each department each division each a program and said geesh you know if we could just put a negative number in there five percent then we would we would show something but the problem is that's very difficult for a management team to do that is performing their strategic initiatives some departments will need one hundred percent of their appropriations others will need ninety percent and that's how that intersects at the ninety five and it's a very fluid process that i've studied for a number of years those kind of unpredictable where it's gonna come from from year to year indeed yeah all right well and then my second question is if i'm understanding eventually we're going to be asked to pass a bill here when we get ready to approve this budget it's not only going to be a budget for two thousand and nineteen but it's going to be a revision for two thousand and eighteen so what it's gonna be in kind two parts is that correct that's right and if you want to have a look at the what that draft ordinance looks like it's presented in there about five nineteen and so my my follow up question then  doar is this i noticed that for two thousand and eighteen we're looking at twenty eight million five hundred sixty thousand dollars of additional adjustments or authorizations for anything over fifty thousand bucks  and so we're looking at a fairly substantial amount there the original budget amount was seventy seven million and then we're going to increase that by twenty eight million in change mm hmm and so what i'm wondering about is this twenty eight million and i realize it goes through several pages there under the adjustment authorization how much of that's already been spent so that if we were to say well no i don't think we want to we don't want to appropriate and we don't want to approve that twenty eight million how much of that's already been spent okay thank you yes you know one of the by the way for the audience may i just refer everyone to page five hundred and seventeen if you'd like to see what referring you'll see that number there you know one of the things about the schedule of purchases fifty thousand and graders is our attempt to be as transparent and descriptive as possible ends up causing just the sometimes the kind of confusion that you're describing so for example there are many things listed here that the original authorization sometimes for a capital project funds get carried over so in other words up front we're going to do a project it's a million dollars we're committed to the public we've had lots of public engagement we have the cash in the bank and we're ready to do a million dollar project and we do an authorization in one particular year or we do it for two hundred thousand in year one and eight hundred thousand and year two or the inverse sometimes because construction can take many months and we need to match up the checks dispersed you know to the project spending and so forth so i think you'll find if we went down into the details of these i think couple hundred line items we've probably got here i think you would see typically particularly where the largest numbers are you would see that there are project carryovers where the timing of a project either can advance or delay or what have you and those numbers need to be carried over quite honestly from the first authorization if we just did the first authorization and the full amount it would never come back the next year but we attempt to give the public some idea of what's going on with that existing project and just provide the public a little bit more detail but you can very much see some big changes you know the other thing is if you just think about the taylor property alone being seven million dollars i mean it it was councils already given the authority i already given the authorization we're just putting it in here so the numbers can all tie out but that's that's probably one fourth well it is one fourth of the twenty eight million that's in that column it just wasn't in the original two thousand and eighteen budget coun took action earlier this year we want to describe it here we don't have to but it makes sense to to have a document that has you know that particular instance and there are others similar in terms of timing i appreciate your your attention to this but i can tell you that generally it has to do with project timing things like this for example i think we have in this fifty zero an over item our postage you know because we spend more than fifty thousand dollars a year on postage it's very consistent from year to year it doesn't change much so hopefully that's a couple of examples that can illustrate that thank you that's all i have thank you councillor great questions all right anybody else miss johnson thank you kid you mentioned xx and quail regarding the water project that we're having an iga and it would be for ten years then what do you anticipate it's properties owned by denver water and they aren't sure if they're gonna want to use the property to expand their water plant in the future so we we were able to get them to agree to a ten year lease basically a ten year lease on just a small portion of the property so it we hope to know more as years go by about what their plans are for the future but we don't know they just they're not willing to do more than ten year agreement with us at this point then we would create a park for ten years and then the small just we're just adding an amenity on a portion a very small portion of the park it's a it's approximately a ten acre park right now property right now so we're just talking about three quarters of an acre of that site r and thanks everyone for your presentations and director door i just have a quick question you kind of look spoke about it a little bit but i just wanted you to clarify if you can is it possible for or what it i guess how it is is it possible for the police department to get the ft t that they're requesting and the equipment etc while keeping our reserves where they're at or potentially increasing them well let's see as i was describing for councilman betta and i think i kind of missed that conversation the if we achieve the anticipated savings i figured pardon if we achieves the anticipated savings the i was reading halfway through and i realized he was talking about this this is the object the expenditures that we were discussing a moment ago include all of those personnel and equipment being approved so i think the answer to your question is we we hope to achieve the savings if we do we think our reserves will probably stay level and that's in anticipation of funding the initiatives that chief mccaskey described there wouldn't be increasing or decreasing probably stay the same okay thanks we good it is we're gonna get i appreciate your candidness and honesty and we needed a nice little laughs oh thank you  i just have a quick follow up you had alluded about the internet tax and we had talked about it a couple years ago and then we were waiting for it yes well i've been talking about this for well i recall meetings with mayor burkholder early last decade on this subject it's been a long and winding road to say the least and when you say internet tax i want to describe that more fully it's not a tax on citizens for accessing the internet we all pay you know centurylink or comcast or verizon for access to the internet that's not what we're talking about we're not talking about elves tax its sales tax on things we buy on the internet that's what you're describing and there's been a lot of litigation the state of connecticut sued south dakota it's been a long and winding road congress tried to get some things done on this subject and could not and at the end of the day this most recent lawsuit that was decided by the supreme court sort of ended the matter once and for all and it may i say it may be different for the city of lakewood in terms of we have the taxpayers bill of rights and all these different things okay while that was all very interesting and meaningful and will have some impact it became less interesting from a revenue perspective when the amazon corporation which does the vast majority of internet sales elected to just become licensed and collect and remit local sales tax that that kind of made the internet tax may i say nearly a moot point at the end of the day nearly not entirely but yes the amazon corporation i can tell you is one of the top ten retailers in the city of lakewood colorado it's a very large very meaningful retailer in lakewood and let me add to that that of course sales taxes collected on sales generated by the amazon corporation two thirds are refunded in tabor one third is not at cetera so i have no projections at all for the change in the internet taxes you just described it i don't think it'll be material at all so could we get a guesstimation in a couple  years when we have some kind of a track record to you know figure out where we're at on that you bet of course if there's anything interesting in material i would let you know but i'll tell you in the general fund if you consider that nearly eighty million dollars is collected in sales and use tax and it's probably today i'm thinking less than a hundred thousand it's a very small percent but it is something that we're gonna continue to monitor and report to council okay thank you thank you i also agree what an in depth presentation by everyone thank you so much and also just the transparency in the whole process as councilor frank's brought up i also want to thank my colleagues for  everyone asking their questions ahead of time i think that really helped us get through this process i want to add just one additional question as you're looking at income and projections i know we looked at the coming year but are you seeing any in any indications of recession over the next three to five or down the road  well let's see it's been a decade since the start of the great recession most people most people agree that typically a business cycle is ten years so we would be due for that at any time in fact one of my slides i forgot to refer to it but i think the timing is probably pretty good now and i'll just speak about it very very quickly and i was discussing the projections completed by the governor's office and that very knowledgeable and experienced set of economists out of the state capital and i put a quote there and i forgot to read it that but right above the legislative council they wrote in their report which i read very thoroughly they wrote higher than usual forecast uncertainty higher than usual forecast uncertainty i've never seen anything like that before so i think what that says is hi we're predicting seven percent sales tax revenue increase next year at the state but that's probably very difficult to bank on so we do not have that in our strategic plan i don't think we're quite as bold as to say you know we need to probably cut sales tax revenues five to seven percent i don't think that's necessary but i will tell you that we have a very agile management team with lots of experience dealing with these kinds of things of note the last great recession  services were reduced for the community no worker furloughs no layoffs we did defer some capital projects but i think the impacts that the community were very very small so i think when you mesh all of those things together i feel confident in proceeding without without frankly what many people are calling a doomsday forecast and had i been so bold as to do something like that it might have done it three years ago and been wrong so i think it was a good idea to just sort of stay the course and  hope that a coming recession will be a mild one so in other words other than it being approximately the anticipated time there's no indication of recession no in fact i review the income and expense of the city every single month in great detail and look for those signs and of course we would we would probably we would probably all know about it in this room  as we were seeing the numbers but i report those the city manager we're looking at those with our budget not at board we have had some really good accuracy obviously in the past but we've also i can tell you when we did our two thousand nine budget in two thousand and eight we were right where we are today i recall that vividly saying you know there could be a recession and it could be scary and it was it that all came true we had a very moderate increase in revenue and revenues went down eight to ten percent but we were able to respond you know we were able to you know hold on some vacant positions and do a variety of different things to make it all work out so i think we're poised if needed to do directed or does not assume anything with tabor correct in other words we don't we're not assuming anything you know i guess that we would assume that it's not going to pass and this is b mister doar m team that was amazing this is the th time i've been through this and this was very well done very thorough great questions by council i'll just say that miss hudson you run a lean and mean operation you always have our city has low property taxes no pensions the one of the lowest sales tax rates in the metro area almost no debt strong sales tax and healthy reserves so we continue to do well and  it's not because of the genius up here it's because the folks who are here day in and day out doing their hard work so thank you all very much the clerk please read item for item for presentation two thousand and eighteen revised two thousand and nineteen lakewood reinvestment authority budget commissioner skilling thought we were done for the this one usually goes pretty fast thank you treasurer larry door i have to drop my finance director title to present to you the lakewood reinvestment authority budget it's much thinner it's  see if i can count oh no it's about twenty pages twenty five similarly it is presented on our liquid org website we will not present or excuse me print off another copy you can see these glorious pictures of alameda parkway and the construction that's happening there you can enjoy that construction site as you leave city hall tonight in your cars and i'm just gonna jump right into it but i do have a few items of i think important note for those commissioners who are experiencing the liquid reinvestment authority vote for the first time so i want to just do a little bit of orientation thank you very much the voters of lakewood approved the that's a little bit of the history your board created for reinvestment areas and authorized for reinvestment projects those reinvestment areas have gotten a map here in a moment but the projects are at the j lra is an urban renewal authority under colorado law and you can avail yourself to that if you're interested and what the purpose of it is and the reason that it stands alone is that the urban renewal authorities of the state like the lra have authorities and powers that the city does not and so hence the reason for its creation otherwise what would what would be the purpose and the major tool of course is to implement redevelopment and those projects i can tell you would not be present without the creation of the lra just just that simple so its mission is to him first encourage private reinvestment within designated areas and councilman abel brought up earlier the kmart  west colfax which is now the creekside redevelopment and colfax wodsworth and there was a kmart store there it was closed for ten years before any change came about and the hope and the mission was that private reinvestment would occur in that particular area without taxpayer funds without city involvement but that didn't happen and later the council created that as a project i was able to interest on the part of a developer walmart and here we are with the project so enhanced facility city's ability to preserve and restore the vitality and quality of life in the community and if you recall the side of that kmart it was it was it was it was blight it was very unsightly it was a  nuisance to the public and quite frankly it was it was unsafe as well there were a lot of bad things happening in that part of the community the the lakewood reinvestment authority is different than other urban renewal authorities across the state of colorado in fact very different i think from my opinion i think it is probably in keeping most closely with the original intentions of urban renewal authority you know i know there's a definition of blight and the law and all this but i prefer to say i know it when i see it there are other communities that say you know there just aren't improvements in this nice prairie land and so it's blighted well you know i don't know prairie land is can be kind of appealing but  our neighbors to the east might disagree with me on that and that's their that's their prerogative but it's primarily intended for commercial areas there's a famous historic history of urban renewal in another lakewood another state in the state of tools when private investment just isn't working or is not present at all one of the interesting things about the lra is its it it has never done traditional project development meaning most traditionally an urban renewal authority would go out and borrow lots and lots and lots of money and give that money over to an investor developer this has been done in a number of cities across the front range even in jefferson county and then oh then that private reed development comes in and then that creates tax money that the urban renewal authority then uses to repay its own debt the city of liquid has never done that we don't do that what we've done is we've structure these various agreements where for example walmart built the channel they walmart paid to tear down kmart walmart built the channel around creekside belmar they built their own parking structures they borrowed the money to do that and then later if their project is successful that creates sales tax and property tax increment and that money is used to repay those property owners for their upfront investment so if there's there's virtually no risk for the city of lakewood or the lakewood reinvestment authority because if for some reason those projects aren't successful or don't develop enough revenue to repay those people that's their that's their issue it's not the community's issue and then also if the projects are successful people will choose the shop there or not and so that's kind of been our focus as a communities that initial investment should come from developers and that's what's occurred there okay so now more specifics on the budget i mentioned completely independent books and records and i mean that by saying there are separate bank accounts there's separate letterhead there's a separate audit a separate tax id we have a separate set of minutes i mean the whole thing we have generally operating monies and project monies and and we don't have any employee per se who at city hall says i i work for the lakewood reinvestment authority no we do charge some administrative expenses there for example accounting work and some of our other administrative you know type work it's more than one person and it adds up to zero thirty five ftes and as you'll see in a moment when i show you the funds flow you'll see that primarily the lra works as a pass through we get taxing from an in in september from jefferson county we painted that property tax increment out to those people who've made those substantial investments in parking garages or drainage or whatever the case may be here are the four areas there are four but i think of them as two because they're really kind of overlapping and you can sort of see where they are but the big news that's going on out there related to the lra is without a doubt the alameda streetscape project construction is roaring i don't even hardly have to bring it up to the city council but maybe some others in the audience other than people who work here would be interested in seeing this i mean if you don't get below sixth avenue in lakewood you may not know this is going on but that's probably very very few people so you know i could get into what we're doing out there but i think you're all seeing it medians all kinds of utility locates you know in the intersection changes he you know one of things i learned about and studying to present this and be prepared answer your questions is was is a safety matter that i hadn't thought about you know traffic engineers and transportation engineers are do not like the middle lane in the middle of the road where you get you get in that lane and then you make a left turn because somebody else going the other way is kind of doing the same thing and it turns into a game of chicken and you want to have the biggest suv so that's not safe and these medians will alleviate that one of the things we're doing is working with the businesses because they don't they want people to get into their businesses but you have the ability to go down to the next signal and make a u turn and come back so we've considered of those things and we of terrific engineers working on the project well i got to ask my twenty questions of the team and the construction began in april we have about forty workers on site and i today they are working it's amazing to see the work that they're doing and the i asked i want a completion date because i think that's important and being transparent and they're really two of them a one the hardscaping is twelve thirty one that's cement you know power poles all poles and those kinds of things but they're not gonna landscape that in the middle of the winter that would be a total waste of money so that will probably be done for the spring planting and of course there'll be considerations for you know xeriscaping and so forth if you see the revenues and expenditures let me just go on the left side here sales tax increment property tax increment and there's a little interest earned for a couple of days while the funds get transferred around so money comes in it goes out expenditures ninety four percent flows through as i said to others and we do have some administrative expenses i mentioned the a little bit of the personnel i mentioned we have some banking fees of small legal costs and we do budget for some  consultant work there's very very small but that's a part of that services supplies so here's the budget you know we do have a lot flowing out this is a major project going on out there and i tell you this team working on is working very diligently to bring that in on time and under budget and i'll certainly have a report for you at next year's budget study session on how all this turned out as mister hutchison brought up earlier this project is being paid for preservation plan is paying a portion because it is do it would have done ordinary street resurfacing and so it's paying for that as it was and then last but not least just because it's such a dynamic and the project  we do have available from the economic development fund to contribute up to two million dollars to the project as well so you would expect those funds to be spent on the project s be there won't be a second public hearing on the lra budget just the one tonight and late in october but again we're not done with any of this business will entertain any questions at any time and be responsive to you and to the community whenever needed and that is my final slide thank you very much thank you mister libby r i just have a quick question about how projects are identified is that with the assistance the private sector or is that just something that's in how staffs doing or like well there is a formal identification of a project and that's undertaken by an action of the board so there's a formal designation accomplished by resolution and that's usually the last thing done quite honestly and identifying a project but having been a part of each of these over the number of years i can tell you that there are a lot of starts and stops there are a lot of conceptual designs a lot of project estimates a lot of  different styles of projects that might occur residential and commercial mix hundred percent commercial hundred percent residential it tends to be a fluid process that involves many others excluding myself it typically starts with our city manager and our planning director and and their sort of involvement in the community and property owners and investors in what's possible in a given project area so they tend to take lots of time to get off the ground years to get those going if that's helpful thanks all right any other questions i'm going to open the public input portion nobody's signed up to speak seeing that i'll close the public input and  thank you very much all right let's move into reports i'm gonna start all the way down on my right with ms johnson no report miss vincent um just to comment the last  several weeks i've been asked multiple questions about votes that have happened on this council i'd like to just encourage everybody out there that how everyone voted is posted online and well i can answer questions to anybody in any ward about why i voted in how i can't answer for anybody else so i think the council is very open about talking to anybody at any time explaining their vote so if you want to go in there and find out and then ask those specific councillors questions i would encourage you to do so you mister betta just a reminder we have our ward meeting this whoa okay well i have a few things so second wind fund was back in lakewood on saturday and i'm gonna give a shout out to councillor skilling who ran the  representing the city council so well done he was quick and he's still a little bit sore but it is suicide prevention month and it's really cool that that is back in that started in green mountain with four student deaths unfortunately we still have more suicides but it's in over thirty counties throughout the state and they've saved over five zero lives so that was really cool and then i had the opportunity to go to the groundbreaking