quorum thank you so i'd like to welcome everybody to this study session and before we get moving into the rest of our agenda like to wish those who celebrate hanukkah happy hanukkah and take a moment of silence just to remember our st president of the united states george hw bush who passed away this week thank you very much okay first up we have a presentation citizen survey national research center and i would like to invite laurie urban down who is the senior research well me too so good important important part of the community well thank you mayor paul and good evening members of the council thanks so much for having me here tonight to talk with you about the results of your and eighteen citizen survey as the mayor said my name is lori urban i'm a senior research associate at national research center and we've had the pleasure of working with the city on its survey for over a decade and i was the project manager for the and eighteen administration so as you all have been doing this for a long time some of you may be new to the process some of you may be familiar with it but we use these kinds of surveys these perception surveys  to gauge performance it's a window into your performance it's a voice of the people that you don't hear from regularly those residents who don't maybe show up to your meetings or give you a call or call city staff to talk about concerns that they have or issues that they have or or give praise to some of the things that they may be happy with what the city is doing and this presentation is a summary of the very lengthy report that you probably received over one hundred pages so we'll go through that and it talks mostly about the the key findings that are highlighted in the executive summary feel free to ask me questions as you go along or if you prefer to hold those to the end i'm happy to answer questions whatever way you prefer sure that sounds great so in two thousand and eighteen we use the same rigorous methodologies that we've used in prior survey administrations we mailed to a random selection of three zero households and we distributed those surveys equally among the five  council wards so we mailed about six hundred surveys to each council ward we had six hundred and forty six survey responses for a response rate of about twenty two percent this is slightly lower than what we saw in two thousand and sixteen which was twenty five percent but it is a pretty common trend that we're seeing in survey research regardless of the survey mode we actually see phone surveys declining at a higher rate although most survey response rates the decline we see is kind of leveling but but it still is a strong response usually we see between eighteen and thirty percent response rate for our citizen surveys that are via mail we offered the survey to respondents both in paper form and they were able to take it online if they prefer  we had about i can't remember actually i didn't write it down we usually see about a hundred responses online which is pretty average for most communities we did also offer separately and which you have under separate cover but we're not going to discuss tonight unless you have questions for me about that the survey to all residents to take via an open participation link and we had a pretty strong response to that survey as well those results are presented under separate cover we didn't merge them with the scientific sample but you have those as well and i'm happy to answer any questions you might have about those the margin of error around all the survey respondents the two hundred or six hundred and forty six responses is plus or minus four percentage points and when we're looking at comparisons between two thousand and eighteen results and the two thousand and sixteen results that margin of error increases to about plus or minus six percentage points so any difference that you see that six points or more is going to be considered statistically significantly different as we have in past years we've provided comparisons to our benchmark database both for the nation and for other communities in the front range about which we have thirty jurisdictions in the front range and we have subgroup comparisons so by demographics of the survey respondents as well as by the the council ward's so as i mentioned the the presentation tonight is kind of highlighting those key findings and the executive report so the first key finding that we found was that residents are happy with their neighborhoods and as the city with the city as a place to raise children about nine and ten gave very good or good ratings to their neighborhood as a place to live a rating that has been trending up since two thousand and eight when this question was first asked and it was similar to both the national and front range benchmark comparison groups as a place to raise children also received positive marks most are happy with the city as a place to raise children and this is a evaluation that has remained stable over time and also was similar to both the national and front range average we also engaged other aspects of quality of life overall quality of life the city is a place to recreation play and as a place to work all a majority of respondents rated those as very good or good as very good or good and we saw a slightly fewer giving the city is a place to retire those positive those positive ratings this was an aspect of quality of life that we saw a decline in from twenty seven i'm sorry two thousand and sixteen to two thousand and eighteen but it was similar to the benchmark comparisons and that decline may be due to a number of factors maybe there some unmet needs that the baby boomers who are we're seeing kind of coming full in full force and communities or it could be due to some of those growth issues that a lot of our front range jurisdictions are experiencing transportation housing those kinds of things were asked what they liked most about living in lakewood and asked to choose just one of the aspects that we have listed and these are the four most often selected location by far was the aspect most frequently selected by parks and recreation and safe community quality of neighborhoods also was on that list lower on the list were things like cost of living and the community heritage as as reasons that they likes living in lakewood and all of these ratings were similar to what we saw in two thousand and sixteen safety is still a priority as it is in every every community respondents were asked to first rate the importance of a variety of characteristics or factors that are important in lakewood over the next year two years on a scale of essential very important someone important or not at all important and then they were asked to select which one of those was the most important to them crime prevention topped both of those lists so we had almost nine and ten saying that that was an essential  very important factor for the next two years for the city and twenty seven percent selected it as the most important factor for the city to focus on over the next two years we saw about two thirds of respondents rating the overall feelings of safety as very good or good but this is fewer than what we saw rating as very good or good in two thousand and sixteen and this also was lower than both the national and front range averages in two thousand and sixteen we saw about three quarters of respondents saying that the overall feelings of safety was a very good or good we asked residents health safe they felt in in different areas of the community both during the day and night and as in all communities lakewood of residents tended to feel safer during the day versus at night however we did see declines in both the ratings for safety after dark so walking alone in neighborhood as well as in commercial areas after dark and compared to the benchmarks where we did have comparisons for three items neighborhood during the day and commercial areas during the day both of those ratings were similar to the front range in nation commercial areas after dark received ratings that were lower for both of those average residents got to evaluate twelve specific services provided by the police department and nearly all received very good or good ratings by half or more of respondents the three services on the left are those that received the highest ratings highest evaluations with there on the right side of that slide and and again these are kind of trends that we're seeing looking at when this question was first asked in two thousand and thirt recreation is definitely a bright spot in lakewood and residents appreciate it we saw high participation rates and many of the parks recreation and cultural events and activities facilities that we had mentioned and asked about on the survey with a majority having visited the lakewood park or the bear creek lake park parks and recreation also was the second most frequently selected factor and when we asked residents what they liked most about but there were some services there are some facilities that residents indicated they didn't know we're available to them so the scale was have you used it do you you knew what was available but you haven't used it or visited  or i didn't know it was available and so about to of residents said that they didn't know these four parks the community garden ray ross park surfside park and the clements community center were available to them so there may be a need for some increased education or awareness around those to kind of maximize use of those facilities and those the center lakeland definitely isn't immune to the growing pains that the front range is facing these days we asked a new question this year in about growth and lakewood different aspects of growth in lakewood and seventy percent of respondents felt that  population growth was too much either somewhat too much or far too much in lakewood and about a quarter felt that it was the right amount very very few felt there was too little population and growth growth here in lakewood we also asked about some housing development preferences  residents generally were less likely to feel that there was a need for new apartments or condos with you can see only sixteen percent feeling that there were too little of those and and more likely to feel there was a need for housing that's affordable for low and moderate with growth comes traffic and residents have noticed that so reducing traffic congestion was the third most frequently cited issue that they would like the city to focus on over the next two years about eight and ten giving at a very important or essential rating and twelve percent selecting it as the most important which actually was the second most frequently selected most important issue for the city in the next two years so this is just a summary of those key findings that that were highlighted throughout the presentation and in the report that residents enjoy their neighborhoods they love the community as a place to raise children obviously recreation opportunities plays into that which they also value and appreciate safety is still a priority and may need some attention and growth is definitely impacting residents they feel it and they're there looking for some guidance i think from the city on how that's being managed and and how they're gonna you know work around that as every community here in their front range is experiencing so with that said i'm happy to answer any questions that you might have great thank you very much that was a nice short presentation but it's actually a lot of information a lot of great information that goes very far in depth and i would say just as a comment those issues that we hear that we see are really reflective i think as this body hears and sees or that we see at the dyess one thing that i think stood out to me and and that has to do with people feeling less safe and so to try to get a better understanding and see some of the correlations with what that means or you know what's driving that that could be really i think important for for us as an elected body to to understand so i will go to  betta i noticed that you mentioned about awareness as particularly as to the parks and that there's some lack of awareness of the parks that are available and so forth where did you do any other does your survey go into any of the other services that are available from the city and the our citizens awareness of those numerous services that are available did you service they have no interaction with it so looking at that list of services and there's an appendix a in the report that shows the frequency of responses for every single question including people who say don't know and you're right to suspect that for a number of the services that we ask about a very large majority say don't know when trying to evaluate that service so so it is definitely something that you want to look at and pay attention to both when you're looking at how the actual evaluative responses kind of fall out but also if there is a really high don't know rating for a specific service that most residents should know about that would probably indicate a need for some additional education or communication around that service mean it almost follows if you're if folks are not really aware of the parks which there is around them they drive by them and you would think they would be aware of those and some of these other services that are not so  obvious you know might be in need of some attention right okay one other question on something you raised you said that lakewood as a place to retire was down had declined to fifty nine percent you know it was wondering what was in past years what was that number sure it was sixty six percent in two thousand and sixteen and seventy percent in two thousand and thirteen and so if i understood from what you said in your opening remarks but that is a statistically significant change mm hmm yes so seven it's a seven point difference and and a needed to be six or more points so it's kind of on that cusp but it is trending down from two thousand and thirteen so it may be something that is worth investigating and you all probably already have a sense of of what some of those needs may be  but we do see see see that kind of a trend in a lot of communities in the front range particularly where we are seeing housing costs increased cost of living increase and the ease of getting around the community being more challenging thank you mm hmm miss harrison thank you really excellent presentation and way too many numbers it was excellent one of the things that i was curious about did you ask the question about the of the respondents was there an average number of how long they lived in lakewood yes that definitely is one of the demographic questions  the other thirty one percent was one to five years so i would think that that is why we see that in terms of a lot of the questions about people that have been here a long time and seeing changes because of the changes that they're seeing especially for seniors trying to retire i think the cost of living may be a real issue as well as when you think about liquid has a lot at tri levels and two story homes when you're gaining birthdays sometimes it isn't quite as easy to make those stairs so i think that may be another issue so thank you we do in the in another appendix i believe it's c as in cat  we provide breakdowns of demographic subgroups so one of those is length of residences you could kind of look at some of those so we provided by length of residency rather whether or not they rent or own their home race and ethnicity as well as age and so you can kind of look and see at some of those ratings like place to retire how things are are shaking out by those different characteristics of respondents thank you we the survey seems to indicate that folks are very satisfied with our law enforcement agency and now they're concerned about safety especially in commercial areas after dark any idea why why they they're concerned about those commercial areas and why they feel less safe than in past years you know i i think only anecdotally i can speak to one the fact that this is a perception survey so you can look at your crime statistic data and see is is it true are we seeing more crimes actually happening after dark if you're not and this happens in other communities pulling in secondary data helps kind of clarify some of the findings that you would find in this kind of a perception survey so we we find out the the what's but not the whys so it could just be that it's people's perception of safety that is is inaccurate so some education around that but but generally speaking we do just see that people feel less safe after dark darkness is kind of scary as my four year old would say so so i think there is just an inherent feeling of being less safe after dark as far as the decline over time i can't really speak to that but maybe you know the police department has some other data or maybe there's some national data that you could look at as well to see you know what are what's happening around the country i was going to ask if you had this year then compared to the front range can other front range communities or compared to the nation where where we ask that feeling of safety and commercial areas after dark so so we do have that comparison but i'm sure there's other national kinds of crime statistics  that that are available that you could look at to see how to make some sense of your results thank you barry this is more in line what councilor abel is saying and i'm just thinking outside the box and kind of looking would it be fair to say that the reason why we're getting a little concern about safety would be that maybe the newer population that comes in to lakewood has not really been here long enough to really feel safe maybe yet or not comfortable in their house or community yet and just give them a little time and maybe that will increase it could be in a few there's a table seventy seven on page eighty three we actually look at those ratings of safety around the community so in those commercial areas by length of residency and you can see there's an explanation about how to read these tables at the beginning of this appendix so but what we do see is that people who have lived here longer tend to feel safer than those who have lived here a shorter period of time so specifically in liquids commercial areas after dark both people who fall into the six to twenty years having lived here six to twenty years and those who lived here more than twenty years gave statistically significantly higher ratings of safety than those who had lived here five years or less so it could be that that those people who are newer just need time to to know and feel that the community is safe that's what i said yes thank you miss vincent yes thank you i know we'll probably be discussing a lot of this i imagine it'll be input into our yearly meeting because as we move forward  i did not see when i read i think it was two hundred and four pages visit so i read it all but i did not see where we had something that was under the separate cover from those people who went in do i have to request that or  you said there was under separate cover those people who just went online i did not see that my packet we we have the results but they may not have been shared yet so okay and may be able to answer that question that is that is the answer so just when it's available well we can  the other thing i was gonna say i think we're also more inundated as a society with i think potentially social media if you look at next door or other different things you're gonna see that there could be you know a million reports of suspicious activity whether or not it pans out to be something that's criminal in in its and its outcome may not actually be in therefore can heighten the awareness to kind of living in an interesting area or if you were used to having a neighborhood that was maybe ten blocks away from lamar street station plaza right where you're gonna have a lot it's one of our more challenging commercial nodes you know you may not have been aware but with the advent of next door you share thirty different neighborhoods you're gonna see a lot more so i wonder if that plays into any of it miss vincent yeah i was going to kind of just comment on that also i think if if counsel hasn't had a chance to read it yet you may want to go look at those piece parts that that break it down specifically by the wards and how that impacts the question there's huge differences in a lot of that especially as far as safety walking by yourself lighting all that sort of thing very big differences thank you so my last question and this just has to do with i think the participation rates and how you said you've started to see and i know from the political side surveys polls things along those lines where people are really starting to kind of do away with that because it has not reflected the you know results on election night and that may be much different i don't mean to insult you and your product random population of residents those people you aren't gonna hear from and you'll see that when you look at the results to the opt in survey there are definitely differences in both the types of people we hear from and what they have to say  explore is is called blending and looking at taking to increase the number of responses that we're getting so taking the responses from the opt in survey and kind of merging it with the with the mailed survey knowing what those differences are and using them the mailed survey is kind of the basis for what the opt in survey should look like some jurisdictions are moving slowly toward an opt in survey because they can from a lot of respondents again there's some you know concerns about the the randomness or it being a non probability sample where we're not selecting people at random those people are self selecting in to take the survey but we definitely are continually exploring it and if you  know we're doing experiments with with some communities they're letting us kind of trial and error some things with their surveys so if that's ever of interest but we definitely are doing research on it looking at what the larger research community is doing nationwide people are still surveying even though response rates are dropping because there is still good that comes out of it and provides councils and staff with data that they can hold on  to and say is representative of your community as a whole that's great and i certainly think this is relevant this is really important for our community and for us and and this is fifty thousand foot and i look forward i was really drilling into it in the next few months to see where we're at what we can do and how we can make things better so thank you very much looks like there's no more questions miss watson is this posted online imagine if it isn't it will be  alright is there any public input on the survey nobody signed up public input thank you so we'll move to presentation  number four and that's proposed lodging licensing ordinance i'd like to invite sergeant ailish from our police department down sergeant heads up our community action team it's nice to see you tonight in chambers you and your team are doing incredible things and i'll just set the table that this has been something that council has talked about for some time and the request was made through councillor vincent to take a look at this and so i know there's some eager folks up here to community action team i'm happy to say that our community action team does multiple things including crime prevention which was number one on your survey so that's good to see but tonight we're talking about lodging licensing and i think the reason i'm excited to present on this is this is something that going back to when i was an agent and i was working on our crime prevention bureau i really wanted to see happen i thought it had some major benefits for us as a community and now that i'm the sergeant on the team and the chief giving me the chance to come up and help work through this and come up with a solution for our community i think is an awesome opportunity so what we will do tonight is i will do the presentation i guarantee i don't have all the answers so we have our deputy city attorney here jenna roth we have commander kim perry and then we have the chief himself and we can answer public questions your questions as we go through so but if anyone has any doesn't anything to start we'll get rolling so all right so why are we here as you mentioned sir it was at the request of this council to look at lodging and see what we could do to make some positive changes for community safety so what we came up with as a lodging was a lodging license but we want to take you through how we got there so what are the benefits of lodging obviously there's a historical value our hotels along colfax have a long rich history we've actually seen that referred to when you go out to our federal center light rail station they actually have the images on the various parts of public art that include some of the signs from our hotels and everything that's a part of lake woods history janet young our former legal adviser worked heavily on colfax cruising back in the day which people are probably familiar with and and that was something that involved with hotels as well so long history  also it's a community resource hotels and motels serve business travelers and families throughout the city when your in laws come into town you have a place for them to go that's not your home right bonus so that's a community resource that's a benefit right but then there's the economic benefits hotels and motels are vital part of our economy they bring in tourism and travel dollars not just the dollars that go to the hotel room but the restaurants they stay in the activities they go do all those kind of things so we got with economic development here and they said sixteen hotels and motels in lakewood had over seventy five million dollars in gross sales which isn't pretty impressive for a city of our size the average hotel grossed about one seven million and sales tax revenue for us from those hotels was one seven million dollars so no doubt there's a major economic benefit from the hotel industry and the businesses that thrive in lakewood let's come to the negative side and sadly part of policing is often talking about the the the  challenges the drawbacks that come along with with various programs throughout the community so in two thousand and seventeen our total police calls for service at lodging facilities was two thousand nine hundred and fifty two calls okay that is the amount of calls that is under the definition of what we call a call for service for this ordinance that you will see later in reality it's higher if we if we included any call that we went to a hotel on whether it be a cop driving through the lot to check on it etc it be around four thousand so but we're looking about twenty two thousand nine hundred and fifty to criminal reports that were taken in two thousand and seventeen was just over a thousand at eleven thirty five i want to go over some significant cases these are cases that we picked due to their variety but also their similarity you'll see some some trends i was the sergeant that was actually involved with this case when i worked on patrol one of our agents is a master of getting stolen vehicles and sadly one of the best places to find stolen vehicles is lodging establishment so he was watching a stolen vehicle in one of our lodging establishments a female came out to the vehicle when she was contacted she had that gun on her she was also a convicted felon and she had meth on her so we call that kind of you know getting all three right there right stolen car gun felon and drugs that's not what we want in our city another example forgery counterfeiting ring located in motel room this is one of the worst days for a cop because forgeries aren't easy when we get in there we will have piles of document scanners and sometimes copiers and stacks of paper and mail from a thousand people that has been stolen over the last few months and oftentimes they commit those crimes and lodging facilities they'll go to a room and they'll use them as their place of business while they're there so here we had a counterfeiting ring located in the hotel room again methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia were found inside along with it here's another one this one was particularly interesting homicide suspect was located in a motel room he refused to submit to arrest so when there's a homicide suspect we don't take it lightly our swat team came out and used what's called explosive breaching so we're not blowing the building up but what we're doing is we're creating small holes to where we make them feel like there's no escape it takes  feeling of security so they created the hole you see in the red wall above they created a hole through the door there that's actually the door jamb after we did that and made our point the hands came up like this and he came right out the door right so we were very effective knowing civilians injured very minimal property damage but none of us want to be blowing holes in hotel rooms stolen vehicle this one was a stolen vehicle when two police agents walked up to the car the driver got out and shot at the agents almost at point blank range with a handgun agents were forced to return gunfire and the suspect ran through the parking lot the suspect did not survive but luckily no agents or innocent bystanders were hurt this is a pretty busy area so some of that probably is due to the time of day that there weren't more businesses open and people walking around another one a felony assault on a police agent this one another stolen vehicle occupants of the stolen vehicle fled the scene by ramming multiple vehicles and almost running over a police agent who was outside his vehicle the vehicle was found abandoned in denver and the gun and met found inside one thing i want to point out we made sure not to mention what these hotels are we're not trying to play the name game or the blame game right but you notice in in this case and the previous one stolen vehicles right so there we see one other similarity is all three of these calls were from the same hotel so that's something to keep in mind that it it can show just how much these can be epicenters for crime and that's what we're gonna talk about another significant case this is a gang related homicide with a gun in front of the entrance to the motel ammunition was found on scene the victim was a sex offender and a paying guest at the motel so this was not someone who stumbled upon it or someone who was invited by someone else this is someone who was choosing this stay there one thing our crime analyst noted is he said since two thousand and fifteen half of our homicides in lakewood have been hotel related so either staying that occurred at or the victim was staying at a motel in lakewood et here's an armed robbery this one sadly proves that other hotels can be the victim of crime that's related to hotels and lodging here a customer from one hotel went down the street to another motel and robbed the front desk clerk at gunpoint luckily we found out later that a pellet gun was likely the simulated weapon was it was used that was found inside the motel room but i guarantee you it didn't seem like a pellet gun at the time to that clerk and it did it wasn't treated like a pellet gun when we got the call initially again suspected methamphetamines were also found the last one here's graphic but it's also important we got permission from the agent to show this this was where the our agent was a victim of the crime and he gave us permission to show the picture actually it's one more after this my apologies here we also see the problem of prostitution so prostitution does occur in lodging in lakewood here the prostitute advertised herself online this is something we frequently investigate where they advertise on on different websites online some have been shut down over the time by human trafficking sites but others always emerge the undercover police officer learned she was operating out of lakewood we did a sting when we went in evidence of ongoing prostitution was found in the back to what i was saying this is the last one here so obviously graphic that is one of our agents that injury it was a stolen vehicle again in the hotel parking lot the occupants of a stolen vehicle attempted to flee the scene he's one of our k nine handlers the vehicle came around the corner strut he went to jump to get out of the way ended up going over the top of the car and landing on his forehead that cause that to get peeled back like that his canine who he was trying to put away in the car he wasn't intending on using it his canine who  trying to put in the way in the car was so bent out of shape over this just not knowing my dad's hurt is what the dogs thinkin right just like if you had two dog at home my dad's hurt who did it and the the dog in there buying biting one of her own sergeants because in an amped up situation like that without the handler controlling it that's what can happen so he is probably one of the nicest guys i know and we asked him to show this and he said i'll come in and talk if you want me to he's more than willing to do that but we thought a picture was worth a thousand words alright so what have we done in the past we've tried a lot of things over time as i said when i was in the unit before i had hopes for some change to try and address some of these issues and i was part of some of those attempts to change those issues so one thing we did was we've always or at least since i started here over twelve years ago we've been dedicated to this sector based policing model and again what that is is just that our cops spend time in the area they work it's not like a roulette wheel where they go where am i going to work tonight they are assigned to a region for a year and they have to learn how to work within that year now they can pick different regions over time but they're supposed to stay in that same region for the year and what that allows them to do is that allows them to get to know the neighborhoods get to know the businesses including the hotels so that's the first thing the second is frequent business contacts with hotels and motels to encourage cooperation and information sharing obviously just like any of you th worked with me before once we get to know each other we establish a working relationship and we're more productive and we're more trusting right we try and do that with the hotels too and patrol actually came up with us on their own and they just said let's adopt a hotel like you would adopt a school and we'll say that's my hotel and i'll go hi every so often and maybe we'll develop a relationship right we tried that as well in two thousand and five so cat with all its associated kitten remarks and everything goes along with it used to be slough sector lays on you and the reason we switched a cat is even make much sense than community action team made more but back when it was slough in two thousand and five we try to hotel mojo program with a variety crime prevention tips and public training in the eleven years since that we tried again with crime free hotel motel and we can talk more about that later but that's a program we have a very successful crime free housing model in this city are our current free housing program is probably one of the most successful in the region and we have people coming from various other places to learn what we do we partner with longmont it's it's a proud program of ours there's a subsection of that called crime free hotel motel and we've tried that as well so we tried doing that with various hotels in the city  with minimal success again so and here's why so why haven't if the lakewood police department has a heritage of innovation the ability to solve problems make a difference why haven't we been successful here well a few reasons one is the center for polly problem we already policing they're a group a nationwide group that reviews how you can make changes in the public and public safety said that traditional policing styles do not work extremely well with hotels and reducing crime and disorder at hotels so that's step one but like i said we're an innovative organization we always have been from our founding and so why haven't our innovations worked the biggest problem is because they're voluntary plain and simple participation in our current program is minimal we have a couple hotels that really engage in the current free hotel motel program and what i can tell you is those motels have seen significant improvements one of them i'll probably mention later does a great job but let's think of this from a different perspective outside of policing ferment if licensing your car was voluntary if obtaining a driver's license was voluntary if paying taxes was voluntary right how many people would actually do it right i don't know if i would license my car because it's expensive right and that's coming from a cop but if i didn't have to right so i guess what i'm saying is it's hard to get people to do things that are voluntary especially when they take time effort in right so that's where we are at tonight we really need an ordinance based program we need to reduce criminal activity and emergency calls for service those slides i showed you of those various kinds of crimes those need to stop half of our homicides being hotel related that's gotta stop right or at least reduce we gotta bring it down but to do that we need a hundred percent participation from our lodging facilities and the only way to do that is through ordinance we won't have a hundred percent part of what we still don't have a hundred percent participation in taxes right let's be honest that's why we have the irs they get a follow up but honestly unless we can get an ordinance i don't see it happening so what was our mission and we brought this up at the beginning we were asked to find a solution for crime and disorder there's commonplace it's from over to larger facilities and at a critical level at others and i really do think critical applies here so we developed an internal working group with people from all levels of staff and from all areas and we said what can we do to make a difference what's worked what hasn't etc and we researched different solutions and decided licensing was the best option i'll go over y so licensing was chosen for multiple reasons i think the first one is fairness and due process when you have a licensing process you haven't an opportunity for hearings and you have an impartial third person who reviews any allegations or complaints made against the license and they get to decide if they're valid or not and whether sanctions should be imposed so it's not the city who's the licensing authority who's making the decisions it's that neutral third party who is doing so we bring up what we think is a problem they review it and decide if sanctions are appropriate and then they're enacted another reason licensing is a good option is because we've seen other types of businesses successfully regulated by them pawn stores liquor stores adult businesses marijuana stores you know those little facts you remember down the road  are licensed in lakewood and we have examples from other municipalities so let's go through some of those we did some research we looked at other municipalities to find examples of licensing programs we focused on  three one because it was close to home denver and then because they had pretty robust programs that were pretty open to us looking through them and seeing the nitty gritty and that's what we needed right so the other two were indiana helpless indiana in chula vista california  their program through their homework their program implementation and their study afterwards they actually got a crime prevention award that was nationwide for the differences they made in crime and disorder at budget motels in our city alleys across the nation having enacted licensing ordinances including you can read them there i will note wait park minnesota has a great pie place that has straw barb it's strawberry and rhubarb it's my wife's favorite my  my grandfather lives in avon which is right north of there so i spend a lot of time in wait park so just saying there's a vote for wade park others on their tukwila washington saw a sixty percent reduction in police calls for service at their motels and hotels sixty percent if we could cut half that's pretty impressive chula vista here's one then and we'll refer to it often but that's because it does have that study that was done so we can see the results they did a lot of what we've done before implementing licensing they attempted to make positive change through outreach programs voluntary education and everything else but they didn't see any change in calls for service over a three year period they recognized they needed to have legislation to mandate the prevention practices and they focus is focused on we're going to get into later which is called calls for service per room after the license ordinance passed they saw a drop in calls for service generally of thirty four percent drug arrests were down sixty seven percent and overall crimes were down seventy  for instead of spending time at motels unnecessarily so one thing we try and do it lakewood pd and the city in general is we try and do this as a community decision and also include outreach and make sure everyone's aware so we contacted all the lodging facilities in lakewood that we had through our taxation division we sent them a letter saying here's our plan please come to this meeting and then the cat team took out hand invitations to each motel in the city and delivered him to the front desk so just in case it was an old address or something here you go we held the meeting on november st just over a month ago and about twenty people attended and about eighteen lodging facilities were there looking in the audience now i can see some of the people who there that night we did invite him to this because we said you'll have a chance to have a public  speaking option so you can have your voice be heard just as long with ours so that's what we're trying to engage in that democratic process as we do this so the meeting included a presentation much like the one you're seeing now just shorter a handout of the proposed ordinance and a we got some really good valuable feedback from it that we have implemented since that meeting in tonight's presentation so we made changes based on that meeting after the meeting we also sent an email with answers to the questions that they asked and they were posed i have them in written form there's a few of them if you want to ask what some one were later i can you know kind of go through them with you and then we also included a list of best management practices i've already had one hotel fill it out and spend it back and saying what do you think i've had other hotels go hey we're really you know we're interested in doing this we've already just by talking about a mandatory licensing program we've had more interest than we had from the voluntary program before sorry all right so calls for service to spine calls for service i'll read this here and then i'll give you some explanation it includes but is not limited to any and all calls for emergency services police fire medical the result in a representative being dispatched or directed to the lodging facility right so that's anytime someone calls nine hundred and eleven hey i need help some services going generally right unless it's a gas leak or something and then maybe it's excel on minor cases etc the initial ordinance proposal we gave you it will show that in our definition for this ordinance it includes and medical one thing we changed since then is we took those out so when we're talking about calls for service that would affect you and this your license it doesn't include fire or medical because if someone's having a stroke it shouldn't affect your license if someone is needing other emergency medical services that should affect your license right now if a cop has to go out there because someone's intoxicated and fire department shows up that will be counted if they're a drunk and disorderly patron of the hotel right all right so related to this ordinance specifically though because one of the keys about this ordinance and what we're going to talk about is holding hotels accountable to the amount of calls they create in a given year and having a standard upon which we decide is what is acceptable and isn't acceptable for a number right here what is a call for service related to this ordinance a call to emergency services that results in a response by a law enforcement representative to the lodging facility okay so this would be as the example states a hotel guest calls in a loud party in the room next door we go out the room next door has the music blaring and they're making all kinds of ruckus and we have to get involved that will count under this ordinance another thing that will count is any police initiated call for service that results in a criminal report so the example is a cops driving through the lot of a motel they see a vehicle with no license plate they get out and they find out the car stolen when they look at the vin plate right if it's a stolen car it's gonna create a criminal report and it will be counted one thing we took out that we initially had in there was if a cop spends a lot of time driving through the lot and there they see a lot of no plated vehicles but they never get a stolen car or anything we used to count that but we said if no crimes discovered it shouldn't count against them just because the cops are being proactive doesn't mean it should affect them unless we find there's crime occurring at the facility all right the last one is and i think this one's important is any police initiate call within the surrounding neighborhood which results in a criminal report that can be traced back to or is related to a lodging facility so the example is a driver or a police officer sees the car driving down alameda at two zero in the morning and they pull it over because it runs a red light and they're talking to the driver and we find out there's drugs in the car and we say where'd the drugs come from he said i just bought him at x motel that we want that to count because there's drugs coming out of a motel and we want that against their total now if we go out there and we don't find anything that shouldn't count right but if we go out there and our cops say hey through investigation we found out there was criminal activity occurring we should count that so checks and balances are important in any process this is one thing that we really took to heart from our public meeting with the hotel owners that we invited them to they were honestly concerned that things would get counted against him that weren't appropriate and we listened and we went through okay how can we make sure it's a safeguard against the possibility of of them being brought in for hearings unnecessarily or anything like that so we kind of came up with a three step process the first part is cops will receive training on the new ordinance and how it how to use it and how to help document the source of police calls for service not just the given address so if there's a if there's a domestic violence at the bus stop at the corner of colfax and teller and then the female victim runs to a nearby hotel lobby and calls inside and we get called to the hotel on a domestic violence incident the cops are gonna be trained just because you're called there you need to put in your report this did not occur at the hotel no one was staying there the hotel is not related to this and that way part two will be possible in part two is we have two crime analysts at the police department they do a lot of stuff for us probably a lot of things you've asked for before right because when you go to your community presentations how many break ins have we had one thing crime analysts would do is look at what you were asking for in relation to commercial commercial priming commercial areas after dark great they could try and see if there's a trend well one thing they're gonna do under this ordinance is they will review calls for service at a hotel or motels address and the disregard any when they review it they're not related to the establishment themselves so that domestic where they just came in if they read the police report and the cop says this wasn't related to the hotel they're gonna take it out if they read a call for service and let's say we don't do a police report but it's a loud party and we find out that the loud party was actually a drunk walking by a motel yelling and screaming but he kept on walking we're not gonna include that the crime analyst job is to one only identify those calls for service that actually relate to the establishment and to what we agreed upon was when it's a go in favor of the motel give them the benefit of the doubt when it comes to which waves this going the third is the third part of our three part effort to try and have some checks and balances is if the lodging facility is set for a hearing before the authority they can present facts and reasons why call shouldn't count so if calls call load is the only reason they can request the calls that cause them to be above that number and they can say hey this one we remember this one this is one where we called it in and we feel we're the victim on this this shouldn't count on this one that did it whatever it might be the hearing officer can listen to all that and make a decision based on that so they have that due process alright so let's get as the number of calls a lodging facility has in a specific time period divided by the number of rooms they have right this calculation creates a level playing field so you can look at hotels equally right from  standpoint it's a standardized way of comparing motels as it's accepted in other municipalities and kind of across the nation as a standard right so for example you can expect a hotel with two hundred rooms they should have more call volume than a hotel with ten rooms right so we're gonna level that playing field by doing this ratio and seeing how many calls they have per room then what well then what happens is when you look at using this in a ordinance the municipality decides what the acceptable ratio is so they're not saying you can't have more than a hundred calls per year because the hotel that has two hundred rooms will say that's only half a call per room that's not fair we have two hundred rooms that's gonna happen in six months but on the other side a hundred calls from a ten room hotel would be a little excessive right so that's why the ratio matters so let's give an example hotel alamo here has twenty rooms right they have twenty calls for service in a year that's one per room per y hotel baltimore on the other hand has two hundred rooms they have one hundred and eighty calls for service in a year but that's only a point nine calls for service per year when their ratio comes in right so what that means is although they may have one hundred and sixty more calls in a year and i can go back real quick although they may have one hundred and sixty more calls in a year than hotel animaux their ratio is better because they have two hundred rooms so it's to be expected so so if we say we're gonna base part of our ordinance on calls for service per room in this ratio what's an acceptable one like how do you decide how do we decide what that is chula vista said point six one calls per service per room for a year so that meant if you were ten room hotel you only got six calls a year to police services then they lowered it to fifty point five so five per year their argument was if fifty percent of the hotels because what they found out is fifty percent their hotels had that ratio they had below zero sixty one and they said if fifty percent of our hotels can keep this ratio the other fifty shoot percent should be able to it's not unreasonable to expect have to do what the other half is doing right indianapolis and theirs they said that's work that we don't want to go that far so we're gonna do a split we're only going after the top ten percent worst calls for service locations in the city right so they said we're only doing a ratio that's in the top ten percent so again the ratio is decide in both cases the ratio is decided by what their hotels actually look like what a snapshot of their current community looks like you're gonna see that we'll show you some examples of that another option is you can just choose a number the problem oriented policing center said one is a reasonable number it's like in one of their documents they produced they said hotels should be able to keep it to one call or less per room per year so if you have two hundred violent rooms two hundred calls should be about right and should be below that those are two different ways of looking at what the ratio should be so what should liquids be the working group initially said let's do the fiftieth percentile we liked that argument well fifty percent can do it why can't the other fifty percent do it right after the community meeting and through further discussions we realized that it wasn't the working groups decision that we could it wasn't it wasn't appropriate for us to make that decision alone and we should include public policy and decision making in that so we will give you some options and then you can ask any questions once we get to the end about this and were there so these are our actual numbers from two thousand and seventeen as i said these are the numbers where our our crime analysts have paid taken lee gone through and removed calls that do not relate to them and that worked out to about a thousand out of the four thousand being taken out when it comes to this decision so the top ten percent of hotels based on calls per service per room you have the five listed there okay the top has five point eight nine calls per room so almost six calls per room per year the center for  says you should be i'll keep it under one there almost six times that standard chula vista is a point six standard they're almost ten times that right if you look at this you'll see at the bottom this is where the powerful numbers really come in this group accounts for thirty two percent of total calls for service but it's only seven percent of our available rooms within the city so seven percent of the rooms account for almost a third of the police calls right if you chose ten percent you would be at three point nine calls for service per room as the standard twenty five takes it up so twenty five is as you can see here this would include anyone with two eight three or above here forty five percent of police calls for service at motels are from ten percent of the rooms in our in our city so that just shows you how management practices clientele crime prevention efforts and everything else can really fall apart and create this kind of call volume from this kind of this small part of our society so that's two eighty three top forty percent we skipped top thirty because we figured very close enough top forty you're looking at fifty nine percent of calls for service come from sixteen percent of the rooms and you're looking at a ratio of above one point not eight nine calls for service perot when we go into discussion on this i'll come back to any of these slides if you want to we can dissect them and go through  can have our data geniuses go through it cuz that's not my expertise that's why i'm a cop and then we can go from there top fifty percent almost three quarters of our calls for service come from a quarter of our lodging establishment rooms so if we did the top fifty percent you're going to be you're going to be looking at three quarters of the call load by it by looking at those fifty percent of motels and there we're looking at one point four one calls for service per room we discussed it as a group now as we said before our group we do not want to say this is the answer this is what we think but we do have a recommendation and we thought forty percent seem very reasonable the the reason was we thought twenty five percent was too lenient you're avoiding if i go back by looking here by twenty five percent you're only capturing ten percent of the hotel rooms that are creating this right on the other end we thought fifty percent was a little bit too far reaching and so we came up with that forty percent and well the reason we liked forty percent is because if you look at it at fifty nine percent it captures six out of ten calls for service from our motels six out of ten ain't bad so that's the that's the technical term ain't bad so all that's our that's our recommendation but we'll keep going from there so what does this ordinance actually look like you should have like i said we submitted a copy with the draft one this is a draft we can open it to change that's our business park out west there right thank god for the internet i can get photos for anything alright so the proposed ordinance the lodging facility ordinance would create an authority this authority again is just the structure we set up with a hearing officer who's chosen by the city clerk as an partial third party to review license issues right it will require all new and existing logic lodging facilities to apply for a license no one's grandfathered in you have to apply for a license you have meet the minimum license requirements with that in mind we made the rear not doing background checks on the license owners we're not making this a hill you cannot climb because we understand that would be unreasonable right so the application is owner's name and right to possession of the premises that they wear it where they're at we want a floor plan of their lodging facility to include a room count that's important because that's what we're gonna use later against their call for service number so we want them to provide that if we need to we'll check it but that way they're not saying you don't know how many rooms i have i have you know this mini you said i have this many we need proof that the location complies with zoning ordinances and then we have our fee the fee was set up in a discussion between the city clerk's office and what it takes them to manage it and then an annual renewal fee some of that fee there is because we thought we're going to need training for this my team is gonna be doing a ton of inspections do we need any equipment for it that kind of thing and what are the year over year costs for this license all right issu the license the city clerk is allowed to just administer administrative lea prove them they look through the license no we do not need we have about forty four lodging facilities in lake oh do we don't need forty four hearings just to get them their licenses the clerk can say yes approved you meet all the minimum requirements the license will be approved or denied within thirty days of acceptance of the application the reason that says acceptance is because obviously there could be things missing let's say they don't provide the room total in the floor plan we're gonna say go back and get us your room total they'll go count their rooms and come back and say thirty two and then they'll they'll put it in they'll be accepted they have to renew annually and then if the ordinance is passed once the ordinance goes into effect they have ninety days to apply for their license so all existing facilities have ninety days to get to get rolling on this once once gets started mandatory meeting so initially because again a part of them our goal here is is to create a a partnership between the police department and these lodging facilities initially the only mandatory requirement besides getting your license is if you're over the number of calls per service per room you got to come see me and i'm pretty awesome so that shouldn't be so bad right  you see me or one of my team and we go through some recommended changes nothing's required okay we say to you look your call for service numbers through the roof you got five calls per room in a year this is gonna be a problem if we don't get this fixed here's how you can make a change start taking ids from everyone start requiring that they tell you what kind of car they're driving say no guests after ten zero p m because we know guests coming after p m or sometimes up to no good and often up to no good in some of these locations right well give them those recommendations if they don't want to follow up or not kind of hold them to it this is one of those where it's like let's help you before things go the wrong way that's the thought regulation of a license so we said it creates an authority right let's say someone puts in their license application it's tonight right from the get go we're like sorry denied the authority says nope they can go ahead and go to district court there's an appellate process for any license authority decision where they can go to district court and fight it out there so the authority isn't the final end all be all say all there is an appellate process that's already in place for our other licenses and would be involved here it allows the authority to issue orders and preside over hearings against license lodging facilities they're in violation so what all that means is if if if we find out that you have it's been a year we run your calls for service number and you have five per room and you get as a group the city decides two point four is our max and you're double that it will cause you to have a show cause hearing you'll have to go in front the hearing officer and explain why you're above the limit and they will make a decision based on recommendations from us and talking to to you as an establishment how to bring that down this provides due process or the licensee again they have a chance to talk about it so causes for license suspension or revocation right so some example of grounds for suspension or revocation if they're above that maximum calls for service ratio bet by the city council i think this is where look we're gonna see a lot of our effort coming into play because if we saw that we're gonna make it based on a percentage decision unless there's some drastic changes in year one we could be seeing those people or those establishments at their year one review right this is the second one in this one's important a significant criminal act has occurred at the lodgi facilities premises so a significant criminal act is defined in ordinance as an actor acts that cause serious bodily injury or death to any person or an actor act that requires law enforcement specialized or tactical team response right if if we end up calling out the bomb squad and the helicopter and everything else we may be putting you in for a hearing the thing to keep in mind with that is it's still just a hearing in front of a neutral third party so they could say nope no violation then there's no issue it's just it's it's it's an opportunity to request a hearing on the license also other reasons you may have a hearing is the lodging facility is delinquent in city taxes owed has outstanding orders from the health department so if the health department goes in and says you have bedbugs and your restaurant on site is unsafe that may cause a hearing outstanding orders by west metro fire if they have a furnace system a boiler that hasn't been kept up in in some violation that may affect their license the operator the last one here is similar to the significant criminal act it says the operation of a lodging facility is such that is negatively impact the health safety and our welfare of its guests or the residents or businesses of the neighboring community to give you an example of that to put it in just simple terms is when the council asked us to look at this it was based on some activity at some of the hotels we've had an example of this would be if you have a hotel that's known for stolen cars and we end up having a stolen car where the guy runs into the neighborhood and hides in someone shed and we have to call it the swat team to do gas rounds into that shed to get them out of there i would argue that that facility is contributing and negatively impacting the health safety and welfare of the neighborhood surrounding it it could also be a business if there's a business nearby this hotel and the hotel has constant fights disorderly conduct drunks on property drug dealing in the parking lot and the the restaurant isn't getting the clientele that it should be because people are like i'm not going anywhere near that place have you seen what's next door that would be an example of where a hearing could be put into place sanctions against the license all sanctions are imposed by the authority they're not imposed by the lakewood police department they're not imposed by the city they're employees that licensing authority we may make recommendations and again our goal and recommendations is not to shut places down it's to bring them their numbers down and make them successful lodging establishments right because we recognize from the beginning of this presentation there's a value to motels and hotels in our community both financially and historically so we're not looking to shut everyone down we're looking to make them have less crime we're gonna make recommendations the authority will decide if they're appropriate or not so what happens they're found to be in violation well generally they're gonna have a probationary period it'll generally be about a year because since we track our costs per service per room over a year period it makes sense to have the probationary period be the same it could be shorter if it's based on one of those severe criminal incidents right if we find out that someone's been running drug dealing out of the back out of of a motel management office if they've actually dealing on site we may set a much shorter probation period and be looking for violations in there same with taxation etc during that probationary period the licensee continues to operate with mandatory restrictions or requirements so what are some examples of sanctions again meeting with me right that's number one that should be more of an awesome thing as i said before an inspection of the lodging facility by lpd west metro fire in the jefferson county department of health if we get complaints about something we may say to our friends at the health department hey come look at this place with us see what you see the fire department especially let's say we have a fire we've had fires  what's causing these fires is it just people staying there who are lighting cigarettes and letting them fall asleep is it something more than that is that the furnaces aren't properly done etc safety and security measures such as fencing lighting surveillance cameras a no rent list for example decided by them not by us but by them credit card only transactions that's a pretty strong one because a lot of these places do operate in cash quite a bit but that is one that could be possible and then security officers andor off duty police officers on premises again these would all be approved and enforced by the licensing authority failure to comply with these could result in license revocation so i've talked a lot let's go through me examples then we'll open it up for discussion so what does it look like for a lodging facility let's go back to acceptable limit determined by ordinance right so if we set it at one point eight it's above that because of this they have a mandatory meeting without pd to discuss ways to reduce that number how can we help you bring it down no mandatory sanctions are imposed at this time upon renewal of their license a year later their calls for service are still above the acceptable limit right so we gave them some recommendations but they didn't bring it down my team goes in and inspects the property looking for safety issues poor management practices other factors likely to contribute to that unacceptable ratio right that show cause hearing is held and the authority finds the hotels in violation because they're above the limit the authority owed orders the hotel to install better lighting and security cameras and to install better locks on all the doors so a good example for that would be as if you find that you're getting robberies in the hotels where they go from room to room kicking the doors enough and that's because the doors are made of flimsy you know they're like interior doors on the outside and they can just kick them right in so one would be sorry you got to secure your doors bare you have to put exterior doors on so hotel animo is placed on a one year probationary period they comply with all the sanctions they install those security cameras they install the lights and they improve the doors at the end of the probationary period they've shown major improvements that calls for service have is now within the acceptable limit we've achieved our goal no further sanctions are imposed all right hotel baltimore hotel baltimore has been operating successfully under the new license ordinance for several years that calls for service ratio has always been below the acceptable limit so they're not over the point one hundred or one zero or whatever you decide a husband and wife check into the hotel that night a neighboring room calls any disturbance the police investigate and find the husband is murdered his wife okay in the library with the candlestick ordinance the murder is considered a significant criminal act and a show cause hearing is what the authority has held just because of that that the authority reviews the case and determines the hotel's business practices in the facility did not contribute in any way to the homicide so they say look stuffs gonna happen right and no matter what you do if you're renting to people they bring with them their problems the authority imposes no sanctions and hotel bought two more continues to operate with a license and good standing yeah now let's talk about my favorite hotel catastrophe hotel catastrophe is operating in the city with a lodging facility licensed there calls for service per room ratio is above the allowed limit we do an inspection and lpd finds poor management practices and lack of security measures held with the authority the authority finds they've they're in violation the authority also orders multiple sanctions including better locks and lighting and better documentation of hotel guests to include requiring an id and recording a vehicle information simple changes right at the end of that year long probationary period hotel catastrophes calls for service per room ratio remains above the limit and sadly we find they haven't complied with any of the assay xuan's opposed by at the authority so they were told get better locks and lighting and start recording who stays here we go in they have no records of who's staying there the bulbs are all burned out and the locks are the same old locks that were there before there's another show cause hearing additional sanctions are imposed to include credit card only sales again one of those higher level ones to say things aren't changing and things aren't going well we need makes we need to make some major differences and armed security during peak hours as defined by when the crimes are occurring due to their failure to comply previously the authority sets mandatory compliance dates for all previous and new sanction guidelines so they say you will install the locks by january by february nd we'll come out and check right that kind of thing the authority wart warns hotel catastrophe further non compliance may result in license revocation at the end of the second probation period hotel catastrophe has not complied with all sanction ordered and the calls for service per room ratio remains above the allowed limit the authority revokes their lodging facility license and they can no longer operate as a lodging facility so that is the ultimate penalty is if if we do all this work years of working with you that's what can happen all right so that's that's what can happen but what's the partnership benefits so the goal of a lodging license programs develop a mutually beneficial relationship between the city and lodging establishments right we've tried that voluntarily now we're gonna impose you spending time with me all right so benefits of the lodging facility license can include lower crime and disorder at the facility which is good for business a direct contact with the police department the cat team and then this is the really neat one this is something that's kind of at the core of our crime free multi housing program daily calls for service reports delivered electronically to ownership and management that's great for a number of reasons and we have some hotels that do we have like i said we have i think two hotels that actively participate in our crime free hotel motel they get them daily and they've said it makes a huge difference because one they know what's going on all the time two if they have a problem with a night manager when the night manager is like now everything was swimmingly and they go the cops are out here six times that's not swimmingly right they can address management issues right and then finally there's not an excuse for we didn't know right we had no idea well let's look at what you received day after day after day after day so that's some of the benefits right there we go so now we'll open it for discussion well done yeah thank you was an incredible actually that was a great presentation and before we start going into questions and comments i just want to read re emphasize and we have some of our hotel owners here tonight that the goal is certainly to work hand in hand with our businesses and find a nice way that we can ensure that you're able to operate and that people are safe and so i hope we can strike that balance but i can tell you there's just not a lot of tolerance for what continues to happen and and you mentioned from two thousand and five to two thousand and sixteen we reached out and tried to get people to voluntarily do that those numbers reflect that nobody's really taken this program seriously and that picture of our police agent is just one of many pictures that could be shown the night of people being injured trafficking drugs all of these different things that are going on and we want to have a safe community and we want you to be a partner in all of this i will mention we do not have a helicopter we borrow other people's so please i don't want we don't want that phone call coming but um i think you did answer some of my questions i met with one of the operators as well as the lodgers association this week to kind of get some of their feedback and i think you have addressed some of their questions which had to do for with emergency calls but the two questions i guess i have victim of crime so when the hotel is actually the victim and they need to call vandalism or something they're being proactive to say this is happening what do we do so that's one question how do we address that and then the second one is the the larger one that looms is are we going to discourage operators from calling the police so i think to answer both of those i'd start with the victim of crime piece obviously we we never want to dissuade someone from calling the police when their victim of a crime but i'll do it sorry there we go i'll do it too an analogy if a bank doesn't have a bank vault and they're constantly getting robbed we want them to call when they get robbed but we're going to expect them to make some changes to stop the robberies from occurring if they're keeping stuff in a brown paper bag in the back room that's not good management practices right we understand that our hotels as i mentioned in one of those examples we have a hotel where they rented to one guest and they went down the street and robbed the other guest at gunpoint we went out we took care of the same police service right we gave them everything they needed what we want to do is say is there ways that we can avoid that we all recognize when we go into a convenience store that has the glass protecting the clerk they've done that for a reason compared to stores that haven't they're recognizing a need to make a difference what we're looking to do is help help push that making that change right and then again one thing i'll go back to is the licensing authority piece if someone is truly the victim and they feel like we're unfairly against them they can bring that up to the licensing authority and say hey wait a minute i didn't have anything to do with this and i can't be held accountable for this one example we came up with is like a drunk just wanders into their parking lot that could happen anywhere to anyone right well they can bring that up in the hearing right and say well wait a minute that i can't control that you know that's not against me in the hearing officer they say may say i agree if you strike all those what's their calls for service number that's that due process piece right also i do say and i tell this to people often since i'm since i'm in the sergeant over the crime prevention unit i tell people when you look at a when you look at a business or a strip mall or something that's run down and not well managed how often are they victims of the crime and how could you see crime happening there compared to the place that's well lit clean occupied all those kind of things right so that's something we impress upon them too is management practices make a difference in the likelihood of victimiz n but even if you're the victim and you're doing everything right it may count against you at first but that hearing is to help avoid that right and say wait a minute that's not that's not reasonable and that's why we have the hearing in place the second question was you about dissuading them from making calls right and i think again there one thing that's an obvious possibility and and the pop guide the problem area policing community center guide said you have to watch for that and you may actually have to go do surveys or your motels to make sure that management is saying don't call the cops when you check in right don't call the cops we're getting counted because that's not something we want we want an honest answer and again my hope is through the community presentation through this open dialogue where they have a chance to stand through our transparent process they can see that if it's truly not something that's in your control there's a process to make sure that that's heard that it's not just an automatic answer so i think that's the answer to those two thank you so m i have several questions but we should just keep him do two or three at a time so everybody can get a chance okay one is as you said that the fire codes or fire would not be counted calls for service for fire  what about any violations that are our fire code violations counted yeah so i think the way to think about is this day to day calls to the fire department if someone calls in if someone calls in that someone's having a heart attack that's not gonna be counted if someone calls in that there's a fire the fire department's gonna get called out fire investigators are gonna come out to investigate that fire if they find that it was due to something that involved the property our ordinance allows us to cause a hearing to occur because of that because we say if they're not compliance with fire code or fire regulations that could cause a hearing so that's the way that those are brought in okay so that would then that would then count again to once a year commercial businesses open to the public and all public areas are required to have their facilities inspected by the fire marshal it they're limited in scope but if they go in and find something and say hey you you got a boiler in here that's not vented properly this is gonna get someone hurt that could cause an ordinance violation too so i guess what i would say is take out the call the calls for service piece doesn't apply nearly as much to the fire section because we recognize especially for hotels that are around care centers hospitals urgent care where people may be staying while they're receiving care we didn't want them to be adversely impacted by medical calls for service okay thank you before i forget great presentation i really appreciate it this answers a lot of questions where do you talked about possible sanctions many of the hotels that you showed on here i know do nothing but accept primarily vouchers yes from from prisoners they're released where does that fit into this i think i think that could be an angle of the management practices one of the benefits of partnering with the police is if they're receiving vouchers for like parole clients or roommate we can work with their parole officers directly so if they're seeing negative behavior by the parole officer by the parolees the parolees should be being talked to by their parole officers by having a relationship with us we can make that connection so what she's talking about is oftentimes parolees when they get out of jail are given vouchers to try and get stable hous and transition and if they're causing some of those issues another opportunity is one thing that was discussed i met with someone who deals with housing and homelessness as they said we do vouchers how's that gonna affect us so we're already talking about that and how we can work with so and that's the crim our people have just been released not so much the homeless vouchers yeah and i think what i think this creates an opportunity because like i said what one thing we as cops love to do is work with our partners in parole and we want to see people who are in paroled succeed because that's part of the justice system right mm hmm but we also want to keep an eye so it gives us the the dual option right because then if we're in touch with our managers if our managers our nurse are on good terms and they say hey i've been having a prom with room two  can you look into it oh yeah he's on parole let me call his parole officer hey they got they got people coming in and out of their room all night ooh let's do it let's do a compliance check they go in and they find drugs in the room boom problem solved okay great  i had a gap i guess in the presentation would that already be looked at prior to them getting the license or does like everybody start at ground zero with a license so ever the agreement is no one should be we are not holding anyone accountable for the previous activity except for that mandatory meeting if they're over the limit so if i am hotel x and hotel x is two six calls per room and you you as a group and we as a city decide to is the answer the only thing they have to do is come in and talk to my team to start and find out voluntary solutions but now what they know is with that license they understand i am operating under a guideline that if i'm over the at the end of the year there's some sanctions possibly imposed they have that year to make the changes if they don't and they're over the limit they'll probably go to hearing and have sanctions imposed okay i think that's it for now thank you thank you mister skilling i also have a lot of questions so we can either and i understand this is an ongoing discussion and we can go offline and after tonight ask i'm sure yep far more questions that we'll think of did i get a stool yes i i was thinking the same thing as mayor paul was and i think just to kind of circle back to that point the chilling effect that this would have on motel hotel operators actually reporting  calls i could see either hotel vigilantes or some self help that we probably don't want to see i think that we need to maybe come up with an actual solution to that i don't know if it's a point system if it's the hotel operator that makes the call they should be rewarded for doing that because i could you would certainly be d incentivized for making that call if you're the hotel operator so i think we need to do more than just hope that it doesn't have that effect i mean we've recognized that as a big that's a big potential so we probably need to figure something out with that and a lot of its gonna go unreported oh what calls weren't made or that's what would be concerned with i think to answer that so there is a debate and it and it is whether or not you should include calls made by the motel ownership hotel or motel ownership in that call for service number right because you could actually  exclude them entirely and that would automatically possibly eliminate that concern right if you said if the management's calling in we're not going to count it the counter argument to that in the prom and the reason we don't recommend that is this one thing that experts caution against is having the public safety division becoming de facto private security for the motels because often what we see happens is is the motel owner knowingly rents to high risk clientele and instead of hiring private security or someone to address it like any other business might they just know the cops are a phone call away and they'll make my problem go away and that's the problem we're trying to avoid because the problem is we do a ton of hey this person hasn't paid i want  out we go out there that morning boom they're gone hey this person's a drunk they're causing problems i want them out we go out there they take care of it so it's a balance right because the problem is if we're if we are taking away if we are using that extra amount of time that i mentioned is lost to the motels and their crime is disorder if we are taking that time away from the rest of the public because they're not using good management practices to avoid that occurring in the first place that can be a major detriment and so that's why we want to include those calls for service now there is there is discussion we've seen it in here about how you can incentivize in other ways participating whether it be tax breaks or you know whatever you can think of there's other options as far as that goes but for from our purposes what we decided was best is we recognize that a lot of these establishments do manage in a way because they're number we're not worried about the hotels that have a one call for service ratio worried about the ones that have the fours the sixes the threes the twos and i guarantee you there's management practices that are occurring that is inviting that in mm hm and if we cater to them by just being their de facto security that's a problem as well so that would be the argument return but i think to your point sir it's worth looking at how do we how do we avoid that as much as possible because i agree i don't ever want someone to go i'm not gonna make that call because i don't want this to count against my total and when their business is on the line yep no i get it i get it so that was just the point to follow up with the mayor on that some of the other questions following up with  councilman vincent i was thinking of when you roll this out these folks that have a two and a half three and a half for cfs right now would it be phased would it be some kind of phase would be pretty difficult somebody who's been operating for years and years at a four and now we're gonna say well you got to be at a one a ten point five or one i mean that's that may not be realistic yeah so is there going to be a phased rollout of this or is it going to be all once i don't care who you are if you're the alamo right yeah sir to answer your question i think the thought process is that's why the currently is constructed we don't have like a finite time line where it's like you get to probationary years and at that you're done right we haven't set that in date so it's up to the licensing authority to make that decision so the authority should say wait a minute like for example hotel catastrophe let's say instead of being that the only could a catastrophic thing about him is there a six and that first year  they go to the hearing officer and they brought it down by three and they're making positive steps i would even encourage the hearing officer to say well look we're making some positive steps what can we do to encourage more so some of that's built into the hearing process not not necessarily into the rollout of the program because i'm gonna say that the ones that need that most are the ones that have the highest volume those are the ones we need to get to as quick as we can and that's a good segue to my last question we've talked a lot about and you've just mentioned  burden that would be on the hearing officer and when i say burden i mean there's just they've got a lot of discretion what is your experience with these other jurisdictions with how busy these hearing officers are i could envision these hearings taking place fairly regularly if there's a lot of hotels and motels in the city you brought a list of a lot of hotels that would already be well well over the limit how does that work with the hearing officer it sounds like we need more than just saying the clerk and hearing officer we may need a more robust system in place which comes with a cost time so what are other jurisdictions doing with that do you know you have any answers to that commander perry or jenna you have any answers to that as far as what you've seen heard from them about yeah we we could definitely follow up and i also think i'd add that that that can be part of the decision making process and when that number lies right because we can we can make it that can be a part of the decision maker and where you decide the call for service number she could be two for example because in your last example you're talking about the hearing officer we had the person starting it or the hotel starting at six and they're down to a three and so there's a lot of oversight by the authority over that that's gonna take a lot of time and continuing involvement so it's not a one off that we have a hearing one time a month and we hire a hearing officer to come in for that it sounds to me like this could be something that's in place and being utilized but frequently yeah and i think that's one reason the chief came to the council recently and asked for another member on my team was recognizing the staffing considerations that were going into inspections it was decided that we need that additional team member to help with the realities of this and that would also be a work in progress too if we identify there's a higher workload we'd have to address it at that time thank you welcome m cooperating and participating with law enforcement i think realistically if what you're really wanting is their assistance in cooperation i i think this this doesn't is not going to do it and so i think you need to recognize that and  for what it is i don't know what the answer is either i could see that possibly what would happen is that they go to the owners go to some sort of private security may be a pooled private security or something that they use when they have a problem and i don't know if that's something you want to encourage or not that that takes long you know law enforcement out of the out of the loop and then i don't know if that's what you want the other thing that i could see happening in that situation would be that only the most serious problems end up in your lap again you know they take care of the small things that they can but you know sometimes you know something escalates beyond their control then you're gonna get called in and again i don't know if that's what you want to encourage so i'm though i'm just a little concerned about that about that that that part of the thing the rest of it is is i think makes a lot of sense and i and i am by the way i did appreciate your presentation thank you mayor council good evening i just kind of like to weigh in on that i think what a lot of what you saw weren't motels calling us saying there's a stolen car in my parking lot there's prostitution going on a lot of these activities are found by the police departments so i don't know if the disincentivizing them to call us is is going to be an issue because frankly they're not calling us now you know we're recovering hundreds of stolen cars per year at these hotels they're not calling us they call us on some serious s there may be a little bit of that but i think it's also like you know i think we talked about alarms before when we you know we responded to alarms before ninety nine percent of the alarms were fal there and basically the alarm companies were selling a service that we were we were enforcing the public was enforcing so there could be a disincentive for them to call us there could be but they're not calling us now so i think if you look at those those cases we showed you where our police agent was injured and the hotel didn't call us the the case where the we found a stolen car and the suspect ran we had to use the swat team to get him out of a house or a shed the hotel didn't call us you know that when there's a shooting in the parking lot someone's murdered in a hotel they call us but they're not really calling us that often so it could it could be an issue you know i guess the philosophy here that we're looking at is you know we're trying to get them to have business practices that you know that we there are responsible there that they're not renting to individuals that are creating these problems and things like that so yeah there's a trade off we see that but i don't think that we as a working group looked at that as it was such a hill that we couldn't overcome that so thank you and to add to your other question about that you mentioned that security do we want to involve them that may be one of the sanctions that's imposed i mean we're not opposed you know large corporations have security lost provision otherwise that's a necessary step sometimes when they recognize they have a you know a need a risk a threat so as long as it's professional and it's run well we're all for it and one of our jobs is gonna be to confirm that that's occurring and like we said surveying the occasionally we could serve if we get a hint that like if calls drop off precipitously at a location we may go out and survey that and see if there's a business practice where they're trying to hamper citizens from calling in they follow up on the jurisdictions that have adopted similar laws did you get any feedback on that and pass to whether or not that's a problem either with them getting their own security and it being effective or just incentivizing the the owners did you did you get any feedback or information back in those that it was a problem or anything yeah i don't i don't know that we did from chula vista or indianapolis we talked to you mainly right good evening welcome i can't perry with the police department i'm a commander and we looked into this and some of the municipalities did not count the calls for service for management but most of the murder did but i would just mention that even if you eliminated them they're still going to be a ratio so if they were removed from the calculation you're still gonna have a certain amount in the top twenty five percentile whether those calls are counted or not abel i have a few questions very few i noticed there in the ordinance proposed ordinance said it one of the possible sanctions is not allowing folks  to rent people under twenty one has that been removed you didn't mention it so i don't think it's been removed that's that could always be a possible sanction there will be sanctioning guidelines that are set up and so that could be one of those that's included a lot of hotels practice that as a best practice anyway but yeah it hasn't been removed there are a lot of college students who need a night or two of lodging and well so  the significant crime angle yes is there a multiplier of that for that perhaps if two or three of those things occur within six months we might want to shut them down advance of the hearing i think the well in advance of the hearing it couldn't occur in advance of but i think that the hearing officer doesn't live in a bubble so if they're back there again so let's say they have a murder that occurs and then six months later there's a prostitution ring that's found in the same apartment complex not apartments i'm sorry hotel or motel the hearing officer will no you know we'll know that and so that's one of the benefits is we can we can talk about criminal episodes th occurring in a specific amount of time i think that points to one reason we included that is because we said well they may have a number under so much but if an act occurs that's so heinous or is directly related to the establishment if we find out that a motel owner is running a human trafficking ring out of the basement of the motel we got again min from a hearing officer we're not going to wait until their calls are too high you know what i mean so i think that that speaks to that in a case like that you'd probably take them to jail anyway we would do our best and the other thing is maybe sort of a stretch but we're soon going going to be dealing with short term rentals yes they'll be lodging yes do we or do we not want to include them in this and if not shouldn't we add language to specifically exclude them my understanding at this time and i'll defer but my understanding is those are being looked at as two completely separate issues and i'll d er to people did i think this is beyond the scope of what i know about and that would be a decision that's made somewhere else counselor we did not consider those and and i would not recommend recommend that just because we wouldn't even have access to know who has short term rentals or who doesn't we know who our hotel and motel establishments are so yeah yes sir i would recommend against that i think that would be i'm not suggesting that we put it in just that if we're not going to include them we specifically mentioned that this doesn't apply to such things as short term rental she okay yeah that's not a problem at all that could be other words or this shall not apply to this because i did absolutely until we we allowed for them or did not allow for them officially that makes any sense mister roybal great presentation thank you just a couple of clarification questions  when you talked about the numbers and when the certain threshold numbers that came up my first inclination when i looked at it was sometimes and again you got to look out both sides you know let's say for example the hotel owner there might be some issues that have come outside their scope that come into their parking lot and they have no no jurisdiction over that and it could be somewhat violent by having security for example there's somewhat limited unless they're law enforcement to be able to presume that forward but my question is that we just need keep an open dialogue open conversation with like what you were talking about with the owners and say look this might be a possibility you know it's it's like neighborhood watch sort of speak and say this might be a possibility but i want to make sure not to hold them accountable for that one extra number you know against them and and that was the number one thought that i had the other thing that that came up and you kind mentioned and i and i think this is a great idea i think these hotels need to know what they're running log is how many calls that they get were they at in in the in the shoot you know for example for each room they already had one call for the year each room and all sudden they get another call you cinma an email or a fax or something to contact them saying hey guys you know this is what's going on so it gives them an opportunity to say okay this particular call didn't apply and they can go ahead and document that and get that ready for the hearing officer and say hey look i got all my paperwork that i was sent this one didn't apply to me can you please you know take that one out so if you give the hotels a running list of you know what numbers are there you know and that way they can keep track to see where they're at so there's no the open communication is there and they have no excuse saying when they go in front of the hearing officer they know that they're in trouble or they they just say well no your honor this is what this what it is the other thing that you talked about in and i'd like to kind of explore a little bit more about it is obviously gathering information when things do help and happen there and one of them is cameras  you know i i think that would be something positive for the the establishments to actually prove saying hey look we're doing everything we can we'd like to share you know the information that what did occur so if  something did occur in the parking lot you have you know video to be able to to kind of prove that and that would be prudent on the businesses to say hey look i'm part of the neighborhood i want to become part of the neighborhood i'm doing my best to do that so maybe my thought was is go to you know go to the hotels and ask them if they'd like to have an analysis done in in the complex and say hey look we'd like to recommend some things for you to make things a little bit easier and see what the response is and then if they choose to take it they follow it then it would really help them out if they don't then you know they're in for some hard rides and i think that's the key to understand about this ordinance is those resources have generally been always available our entire division offers crime prevention through environmental design surveys anyone can request one and we'll do one within scope we've done them for little businesses all the way up to two room oh you know and so i think to your point absolutely the key here is we have to make the motel owners and management interested in doing that and the ordinance helps compels them well we hold them responsible the right thing yep we also give them an opportunity and encouragement to help them to do the right thing i think that's what i'm looking for and i think that's the concept and that's the that's the goal of that initial mandatory meeting because we specifically said none of it will be required but you have to meet with us at least listen out here out some ideas and i said oh do your point i think that's exactly what it is because when we meet with them we're gonna we're not gonna look at them as just hotel one point two five seven on our radar we're gonna go this is hotel alamo they're at part of our community what what we will ask them what have you been seeing at your hotel well i have a problem with people doing this all the time here's the answer you know it so exactly i think i think that's built into this process and i i'm glad you support that oh if we bring him into our neighborhood like neighborhood was actually become part of it so if there's something going happening outside their environment and they call then they're being you know proactive  saying okay i don't want to come in into my particular sphere yeah and i think i think then the nice thing is if you recognize that if good neighbors make good neighborhoods right so if they become a good neighbor in the business of store becomes a good neighbor eventually that neighborhood transforms to but until everyone puts in the work it just doesn't happen yeah so thank you it's all i have miss franks a first one maybe a real silly question but what are we saying is the definition of a room so we have something is it just a contiguous space with one bathroom are we saying it's multiple beds can a suite qualify just so we know that everyone's counting themselves correctly and i don't think we have a definition but at least from the spirit of this it would be the the rented space so if they have three little and maybe you can answer  the room itself the the rental itself great know that that helps also won't understand it sounds like the first the recommendation is for the license to be seven hundred and fifty dollars and then the renewal to be four hundred dollars did that factor in what we anticipate to be the the true overhead of the hearing officer which i could imagine would flux and be high in the first years and then slowly progressed did that get factored into baked into that or do we need to look at giving the hearing officer the ability to impose financial sanctions for those who have read kind of need repeat visits because we may have to do a contracted hearing officer i think those might be available where then the demand is being paid for by the offenders rather than the ones who are playing by the rules having to absorb the costs of those who aren't i guess that's what i'm trying to say yeah we definitely included we looked at well how many hours do we think the cat team will put into the inspections how many hours do we think the crime analysts will put into reviewing the calls and removing that we definitely included that in the year after year costs and then we got with the city clerk and said what do you think you need from that aspect and they're in charge of the hearing officer now we could review that with him and get you a more in depth answer but i we did include everyone that would be a part of this in that process to come up with that number that initial number great thank you i also wanted to understand if we could maybe look towards i know there's been some concern about maybe the motel owner or the managers not wanting to report something i don't necessarily think that's if somebody's had a crime against them they're you know even a criminal who has a crime  tensa wants to get some relief from that but could we look at maybe saying that the crime analysts would look at that police report and if the victims reported that they contacted the manager and they refused to that that somehow makes that information makes it to the hearing officer and mitigating as a factor to aggravate in fact is almost an aggravating factor to that if we start to find out that that somebody reported said well i told the manager this was happening and i finally had to call that means that they were suppressing that call to some degree and i guess that might mitigate some of the concerns that folks have had of maybe under reporting and us not hearing about so that i don't need an answer i just wanted to throw that that might be a way to take care of that the other thing it sounds like here that we have manager change where it we're going to require that the managers are registered i would assume that be for the various shifts and i'm just wanting to suggest that maybe not only registering but we have some kind of a best practices pamphlet that we maybe provide as well as maybe that manager is made aware of the plan that they're on meaning that they're on a plan where there are six things that they're being asked to do because they're under that that manager gets benefit of that so they're aware that well here's the best practices but here's the plan you're on your probationary plan for your business that way they can't later  didn't know we were supposed to be getting ids or i didn't know we were supposed to be getting so i guess i would just maybe want an education component just baked in there somehow and that's the end of the suggestions yeah and i think to add to that one thing we did when we sent out th the meeting as anyone who attended we sent him a list of hotel motel best practices to reduce crime and disorder and we actually first gave this list to one of our hotels that had been having ongoing problems and we've been working with corporate to address it but that list includes by first responders so that kind of thing so we're saying professionalize your business and and that will help because if i is a cop responding in can figure out who the maintenance person is right away that helps us all when we're trying to find mayor they pretty much everybody's asked the questions i had on my mind but i just wanted to say that would like to take a look at the q and a or sort of some of that input that was provided at some point just to sort of get a sense of what some of the businesses who i'm sure will speak today but just kind of dig in a little bit more on what they what they're interested in learning more about the other question i had was do we have a way of verifying the room numbers is there we have that how many they have yeah oh sorry go ahead sir no go ahead so initially we've received them from our economic development department when they're required to submit their application they have to submit the number of rooms they have now we can just based on knowing the facilities we can say that sounds about right but if we think they're over inflating their room numbers to reduce their calls for service number we can do a walk through as part of that process conversely we don't want them to underestimate and have a higher number because of that either so it behooves them to provide the correct number because they're held accountable for that from then on okay i think that's all i have thanks and you i'm sorry and you can just if you'd like to pass that list on yeah yeah we can definitely pass on the list we gave out with quite a few answers miss vincent this is more of a comment i i think coun needs to i hope they realize that our chief is exactly correct these are i unfortunately have been i as a neighborhood participant have tried to work with these many many many of these hotels that are on the list they have disregarded it we've had the mayor go out and talk to some people we've had the business w cca specifically go out and try to talk to them we even had some that were offering private security that the business association was pitching in to help and did that so they could patrol these parking lots we have offered there were people who said please put up cameras please put up lights for these we have these calls for service we aren't even talking about the neighbors who come and report to me that there that they won't go by some of these hotels and it's as simple as people men lurching out and peeing all over the place they won't walk by they have to call for these these these are not easy things that these people are dealing with we've had murders at some of these top hotels we've had rapes we have had we have had sex trafficking i know about so it's not that these people have not been worked with i mean from businesses to mayor to the police all of us have been at many of these places and have tried to work with them on the crime free housing is what i'm calling at their hotel since two thousand and eight so why i appreciate people's concerns about the hotel may not call i can i can guarantee you without a doubt these these that are at least at the top ten percent i know don't call the people have to call the neighbors have to  call cars are dumped there i've seen cars there for over a week and i know that the people aren't in the hotel so i can testify to that so if you think it's just a matter that these are our light and and not series calls they're very serious and business associations and multiple multiple people and as well as neighborhoods who have tried to work with them so i'm i'm offering that to all of you because i do have the misfortune i guess of living like two blocks from probably five of the top ten percent so thank you was just killing and i can appreciate that and i appreciated the chiefs comments on that too that these they're not calling anyway so i mean that's i think that's the counter to when we're talking about that chilling effect earlier and i'm wondering if mike on my last comment was i think as this discussion moves on and i'm past deciding whether or not we need it i mean obviously i mean now i'm kind of into the weeds and i really want to know about this hearing officer stuff because the more we've talked about it that seems to be what the big thing is gonna be because what we've talked about tonight is you're gonna have an ongoing interaction but there's gonna be these probationary periods you're gonna need experts such as yourself and these folks sitting here that are gonna have to make these recommendations there's gonna have to be follow up what worked what didn't work there's a lot that goes into this authority and it's just it just can't be a clerk and a hearing officer it seems to me it's got to be a lot more robust than that with a lot of tools at your disposal if you really want to make it happen you need more than just here's your marching orders see i six months i mean it sounds like we need that that that's the part that really needs to be developed a lot more is what what that authority is gonna look like and to the point that we've been discussing about the the chilling effect of reporting maybe that goes that we talked about mitigating and aggravating factors maybe that's a mitigating factor if somebody comes in and says well i've been calling i saw stolen vehicles our hotel called that in that could be something that they present to this authority in mitigation so that they don't get hit so hard or something so i can certainly put a third on that i did go to two of our the top of the that list over two years ago and left business cards multiple times to try to speak with ownership because i think the goal has been since two thousand  voluntary and actually participated in our accreditation process and how long when did they come on board they really it was in the last few years i was up there so i got promoted and i'm just using personal history in tw it was right before that but that's a that's an example of the story because they've seen that having the relationship and having the calls for service with us has helped they are not in the top forty another one that i would point to as a success story is one thing i think when you were asking what are some of the concerns that were brought forth in our public meeting someone said this isn't fair based on region so there's a region in the city that has a harder time than other regions and it's not fair that you're  that we're being penalized because of where our location is the answer to that is we have one of our motels that has been a long term voluntary member of our crime free hotel motel there in that region along colfax east of wodsworth they have a national night out party every year we go out there they have good management practices and they are just inside the top fifty percent and they're there to away from being below you in the top fifty so if we want to say management practices can work and no matter where you are under what conditions you're in working with the police and being a community partner can make you successful and i think that's huge to think about too because i understood that was a concern but i'm like just go visit them so it's a partnership and you emphasize that over and over so there was one big ask and that was what that number was and there the recommendation was forty percent and is that amina believe forward with forty percent and of course this is just to continue the conversation i think i heard the other issue was to get a little bit more information about the authority so i may need to get better clarity because i think it does outlined but you want to get a better understanding of what the cost related to uh would be so on the forty percent threshold as there this on that add one of my concerns as we were talking about the authority is it sounded like we may need to start out with maybe only one hearing officer but as time goes along we may actually need to have a two level hearing procedure one where just for the simple stuffy one person could hear but then as it gets more serious we may need to have you know a couple more people involved in that decision making just as a way to make it fair i just wanted to note that with the forty percent is fine with me as long as we have that significant crime back up in there because there are some places that have a number of significant crimes but we're not in the  other thing i would add is just that uh you know i know we probably don't want to do look backs for every single thing we do up here but it's probably a good idea to take another look at this program a year from now or something like that just to see how successful we've been or if we've been successful or et so you we have consensus to move this forward we have consensus with the forty there's been some questioning about just a better understanding about the authority and what that looks like is that then something that you you can dig into more and get some more information as you move towards the final ordinance absolutely yes i got a yes from jinnah that's all i thought i needed the record they still have to meet the application requirements and we have some standards in there but to your point yes it would be difficult to if you changed ownership to hold a new owner accountable for previous owners actions so so if someone is and shameful violation and right before they go the hearing officer they could sell their interest in the property and there was a clean slate there i don't know that the call for service number would change though hope it's still and if it's still in operation they start that call for service number so they may then be able to say well i get my mandatory initial meeting but sure but you're still over the limit so okay  there's some there's history that follows so you're saying that history would carry so it wouldn't it yeah i wasn't by immersion yeah and i knew that this i was gonna be shut down and charlie was my brother and i sold it to charlie yeah let me check what they're asking is if there's a there's a change in ownership so if if frank owns the place and he's about to be shut down by the licensing authority and he shows it sells it to his brother bill what's the where does the history of the of the place go into process with the license thank you i haven't been in front of you very often so um so my understanding is if someone wants to sell the facility and is it because and because they're in trouble  so the license is not they can't transfer the license so it would be a new application for whoever it is that's trying to buy the the facility and in the application we want everyone to list who it is that's responsible for the business that's purchasing so the idea is having the individuals listed so that we know who they are and one of the questions is have you ever had a license revoked suspended or denied before from lakewood or another jurisdiction so i guess you know someone could have a license denied and then reapply but it's never going to be transferred to someone else it's there it's not able to transfer so it's always going to be a new application that makes at legally and we're gonna discuss as a group and if it is completely shut down and you transfer ownership to someone else do they get the reopen it on if it's completely shut down then a new applicant a new application has to be filed so it's nothing can be transferred so i guess the questions going to be when we review the new application ability for some of the businesses that are in trouble to be able to just transfer it to a different person to avoid dealing with the problems so that's why we made sure it couldn't just automatically be transferred to someone else right thank you mister betta well and i think that more importantly what you want to make sure that you do is if let's say you've got to a point where you're going to revoke a license now you come in a new owner purchases the physical property the facilities but what you're going to want to be sure that you do is keep make sure that the previous owner is totally divested from any ownership  either either in the way of a financing agreement or minority shareholder or anything like that because otherwise you really haven't accomplished anything and i think that's that's the kind of thing i would be concerned about is is looks like you got a new owner and a new manager but lurking behind there the the old owner is still involved in some way financially has a financial interest in some way in that business that's what you want to avoid i think yeah down sells and it ends up being run by the same person who was supposed to be out of it so that is something we're aware of and we want to make sure is not an option for them to do all right thank you thank you all very much well done very well done and we'll send it back and see when it comes back okay sir any other clarifications i mean i think really the time the time frame you know is when we can get these things you know dealt with and then brought back in a more complete ordnance i can go to first reading or if you think you can go to first reading once these changes are made yeah so um we will look into the additional information that you asked for one being the role and the responsibilities the responsibilities of the authority and then also as it relates to this this new owner concept and what those ramifications are and how we can protect protect the city's interests here so  i think we we will huddle and figure out how to respond accordingly and i think maybe we'll provide written information for you and then wait to hear what that feedback might be so if we need to have another conversation or if we can integrate it into the first reading we'll just wait and just give us some time to work it through work these answers and give it to you and then kind of see how that falls we really want to get this right the first time and it sounds as if or it looks as if most of you are interested in us to look back a year after it's adopted so is that something we ought to fold in as well okay after it's adopted though so once we have all of em yeah worked out good thank you yeah it's just i we are okay because there's a lot of businesses in neighborhood goods etc that are interested in this and we're okay to talk to them about where we are at this point or okay that's that's what i assumed but i've assumed things before so okay thank you all right thank you so i'll open up the public input portion and we've had some folks sign up if you didn't have a chance once we go through the list if you'd like to speak i'll invite you down you have three minutes is this working now okay so this little box here will be green for two and a half it's black box there and then when you have thirty seconds left it will go yellow and when your time is up it'll go red and i'll politely ask you to wrap it up so first up i have albert the police department and we've implemented all of the recommendations they've given to us and the majority officers that come to us say that we're doing an excellent job so we believe them and we kept on with  practices that we've done before now i am concerned that me as an owner and the management that i have running the business are going to be skeptical about calling if there's a problem now i am  i am i am kind of glad that you're talking about not holding that against us which i appreciate because we've been diligent about calling most of our calls are for people that refuse to leave the rooms why you haven't paid your rent your must be out at ten o'clock why aren't you out we have no choice but the call to police because they and some of them get physical they want to  to fight with you or they yell and scream obscenities and i have female operator workers that should not hear that i've told them at ten o'clock at night do not go out if there's a problem call the police right away and if they have a problem in the rooms please call the police and we've been calling the numbers we have is eighty two the manager tells me he's been calling probably all those numbers and so and we haven't had any significant criminal activity in our place we had one death by overdose that's it and that wasn't that wasn't by our fault we try to help him he was a parolee one question i had was if a parole officer comes to visit a parolee am i hell against that sometimes they come five or ten into the rooms looking for these guys the other day my manager told me that there was eight officers it took out two people are the rooms is that gonna be countered against us hopefully not that's all i have to say thank you great thank you we'll try to capture some of these questions to make sure that they're included  miller i'm the general manager at the sheraton denver west hotel located at three hundred and sixty union boulevard thank you first of all for your concern about safety we certainly share that concern we definitely understand you know where this is coming from we are happy to not be one of the poor performers so maybe a little bit different perspective that we're speaking from i think that a majority of my points were actually already talked about and i don't want to be redundant i do share concern about discouraging hotel owners or operators from calling the police and i think more so if owners and management are suggesting to their team members their employees to not call the place when they feel like it's necessary putting them in unnecessary danger i also share the concern that we have a lot of calls that you know have to do with things like eviction hz these are not any sort of violent criminal activities but they are things that we feel sometimes put our employees in danger or maybe particularly we just really don't have control over we have to call and get help for and we don't want to be penalized for those types of things  think there just needs to be really good consideration given to kind of qualifying those calls it sounds a little bit complicated and maybe even subjective what is going to determine a call that counts against a hotel versus one that is maybe you know an approved call so i think really trying to narrow down what does that mean because right now it feels like a gray area and it feels subjective and like we won't really understand what is you know something that would be considered a call against us or a point against us and then for our hotel personally because again we're not necessarily you know anywhere near the threshold that you guys are talking about is the language about a significant criminal act has occurred on the lodging facilities premises the fact that just one criminal act could put us in front of the authority and again a little bit gray on what that what that is so i would be interested in that as well that's of particularly concern for us is just that one something that could be one event and that's outside of the call per roam ratio really that's all that i have thank you guys again for including us in this process and the you know the first operating and owned that motel for about twenty twenty five years so they devoted you know one third of their lives in the hotel and thank you very much officer today i think the presentation was great but one thing that i don't agree with what he's saying is that i guess all of the council and then two people before me had the same opinion that by imposing a restricting the call nine one one is just way of not preventing the criminal activity but somehow it's increasing  because if i'm the owner of the hotel and i'm like about to hit my limit line then even though unless the people are killing or unless like really really violent activities going on i'm not gonna call because in the line so my take on it is that is there any way to work with you know this hotel owner and policeman or police department rather than just  eleven call is there anything else because just by restricting nine call is not going to help the you know the problem because like i said the people the business owner are in danger especially my name's our names are in pop we're not gonna make any call period even though there's a criminal activity so my suggestion my you know take on it is that please please reconsider this let's talk about i mean we are open to discussion so let's talk about other ways to prevent criminal activity in motels or hotels other than just restricting nine hundred and eleven calls that's what i have to say thank you anybody else all right so with the last two comments so i would say just we'll continue to have outreach and mister sal i i think there is a lot more than just calling nine and we'll get that you know we'll make sure we get more information but it truly is a partnership and our agents are gonna be able to go out and sit down with you and your family and talk to you about ways that don't mean you have to call nine hundred and eleven and try to help you achieve a safer and more productive business so that's really the goal okay all right thank you all right so that is it on lodging license thank you again and last but certainly not least we have item number five just proposed amendments to the campaign finance ordinance i'm gonna turn this over now to our campaign finance committee chair councillor ab aylesh found out at one o'clock this afternoon i was the presenter this is my slide show and i saw it for the second time at six thirty so  consensus are the issues on which we reached consensus the consensus was unanimous there are two or three that were four to one i was the one in decision involving colorado springs in their campaign finance law the appellate court decided that if a municipality february of two thousand and thirteen i'm sorry in june of two thousand and eight that's the wrong one to my note oh there we go we had regulated write in candidate votes and instituted a provision for the cancellation of elections so because we did that the entire had presented some concerns and we also had on the heels of forming the ad hoc committee we had a us district court ruling saying that it is not the purview of private citizens to bring complaints and prosecute them it is the purview of the municipal entity so as we were working through this we saw that we now had to develop a new hearing process and campaign finance reporting violation reporting process the ruling doesn't mean that citizens cannot point out possible violations so our process addresses that as well  how to handle the hearings themselves and it leaves the community number out of the prosecution of it and out of the out of writing checks for lawyers to defend themselves we have an initiative where that's happening now so we the first thing we did the best thing we did was to retain the services of which was to impose lower donor limits for contributions to candidates established disclaimer requirements for electioneering materials implement the enforcement process that complies with the federal court ruling enhanced transparency know who is donating to whom and how much limit the influence of corporations and donations from unidentifiable sources corporations because you don't know who in this vast corporation as donated the or made the contribution or authorized it and to tighten the deadlines for filing reports require more frequent filings and as we approach the election one of the major things we have done is to reduce  contribution limits for candidates to four hundred dollars for council candidates and eight hundred dollars for the mayor at present i believe if you're running for governor you're limited to six hundred dollars if you're running for mayor of lakewood you're limited to five thousand dollars per contribution so we thought that to be a bit out of whack  we want to attribute proportional contributions from llc's limited liability corporations that is in large part for local donations come from and through a business conduit at at one time we had one fellow who had four or five llc's all of them did nothing but make political contributions and they were these aren't the exact names of them but five five one six llc four nine one three l and thirty twelve llc no way you knew that person was and by doing so they could put four for maximum donations to work  out of their own pocket so transparency became a big factor the committee has met nine times and have come up with a document i believe is very worthy and mister goose kane took our suggestions and made them comply with the law and he i think enhance some of them to a degree that we hadn't even considered so but very significant changes we  we also have done such things as added to put disclaimers back into the code that so if a you know where an ad or electioneering piece of materials coming from if it's coming from an independent expenditure committee that has no connection with the candidate that's going to be clearly noted if the candidate or the candidates committee provides it and that will be clearly noted those are the highlights and  we've had this before us for our reading pleasure for weeks now and i think what we have well where we are now is to answer the questions that council may have i'm going to rely on council discussion great questions well well done i want to thank the committee for all your work and thank council for having the opportunity to have a study session this is an important piece of legislation and i've gone through it once before so this will be the second time so i know it's important to try to get it as as good as we can right now and it probably won't be perfect nothing is but this is the first step of that opportunity vincent i had one question section a two five four point zero four zero on the second part page twenty one which is on ours it says that submit that you can run for counsel but i think that's after two hundred and seventy or one hundred and eighty is there a provision in here that says you can't you can only file a report if you've already submitted a candidate i mean if i'm a candidate and i file after the two hundred and seventy ahthe day that i'm supposed to report i can't report i don't believe you have to do meet any of those i mean it makes sense you can't you can't file a report and that's a good point  i think the is often the case they answer your question is in definitions rather than in substantive provisions until a person becomes a candidate and forms a candidate committee there's no reporting responsibility at the point at which you file your papers and and then register as a as a candidate committee your reporting obligation whether it's before the th day or if it's on the hundredth day at that point it clicks in so i think not directly but effectively and that's exactly the the way the the state law works as well okay so you whenever you filed you'd fall into that next one if i filed on day hundred i'd have to report on day ninety okay thank you thank you excellent presentation councillor abel that's charitable thank you and thanks to the committee for doing all this this is a painful and it takes a lot of time so thank you so much my question is and i had asked you this a little bit earlier mister cruz can in the definition of corporation that's defined in here there's a lot of sub s corporations would you clarify how sub s has fall into this and how they would be required to report the ordinance doesn't change the existing definition of corporation for purposes of the campaign finance ordinance and treats as a corporation any entity that is incorporated under the state corporate act so if an entity does fall within that that provision it will it will be treated for purposes of prohibitions on direct contributions to candidates as a corporation obviously an s corp will be taxed as a partnership even though it has a corporate capacity under your existing ordinance and under the ordinance going forward an s corp as i understand it would qualify as a corporation under state law and therefore be subject to the prohibition on corporate contributions okay and then just any other business entity then we're also for example a partnership would also be excluded correct partnerships are excluded from the definition of corporation and to the extent that a limited liability company forms those members will only be able to contribute up to their individual maximum amount so because a partnership actually has the names of two different people or however many and you can tie the contribution to that specific person not the vague name of a corporation that's why it's why it's acceptable then  there's a long history of how corporations are treated under campaign finance laws stemming back to the teddy roosevelt days when corporations and labor unions were both prohibited from political activity partnerships and and other entities that hadn't really emerged as political forces at that point and yes partnerships have a different treatment although you could if you wanted to incorporate within this  provision a light treatment to the limited liability companies such that partners could only give up to their individual amount based upon their partnership share i think as long as we make it clear and and fair for all business entities i have no problems with it i get the goal and i'm not opposed to the goal i just i didn't understand the difference on unsub s so it sounds good thank you and if i may if you're a member of llc your responsibility for the donation is in direct proportion to your holdings as a member of the llc how much of the llc you own and you cannot make four hundred dollars donation to a councilperson as a member of an llc and then turn around and do it as a private person it's still going to go with your name so even if we if it's two partners both partners contribute contribute the maximum a piece but then no more so it all evens out that way m right thank you for your presentation councilman abel i just a based on some public comment i've received i had a few sort of questions and thoughts about possible for second reading one of the comments i received was pertaining to whether it's wise to call our sort of disclosure requirement on yard signs things like that whether it's wise to call that a disclaimer or not just based on sort of the definition of of a disclaimer is that a typical just standard campaign finance practice to call it that or that's it's a it's a term that's used under the federal election law under state election law there is legislation that's going to be proposed in the upcoming colorado general assembly that will expand disclaimer then another comment was under our definition of alec electioneering communication we don't really have anything specifically pertaining to internet communications as wondering if that's may be wise to add that the definition the  the electioneering communication definition you're correct doesn't refer to any sort of internet or social media or other electronic communications it does have an  encompassing phrase or otherwise distributed but i don't know that the i don't know certainly the in my experience the the more clarity and the more specificity typically equates with a greater opportunity for compliance and understanding which is really what you want to generate so i would think that including a reference such as the one that you're you're making i think would be beneficial okay thank you another question would you mind speaking to the reason why the banning of corporate donations was focused more towards campaign candidate committees and as opposed to independent expenditures or or other types of political committees the route of campaign finance regulation is about prohibiting either the appearance or the actuality of corruption of public officials the notion that certain entities are more inclined to act in a way that would lead to corruption of public officials is really limited to candidate committees because there's no way the united states supreme court has litigated  has addressed this several times there's really no way to corrupt a ballot issue for instance and likewise as to political committees or independent expenditure committees if those entities are in fact operating independent of candidates there's no corruption influence and therefore without that influence or the potential for that influence you run into first amendment issues when you start to restrict either sources or amounts of contributions and the footnote to that pretty boring conversation is citizens united versus federal election commission so basically the united states supreme court has said hands off thank you for that  and i think my last question is and we had a pretty robust conversation about fishbowls was i right in our or remind me is that something we could do is just flat out very good discussion didn't really come to a consensus on anything but as a footnote to the ordinance we have a couple of possible additions one of them says no committee makes candidate committee may accept any contribution in currency or coin of more than twenty dollars from any contributor or failed to report contributors of currency of coin of more than twenty dollars that's how we try to eliminate what we call the fishbowl contribution where you set out a fist poke at one of your campaign events and people come up and put in less than twenty dollars or less sometimes they'll put in twenty dollars or less five or six times i'm told mister betta and i have never had that experience so as is kind of hard for us to imagine you'd walk away from  campaign event with two grand in twenty dollars bills but i guess it could be done so we have that as a possibility to add to the ordinance of council so wishes thank you blessing is just a comment really i just thank everyone for the who was on the committee did a lot of great work i enjoyed this committee as much as anyone can enjoy any committee and  and i think the work is not done but i think we did a i think we did a lot of good stuff here and i think i think that'll hopefully reflect in the next election but you know time will tell so thanks we have a few months public finance component of campaigns and hopefully we will get to that in the next couple of months so i have a few questions  it looks like we may have some amendments so when we proceed to adopt will you be present with within that realm or at second reading on the th of january yes okay and i guess one's a clarification because we are adopting mister cox he had mentioned there be perceived or some sort of language that will state any because it won't be adopted and go into a loss to a certain amount of time but it'll have some sort of disclaimer that anybody that you will be so close to the municipal election how to address that i came up with one proposal that was imperfect but would think that maybe in the next week or a couple weeks i can discuss it with mister cock so we can come up with a maybe a more poetic way of making sure that there is fairness among candidates who have collected funds prior to and after this particular ordinance would go into effect so there is a proposed amendment was that drafted by in our packet there's a proposed amendment that was my my less than poetic version yeah all to vision yeah okay well we'll have to see where that goes i mean i i don't quite i mean a campaign is a campaign and to arbitrarily throw in a catch up  provision on potentially folks that have been raising money and saying well the rules change so we're gonna limit you or handicapped yeah i don't think that is fair and that might just be a personal opinion so but i'd be willing to question that legally and i guess my second question would be the the banning of labor unions being able to give donations to an individual campaign so that clearly passes a legal  test that has been upheld equal treatment of corporations has been upheld both at the united states supreme court and the colorado supreme court it's fair and what was the what was the i guess behind limiting contributions from labor unions as you know know who the numbers are that are kicking in the money it became a very contentious issue among the union numbers themselves as well i don't want that kind of data i want that candidate so we don't know who those people are who are directing the money toward the allowing them so that was that was the thought of a couple of the council of the committee members said legree unions be held of the same standard if i could just add that even though corporations can't use corporate funds and labor unions can't use general treasury funds for purposes of donations both entities can form a political committee or a small donor committee and therefore their employees or their union members can still give in a concerted way for purposes of municipal campaigns it's just not out of their general treasuries and in the case of those two  there's certain limitations on identifying for instance members of an association and that goes back into first amendment law but the the  at the point at which you are giving more than twenty dollars during a reporting period your name will appear on a report for a small donor committee in this at the state level it's fifty dollars  purposes of this ordinance in order to promote that kind of activity it's one hundred dollars per election cycle and if people are giving say five dollars every reporting period you won't see their names their names will their amounts will simply be in an anion tributon tonal but if they're giving fifty dollars in a reporting period you will see their name so if they are just gradual givers small givers because obviously a labor union and for instance if you have a lot of people giving five dollars in a reporting period those reporting obligations become unduly burdensome so if i was donating from an llc and i had an llc that employed a hundred people it's just like a corporation you don't know that it's not the employees it's the members of the llc well people who get together to form the limited liability corporation their employees or their employee sure but that money comes from the llc which could be produced by the employees of the llc i'm just saying there's not if you're looking at a corporation or llc or a labor union and then the idea would be to disclose who's donating you don't get that with an llc as you get a member i'm sorry you get a member you get a member and the proportionate amount of their ownership of the llc determines how much of that donation they're responsible for and they can they can donate up to the limit but then they cannot donate more personally i understand in our current our current ordinance it requires identification of members of an llc who contribute more than one hundred dollars m who's donating the money so good i just you're correct there's kind of a yin and yang absolutely reporting and i think the committee struggled with how far push but i think the the notion of ensuring that there is more frequent reporting will certainly disclose what entities are politically active  and there's also particularly for independent expenditure committees a heightened level of disclosure to so that so that groups that have neighbors for a better neighborhood but you don't really know what their interests are  you're you're gonna know more about kind of their lobbying presence and their their policy interest so that that too is disclosed but but you're one hundred percent right mayor there's not you you could let me put it this way you could adopt an ordinance that requires every single penny in every reporting period to be disclosed and that's an option i think the committee was trying to be careful not to be too burdensome on reporting images and not to say that i i agree or disagree i'm just all right you know i mean it's it's a totally valid approach do i guess for me what i worry about and it's the same thing i'm worried about when we did this a few years ago you know in some ways when you put more restrictions in different areas you just push the money in the dark and it's becomes dead money and more ambiguities less transparency hopefully this won't happen and could you speak to me a little bit because you did bolster the electioneering was that so did you do that just through definition of electioneering or did you add more the  requirements putting the failure to disclaim communications under the campaign finance complaint process and for those  don't put any sort of disclaimer at all and just try and stay under the radar authorizing the city clerk to hire appropriate investigators to determine who sent it out and in the campaign finance complaint process of your existing ordinance there was a lowering of the dollar amount so that there will be that that will trigger reporting so that there will be more reporting there was clarity that five hundred and one c four organizations couldn't form to conceal the source of their donors but they too were required if they're going to engage in electioneering communications and  such entities are going to have to disclose their professional lobbyists at the state level and any lobbyists that they hire here at the city level so that when that disclosure is had the citizens of lakewood can know what interests are being advanced from a policy point of view for the purpose of your election process so is that all encompassing when you said and i'll get lost in translation on the five hundred and four is that are there  others that need to be included or that pretty much is in what we've seen in the city of lakewood that's where entities will create under that to have to remain under the radar don't know the specific lakewood experience but the engage in a partisan politics or electoral politics so i think as a significant first effort you will be mandating more disclosure than a lot of your counterpart and i will tell you the very first thing the committee asked me to do was again a model campaign finance ordinance from someone else in colorado and in talking to other city attorneys in the municipal league i was told you're about to write it there we go we'll take that okay so the last i guess kind of area that i want to go into is the ease of reporting in the availability of forms i mean where we've struggled in the past is we have kind of an antiquated system no offense madam clerk so i want to make sure that we're ready as an organization to take this on to make sure that people there's no barrier to being able to run to file you know no matter what area you want to be in and to have access to that and do you feel are we going to be prepared to have this and  going to be pretty user friendly i hope yes we've had some discussions with it already about looking at those forms again right now it's an excel spreadsheet which seems to be working okay i know it's not ideal we have had those conversations with it to see if there's something out there better or a different way to do it but yeah we are prepared to move forward with whatever you decide one of the reasons also that we've instituted more frequent reporting and more reports is because the old ordinance was designed for a polling place election on on the first tuesday in november so we have now tried to institute a reporting system that will cover the mailing period from mid october into election day one of the other things i neglected to mention is that when we lowered the campaign contribution limits or proposed to lower them they're eight hundred and four hundred we're also eliminating a provision called the extraordinary donation which now requires you if you get a donation over a certain amount within thirty days of the election you have to report it within twenty four hours and that's pretty onerous  the thousand dollars right so this by lowering these donate we no longer have an extraordinary donation that you have to report so that that twenty four hour period ability of the public to see more frequent reports so they'll know they'll have a better idea of who's donating  what and when and it doesn't run over until the end of november after the election when the really big bucks that were donated come into that final report that's in your existing ordinance i have no idea why it was originally put in there does it my guess is that it is that what it does is it attempts to incorporate the requirement that say a radio or tv station that has on where a candidate has place to buy that that is an open record that other individuals can go review so that they can get a sense including the media and especially the media here but those those records are public records under federal law as a matter of f requirement so this is a nice duplication but it doesn't doesn't really create any new requirement okay and then last year because this is this is brand new to the city and was kind of beyond the scope but i think it's a good deal is the limited ability that we're going to start doing with lobbyist registration and is that kind of uniform to what we're adopting at the municipal level uniform to what the state disclosures are no nope okay you are you are ahead of the curve if and and that may not be something that you want you want to mandate but part of the issue that the committee raised was these groups spring up and no one really knows even when they're reporting what interests are being advanced particularly if there are out of state givers and so the one way of trying to address that was to you put that front and center as part of your reporting process as far as lobbyists go it's just just indicating whether or not lobbyists are retained in what their what their interests are in front of us but then we'll have a separate page that'll be dedicated to that platform with registered lobbyists so i'm assuming as a hell this is nana this does not impose a registration requirement what goes on at the state it simply requires that if you are doing if you are one of these independent groups you disclose that you have lobbyists that have particular interests in front of the city or the state so that the nature of the entity is disclosed okay so i thought there was another additional that even registering as a lobbyist to the city not having to do with contributions the committee did discuss that it was deemed to be somewhat have to memorize this marquee every election cycle puts together what you really need to know about election our campaign finance and a few short pages and that still that clarification will go office we do want to encourage more reporting and such by ie cease and pacs so that we know who they are and where they're coming from but  just based on sort of that lobby conversation and the public finance element and i think just reading through the ordinance it's pretty obvious there's probably plenty of room for clean up i can imagine you know the clerk and recorders would probably hate us but i could imagine seeing a need for potentially continuing the conversation for probably longer than anticipated for two months but just wanted to bring that up cool all right i'll up mister skilling sorry it wasn't on so just since we're you first reading is the next step on this what about the amendments to the amendments of the amendments what are we with those are we going to we haven't discussed the first one this exploratory committee are we going to take these amendments and insert them as for first reading so that the public sees them or was that our goal tonight to say consensus on adding any or one or all of these it looks like mister cox is poised to answer that question well except to the extent that these things have been discussed so i would defer to the confer any plan that you came forward with for the amendments i haven't been briefed explicitly on those i can speak to what we would generally do but was there a game plan well i think we should probably with these two things make a consensus find consensus on whether we want to include the fishbowl and the catch up provision  the exploratory committee also if there are any other ideas from council one of the one of my questions mister goose can was about electioneering  there is a practice called ballot harvesting where groups of people get together and say you know if you need us to take your ballot as as the mailings go in as ballots are mailed back to the county the clerk updates the list of who has not yet returned their ballots and folks will go out and say you know i will contact those folks and say and if not would you consider voting for gus thompson that would seem to me to be electioneering and since we no longer have polling place per se we have the mail in ballot that would seem to be electioneering within a few feet of the ballot box or the the method of casting a ballot so is there any way we can prevent that kind of i'll take it for you but will you vote for so and so yeah i think i think you're in a little bit of it if someone goes door to door knocks on your door asked if you voted asked if you'll vote for town council a woman x as long as you're at it you don't know if you're a hundred feet from their ballot you don't know if it's upstairs in the in the back study or if it's you know right there on the mail table they deliver the ballot to you eventually and you're within a hundred i think you're going to encounter some very interesting first amendment issues okay and you see no other way of well the you when you when you do that knock you have to disclose who's paying you under the under this ordinance so it can't just be hi i'm here because i care about democracy if you're being paid to do it it is an election it is a communication that is otherwise distributed and therefore part of your pitch has to be hi i'm here for you to see if you've voted by the way i'd love for you to vote for councilwoman x and i'm being paid by neighbors for a really good neighborhood charlie able registered agent not authorized by any candidate okay but and if it's a volunteer volunteers are exempt right but volunteers are still subject to the ballot rule under states basically you're saying there's no hedge we can put in there to prevent that sort of influence i i can't conceive of a way to kind of restrict on that level of speech no okay thank you so to that point do you want to start at the do you want to strike the and so that was part of this discussion you disclose everything whether it's five dollars or twenty five dollars the piece of paper is the same so this council want to and and if we don't have a consensus that can still be brought to the floor but do you want to do something with that eliminate the fishbowl exception the franks wants to get rid of the fishbowl period so let's move that into the ordinance looks like there's a consensus in just just to be clear this piece of paper probably needs to be clarified it would be about striking the current provision that that exists rather than inserting a new provision just just for clarity s although you know what i don't think we need to go we should go down this process because we're not taking votes tonight so i think these should just be prepared as potential amendments yeah yep so we'll just we'll just leave these three and then we can have some more conversation on second reading and i may need to reach out because the second one i'm really confused the one hundred and eighty third day the rd day so it gets a little bit i've read a few times i don't understand that so no and it sounds like i'm not alone okay anything else and we'll go to public input okay first up miss feely good evening for me would be much cleaner than what we've had in the past so i'm real excited to see it go forward and the committee worked really well they i got to attend many of their meetings  saying okay there are like there are small donor committees that already exist and they can only take fifty dollars they are not going to increase their contribution for a local election to one hundred dollars if they play in the state pile because the state right now says fifty so it'd be a small donor committee that would be formed just for liquid that would do the hundred so i think it would be very confusing to track it and i did ask some treasures of some various small donor committees around and they were like we're just gonna stay at the fifty so that was the feedback i got oh and for folks who don't know m feely is also considered an expert in colorado campaign finance and she attended every one of our meetings we had public comment during those meetings and she was very forthcoming i think it was almost the sixth committee member so we we really appreciate your input you're welcome thank you very much  and accountable government and seeks to strengthen public participation the organization i represent has been instrumental in many electoral campaign finance reforms in colorado for example we led an enacted amendment forty one which blunted the influence of big money lobbyists put a stop revolving door between public and private sectors and created the state's ethics commission more recently carl common cause helped with the passage of amendments y and z the independent redistricting commission ballot measures ensuring that representatives represent the public fairly today however i want to express our general support for the campaign finance reforms in question there are many laudable improvements found in the ordinance too many to list here but a few that stand out to us include the increased reports required of the candidates and issue committees the reduction in contribution limits for mayoral and city council candidates disclosure and disclaimer requirements for political communications banning the influence of foreign entities closing the loophole that allowed people to exceed contribution  which most of these have been discussed already here and just as importantly the ordinance empowers the city clerk to find committees which failed to abide by the disclaimer requirements and we would support you know as was just discussed here adding clarifying internet and web communications as well cause i want people to trust their local government it's hard for all of us to do that when undisclosed money places its thumb upon the scales making the process unfair adopting the proposed ordinance here and lakewood is certainly a step in the right direction and a step toward making sure the democratic process is fair and that it's honest so thank you for your time and thanks for working on this thank you very much miss peters  evening welcome formerly vicki peters known to some of you recently deciding to use my middle name lee okay ellie igh and i too wanted to give my thanks i'm very excited to see lakewood showing the leadership and the tremendous amount of work that has obviously gone into this ordinance thus far i spent a lot of i haven't been able to attend the meetings the committee meetings but i i've spent a lot of time looking at it and this the substance is great and i'm great admiration for mister gryska but it's it's in pretty difficult shape right now and so i just hope i understand that there's a imperative to get it done maybe if you can't um before the next election but i would really encourage the committee to keep working on it and allow mister gryska in the time that he needs to  pretty it up and there are some organizational issues there's some work in progress issues some inconsistencies and i would hate to see after all of this work in dedication for it to go in and creating a lot of problems and  questions so i hope you can do that i support all of the highlights that you mentioned it is complicated stuff and i was an i was a candidate once and campaign finance was the most daunting part of it you know am i going to screw that up so i appreciate that you appreciate that we don't want it to be an impediment to candidates just briefly there are a couple of things  we talked about the the whole digital issue i think it's more than just a definition i think i think the committee and mister gross can really need to think about each and every provision and figure out how it would be  w it would affect the digital world for example there's a provision in there that says if if it's an ad on tv you know it has to be so big and play for so long well what about how long does it have to be if it's pop up add on on you know on the computer or if you paying somebody to control the internet and or and and look for opportunities to comment you know is that a communication i mean i can't i'm not that savvy on this stuff but i really think that somebody needs to go through it and just concentrate on that issue because that's where we're going so i will i will stop there and thank you once again thank you le alright anybody else yes please come on down if you want to stop by the clerk's desk too and just sign in that'd be much appreciate while he's doing that lee i'd say if you have some of those glaring instances or examples maybe share them with councilor abel and he can check that out reform organization working nationally and based here in colorado and i'm also a member of the newspaper guild and i should mention there is a major campaign finance reform that just was passed in denver with seventy one percent of the vote and a win in every precinct that does a lot of what you're doing it dramatically lowers the contribution limits to be more in keeping with the state limits as you've done it bans corporations from donating as you've done it requires it required disclosure in an earlier draft and council adopted that before this got to the ballot and let's see  with a big thing it does is it does add public financing and i would strongly encourage you to continue researching public financing and consider putting that in that has a huge effect on  engagement you talked about not wanting to discourage people from running it encourages more and more people to run more women to run more people of color to run more young people to run you get a much more diverse legislature that really reflects the community they come from i'm in support of everything and here i think i think it's a great step forward i'm really happy you all are taking this initiative there's one big question i had and it did just come up about the small donor  committees and i'm not sure that going from fifty to a hundred as is the standard statewide that going to a hundred helps encourage people to use it i think what encourages people to use it a lot and really focus on is small donor empowerment and the small donor committee statewide is fifty dollars denver adopted one just now for fifty dollars but they give they're able to give much more to a candidate so state you can give roughly ten times more as a small donor committee then the limit is for a regular individual you have allowed them to give twice as much i think as a regular individual i would consider lowering it back to fifty to be consistent with the state and other municipalities and maybe add the incentive on the amount that they can give making it maybe four times as much instead of twice as much given that the statewide standard is about ten times as much let's see if just wrap up pretty quickly here the fishbowl thing i would do away with any anonymous reporting i have been to a campaign event where they say give us a twenty we'll give you a penny and i don't i don't like anonymous contribution so i think if you can do away with that that's great and i would encourage i don't know exactly where you are on the rap on the access of the reports but i hope  that in addition to the ease of filing those reports it's easy for people to access them and that's about my time so thank you very much i think this is a great proposal and i'd be happy to talk more about what we've done in denver that you'll see implemented soon  thank you very much thanks for coming out thanks for everybody that came out and and luckily all of our reports i think going back to two thousand and seven are online and pretty easily accessible if you can get to that page on our main website but once you get there it's all there nice and easy cool well i think we are good to continue working and see this back in a week and then adoption coming up in so there's some consensus to follow so statewide fifty dollars limit who we could produce language and that would just be another amendment just add it to the list of three  back for a formal look so that would be exploratory ketchup heinz ketchup and the fishbowl and now the small donor and then anything else council might have in the meantime based on feedback that has been received we can do that mister libr i know this won't be a catch all or solve all the problems but do we want to look at maybe adding that a an electioneering communication adding that internet component to it or in the definition yeah i think there was consensus for that and as harrison had a question about gofundme which does not provide individual names for contributions it said we address that in some form and i wasn't aware that they would fund campaigns but i basically a gofundme would be a political committee that would if it gave would be subject to reporting or would have a complaint filed against it whoever organized t and one of the things we were also considering is that we put some teeth in here the thought came up in committee that annex independent expenditure committee could break all our rules just walk they could be found in violation and find and we wanted to add some language that we can use any legal method of collection so that they couldn't just walk away from their obligation we could pursue them through debt collection is that did we put that in here and should we i know denver has it in specifically in their ordinance that was originally an amendment twenty seven in the constitutional provision and we could come up with an amendment to adapt language giving the the city authority to pursue the after the complaint process is resolved pursue collection i'd like to see that is the so there looks like there's consensus now would you are you just limiting this to and i'll get to my end part of this i've worried about penalisation of individuals who may not have done something right on their filings and were subjected to a fine and then going to collections over trying to do that so are you limiting it to just small donors i think no i think we were going to limit be i think you might have an equal protection issue if you don't but you should know one one provision that hasn't been highlighted is that well the clerk's authority to both commence the the complaint process and impose fines and collect fines is clear there's also a process before the clerk to waive fines where there has been a good faith error or there's been substantial compliance so as because the committee was very sensitive to the fact that a lot of candidate committees in particular are driven by citizen efforts and volunteers and people doing their very best but they may overlook a single donation or a single  reporting event so you may have that protection in a different way and you should know that that very process reflects what the secretary of state is empowered to do currently so you've got that level protection and one other thing it does is give margie the ability to notify candidates that they haven't met a deadline and instead of finding them immediately they get seventy two hours to cure as we thought was it's good they would cover those bases and and remove other impediments so with that said then the as there's consensus that council wants to do something along these lines but i think we need a little bit better direction as to what entities this should cover or sounds like it needs to just cover everybody i guess so so this council want to go forth with that sort of provision okay asma as an additional amendment one thing you could do is set up a dollar amount so the any fine exceeding so that it's a significant fine would merit these collection efforts and then i think you might effectively go after entities that are spending much more money and reporting in a less than compliant way and thinking of when you're when you cast that big check all right charlie's fishbowl is gonna be full so anything else okay thank you thank you appreciate everybody coming out weighing in we'll go to reports this hot cindy of anything mister cox do you have anything okay so uh i just want to say and thank the community and thank the staff and all the volunteers that made lakewood lights a wonderful success this year just got incredible feedback from from many people who really enjoyed it we had a great turnout from council i apologize councilor vita was there we did not see him and he did not get a ride on the fire truck so we'll have to make that up to you next year we had an incredible santa clause as well so thank you thank you thank you tomorrow is colorado gives day great opportunity for you to support one of your favorite charities if you're so inclined but that's a great opportunity and the near future towards the end of a planning session excuse me towards the end of january i don't remember the specific date but yeah twenty six thank you so we're gonna be getting to all of you soon to give you sort of a little update on on some of the plans there and councillor vincent's gonna back me up because i only remember two points that i wrote down so she's gonna get the other couple but one of the things items that we're gonna have is we're gonna have a speaker  it's gonna be one it'll be relatively limited especially especially as it relates to last year i know that we had speakers for a little bit longer and then also we'll be reviewing sort of how  report report outs and such we will have some prep work that'll need to be done and there'll be more information about that and jacob and myself information will be sent out about that in the very near future and we're going to spend a great deal of time talking about our priorities for next year for two thousand and nineteen does that exhaust your report does your able exhausted harrison two things first of all i wanted to tell everyone what a great ward five meeting we had last saturday discussion about metro west housings new sage corner which was an interesting discussion we'll just put it at that so we we got lots of feedback from the neighborhood and good stuff to take into consideration we'll have a repeat of that same discussion coming up this saturday but at a different location this will be at the westwood community church which is that wodsworth and woodard if you think everyone knows that there is a wonderful opportunity to hear wonderful music and singing coming up thursday and friday where there'll be a combined choral and orchestra presentation by the lakewood symphony orchestra and the colorado mormon chorale wonderful christmas music and if you want to get the feeling this is where you come it's at it will be held at the west jewel building which is sixty four sixty five west jewel avenue it begins at seven thirty p m both both thursday evening and friday evening and i'll tell you if you if you aren't believing in santa and christmas by the time you've get out of there there's no hope for you this morning at nine a m and thank you to the public who attended i have to say i thought it was a very good meeting but then again all of our development dialogue committee meetings are very good meetings i would encourage all the public to attend two weeks from now when we will do another a m monday start to finish up our site design and so the council is where we do have the mixed use stuff coming up january th and site design december th five thirty we have the next ad hoc housing committee meeting this is where we will finalize a very high level draft of what the go forward housing policy committee will do so please feel free to come and attend that and we will not have a ward four meeting this month so just wanted to remind folks mister betta no report miss vincent okay there's the o kane oh kane park by the oh kane neighborhood tomorrow at seven o'clock so it should be fine it'll be an ok and next tuesday we have the two creeks lighting contest for those of you in the two creeks neighborhood be sure to enter your house because there's some wonderful prizes and the top prize will is called the counselor's prize and it'll be given by the counselors all right very nice well we'll be back here next monday for a regular meeting and then we'll take three weeks off so come back and see us and thank you we'll adjourn agent hip well thank you sir be safe tonight