right i'd like to welcome everybody for this evening's study session which is a update and a presentation if you'd like to participate now this is different than general public comment this is your opportunity to weigh in on the specific items the phone number is one two five three two one five eight seven eight two webinar i d m m is nine three six seven six zero three nine three nine five you'll press pound after that to join the meeting and then star nine will be your flag to us that you wish to speak and then star six to  take just a moment or two to introduce our new city clerk so i wish i could do and i'm passing by because of this these days i'd like to introduce bruce roam briskly away so that's bruce rum he began today on he's just learning the ropes the city clerks office staff had a chance to be a part of the interview process and to a person he was  choice son just delighted and i know the city clerk's office is really delighted to have bruce so welcome bruce and bruce would you take just a moment and give us a little bit about your bckground maybe education that kind of stuff  just introduce yourself sure sure so first of all i would like to say that i'm really excited and very happy to be here starting my career in the city of lakewood as your city clerk the journey that led me here started about a dozen years ago and since then i've worked in a variety of roles at different municipalities i started my career just up the road and wheat ridge working for there like clark and most recently i was at the city where that as their records manager i've worked very hard over that time to achieve the education certifications to make me the best city clerk i can be that includes a master's in public administration as well as a master's municipal clerk which is the high service case you can and when i'm not here for the city of lakewood i have at home a wife of twenty one yers a nineteen year son and a seventeen year old daughter as well as three little dogs and a big cat that keeps the dogs in line so i look forward to getting to know each and every one of you thank you for us we're delighted to  to ben goldstein for being our interim guy who learned a lot too so thanks to the team of bernie and ben ben and bernie that's unlike an ice cream or something but thanks to you too for all the work that you did and welcome to bruce all these be while they're getting ready councilor vincent is your hand working  good evening sergeant  good evening thanks for having us can you hear us both ok as we talk time you'll probably see mark and in the future so nice to meet you tonight we're here tonight to present on the lodging license ordinance and give you an update i know when we passed this we were all excited back in february of twenty nineteen and we promised you that we would start doing look backs and updates as necessary so you could feel like the ordinance was continuing to as ball as necessary and you felt up to date to keep your constituents informed so that's what we're here for herself without ado since it's been a little while and for anyone new watching we want to go over the purpose of the ordinance first and kind of how we got here so again you know there was these increasing calls for service to the local police department regarding various incidents at the hotels motels within the city you asked staff to look at options for how to reduce those calls for service and we came back with a lodging facility license program and we presented it and reviewed it an agreed that it was the best way moving forward to try and reduce these calls for service increases so a call for service we look at it as a reminder is anything but not limited to c enforcement that result in a law enforcement report of being dispatched or directed to the lodging facility so if someone calls the police and says say they need a cop at the location that counts as a call for service it also includes lodging facility the results in a criminal report being taken so when we say police initiated that means that i as a police officer am driving through the a lot of one of the hotels on a patrol and i identify a car that i find is stolen that's going to create a criminal report and because there's a criminal report it's a call for service as far as the license is concerned it also includes any call to emergency services or police initiated response in the surrounding neighborhood that we can tie back to the hotel so if we can show that the associate criminality was based out of the hotel that counts i do want to note it does not include traffic citations  a police officer pull someone over in front of a hotel and use that have hotels addresses the traffic incident location it does not include those and medical then calls so if someone calls because they had to think they had a stroke or  someone had a heart attack and the police aren't involved in any major way that doesn't count against them divided by the number of rooms that we have so it creates a level playing field right so to remind you the ratio what that does is that says we understand that a hotel with one hundred rooms is going to have more calls for service than a hotel with ten rooms so we make sure to take however many calls they have in a year and divided by the number of rooms to find out what their ratio is when we met with you when we went over to the ratios that were options for making decisions on what wa acceptable in lakewood u s city council voted for a maximum allowed ratio of one point eight nine calls for service per room per year the best way to think of that is if they have a ten room motel they can really have eighteen calls per year or nineteen just under nineteen calls per year when you make it that s so again on february th we were very fortunate that you agreed to pass this ordinance and then the following months all lodging facilities were required to obtain a license we we presented this as a very progressive education based ordinance that we really want to try and meet the hotels where they were at and try and help them improve and that's what we did so in those situations where a hotel had a call for service ratio over one point eight nine the only thing they were mandated to do by the license ordinance at first was simply meet with their cat agent so every hotel is assigned a cat agent for consistency relationship building and if they were over one point eighty nine based on the two thousand and seventeen data we ran they had to meet with a cat agent each motel when they met with us were provided a list of best practices we had developed and we also offered and they didn't have to but we said hey we'll come out and walk the property with you to walk through and talk with you about what you're seeing maybe come up with ideas of how to reduce crime and disorder next in and nineteen we hosted the lakewood hotel safety symposium and believe it or not this was in person i know those meetings you can't believe they would exist but we did have an in person meeting as recently as december of twenty nineteen right there in the council chambers that you guys missed so much and in this in this meeting we invited all the hotel owners management and staff to come and what was funny is we actually had people show up for blackhawk and central city we had some management so word of mouth spread and they showed up like what hotel are you from they're like oh we're from so and so casino so and so obviously we were targeting lakewood motels but it was great to have them and they said it was beneficial and it was nice to see that kind of that our that our work extended beyond our borders well it was well attended and we did make sure to keep track of what hotels attended so that way when we went to hearing anything we could show whether they had taken proactive voluntary steps to better understand august it was kind of a rotating basis that we started to get these hotels back with their one year amounts and when they hit their one year mark their license for that if you will we ran their numbers to see what their call for service ratio was what i wanted to show you here and this is the first data you'll see for tonight so i'm truly interested in this this is so when we reviewed this in twenty seventeen where you got that one point eight nine ratio was we showed you the top forty calls for service hotels in the city and you agreed that you would like to really hit that top forty percent that's where you want to see the reductions and so what we thought we would show you tonight is where the those hotels were in the twenty seventeen data and then where they are now at the end of their one year license data we'll go over some successes here and we'll also willing to talk about some of the concerns we have but you're going to see that some dropped pretty significantly comparatively from that twenty seventeen data to the best data we have now which is their first licensing celebrating successes nine of the fourteen top forty hotels saw declining calls will point out some of the highlights here that we're pretty proud the mesa motor in a fifty seven percent drop in calls talk a little bit more about that one in a minute the denver westin fifty three percent drop in calls mallory minor thirty nine percent and the a bar d a sixty four percent drop in calls they actually had the highest drop in calls at the mall i mean to drp that much is impressive for a hotel that had that much concern before so for those facilities that saw a decrease one thing we point out is ownership does matter when we talk about the mesa and i can tell you that the new owner was more than willing to let us present about this tonight i think he's very proud of the work he's done with this hotel mesa motor and had the highest call for service ratio in two thousand and seventeen when new ownership purchases and he actually bought it right around when this ordinance was passing so we met with him we want to learn what are the repercussions of the ordinance what's it going to mean for me as an owner and he went forward with the purchase he took the steps necessary with us to reduce it and they saw that fifty seven percent drop which again takes here let hm talk i'll still run the slides but he's going to talk you through the next part of this process okay can ever hear me okay i'll make sure since i'm just starting out here okay so i'll talk a little bit about the inspection process what we actually went through with all of the hotels motels this year at least the ones we've done so far this year  and kind of where the rubber meets the road as far as the actual inspection process the results of that so far so basically the way that the ordinance is set up is that there's a couple of ways we can have an inspection triggered one of those and what we did for these this year were based on the calls for service ratio that john already talked about there is also a option if it can be triggered by a significant criminal act which is basically defined as if we if we have an act that results in serious management's or the employees or are not involved in it or aware of it that's one of the things that we haven't we haven't had one and that's involves the management folks where we've taken the step of taking them hearing so all these we're talking about this our code enforcement officers play a big role in this as far as doing the actual inspections as well as the west fire department for their fire marshals were able to come out and provide assistance with these as well so definitely a team effort in addition to the folks from our police department which includes our crime analysts who were the ones who actually went through each of these calls and compiled them and basically we're able to compute those calls for service which is a lot of a lot of reviewing of  the calls themselves and determining what's appropriate to including that calls or service ratio so they really had a big part in that our cat team obviously has been very involved in it as well we also nice some of our other special teams  and our special enforcement team that provide some some assistance in the background as well as providing some security while we're doing these when we have all of our civilian partners out there making sure that we have enough of a police presence that they can do their job safely really every really contributed to the success of the inspection program so far same as far as those over one point eighty nine ratio we ran into some delays due to coded as far as a scheduling and completing these inspections so we stopped three of those pending but we have completed eleven of those e cat aent goes out and actually delivers a notification and talks with the management at the at the motel or hotel itself and lets them know that when we're when we're coming on the morning of the inspection we go back and contact the manager again let him know  that remind that that we're going to be there completing the inspection we actually go through and knock on all the doors and let all the occupants know we're gonna be coming back shortly to do the inspection let them know what the purpose is and what we're doing make sure nobody is surprised by this by the fact that we're coming back and we're going to be taking a look through the rooms trying to make sure everything is what it should be once we've done that we'll return with our partners which includes again  our building inspectors and west metro fire will actually go through the entire facility we'll go through all of the occupied the all the rooms we'll go through the common areas we'll go through the management area all that kind of stuff and they will complete their inspections and then they are all the men who will be notified if there's any deficiencies that have been identified as far as what we followed up on know if they're missing if things are missing things need to be repaired or replace d any of those things that we noticed are actually notified they are notified by the inspector so they know what they need to do to follow through to make those deficiencies some of the things that we do we noticed when we're going through these inspections so there were structural issues in some of the some of the facilities plumbing issues and some of the facilities as you can see here we've got the drywall coming apart we've got some plumbing issues in the kind of disrepair in the in the stairs there in that and that picture on the left on the right might be kind of hard to see but that's actually it's a hot water heater and you can see that the vent flew is not attached to the top of the hot water heater like it supposed to be some of the issues we ran into that were kind of that there was some of the life safety issues that the identified and the management was notified right away that needed to be fixed we had some of the some rooms actually had hot water heaters inside the room that had the v that were not vented correctly and those had to be closed that day to make sure that they were able to fix those quickly and so that people weren't in danger from those just some of the things we noticed if you look in this these photos here the one on the left you'll see there's some gang graffiti and just kind of just general disarray in that room in addition to the air conditioner unit being duct taped into the into the back wall of the unit on the right you'll see some of the just kind of a general  clutter and some of the zoning issues that we identified on some of the properties again those are again these are all from different properties but some of the themes that we're seeing on the left you se a storage room that they're storing gasoline cans in addition to some security issues to make sure that we have doors that lock making sure that we have windows that are secure that they can they ca close and secure those in this case obviously that's not that's not a very secure very secure door there and a window on the right obviously is not a hopefully implement or have the hearing officer recommend to make sure that we try and address those calls for service which again is kind of the whole point of this this ordinance prior to the hearing the owners had the opportunity to meet with the city attorney's office if they choose they can discuss the findings from calls for service ratios and they can also review those proposed recommendations to see what it is that is actually being proposed and see if they're what they think that if they're agreeable to that or if that's something they want that they take issue with and then when it comes time for the actual hearing there's actually an independent hearing officer that presides over the over the hearing process itself it's much much like a liquor board hearing for those of have been involved in the  as far as some of the sanctions that could be imposed as part of the hearing process it's kind of a variety of different things again it's the idea that it's going to be targeting those issues that have been identified at that property  at that facility but it can include a number of things whether there's just office procedures the check in and check out things it could be as simple as that you know requiring government issued i d for anyone who is going to berenting a r it could be a number of things as far as just some basic office procedures and best practices for people that are running a motel or a lodging facility if we're running into issues with vehicles specifically stolen vehicles or suspicious vehicles things like that we may make some recommendations on the parking situation which might limit access and maybe limit some of the access points to two parking areas if it's if maybe it's easy for people to come in a back entrance and recommendations could include you know upgrading doors locks things like that could range up to a better security systems that can help them monitor what's going on on the property better and transaction types if one of the things that that may be considered for some some of these facilities might be saying you know it doesn't it's not a good idea for you to take cash payments the hearing officer may say you really need to just require a credit card only transactions because you have legitimate facilities all three of them have showed significant improvement since there are twenty seventeen numbers so that's they're all heading in the right direction but unfortunately also they're all still three all three still over that that one point eighty nine ratio and so based on those you know based on kind of what they're doing and what direction they're headed recommendations were made to try to system to further reduce those calls service the all of the owners agreed with the recommendations they all met with the city attorney's office prior to the hearing they were all briefed on what the recommendations were they were all in agreement with those all three of them were placed on probation which will last them through the end of their licensing sanction identifying the individuals that renting rooms again that's just me maintaining a you're taking a photocopy of the customer's government issued i d and just maintaining that on file while they're while they're staying there and then identifying anyone who's a minor simple as issuing parking passes or putting placards on there for vehicles that are registered to the belong to registered occupants makes it easier for them to maintain a better idea of who's staying there and whose vehicles they are  majority of them are showing improvement and as you noticed as john pointed out that some have very noticeable improvement they've really been working hard and that's been significant we appreciate them working that direction we've had a few that are going the other direction they've had a pretty significant increase in calls for service and those are the ones that those turns are going to come up during the hearing process and those are john talked about trying to be kind of progressive being reasonable as far as those sanctions the potential changes at this point we haven't noticed any significant changes that we would recommend but that's one of those things that maybe as as if the members council have questions or concerns as far as things that are going we're going forward or as we finish the first cycle really this is we're halfway through our first cycle of actually doing the inspection two and hearing process so it's really too early to tell but maybe by the time we're we've gone full through one complete cycle have a better idea as far as things that we may want to look at or things that you may want to look at possibly changing updating adjusting in the ordinance as we move forward so and with that just again we would like to thank you for your time and having us having us here and we would love to answer any questions that you might have for well done thank you very much for that and i would just just echo two things i think it is really important as you continue that if you do have areas of improvement or you see things i think this council would be certainly interested in understanding what that would be the other thing is this is pretty resource intens and as we continue to monitor it i think it's important that we you know maybe if we have to adjust the fees based upon the amount of effort tht's going into this certainly keep that in mind going forward as well  because seems like you have five six departments working on this and a lot of time and energy going into it so with that got everybody's hand so harmonious start here with mister skilling and work my way for the presentation tonight my question is concerning the partners that you mentioned go out with your teams you had mentioned there is a variety of folks that may go out there is  enforcement always partnered when you inspections and then as part of that inspection are there separate citations that are given for example we saw the water heaters and various things is that kind of a separate  yes so what what happens is there is all of our partners have their own policies they follow so code enforcement code enforcement goes out with us they will give their own orders notices to the property so they find junk and rubbish or disabled cars they will provide them in order to fix that fire department similarly will provide their order you need to fix this egress point the building inspectors will say this stairwell is is a structural risk each one of those group provides their own notice and then they send a copy to us and then they follow up with us so like code enforcement for example in all seven cases they identified issues and then probably a week or two later they followed up and they told us they had been rectified there's a couple of hotels where they haven't but in each case it's the it's the responsibility of that inspecting agency to handle their own investigate and we're providing them the means to do so through our group i know when we talked about calls for service i'm hoping that we are keeping the cold separate in terms of the record keeping because i don't know that an owner could be held liable for somebody they get sick in their hotel so i'm hoping that we're we're following up on that data and keeping those calls for service separately i'm assuming they are the do you want me to stop and see sergeant derosa you had your ready to go i i'll just call bad actors that might be the best way to describe it are they personally owned or corporately owned when you say bad actors you mean the ones where we saw a market increase hurt well i guess the way i should phrase that is because oftentimes even if they're owned by an individual it's under a corporation right so they're not they're not chains if you well it's they're not part of a chain or  substantially when comparing those two could you quantify what the big difference is is it attitude of the owners is it what is it that's making the big turnaround and that's all i have so i'll sut after th yeah i think one thing we realize is just like the major drops some of the hotel's ownership matters for those hotels that have a ceiling increase too as you're well aware many of you are small business owners the the environment you create for your staff or your management really dictates how business is run and we have found that in some cases the ownership is not creating that environment or they're not working with us as well as those other hotels and so that's why you know the whole idea behind this audience was to say hey partnering and and education go so far but at some point we're gonna have to be able to say no you have to do this differently because it's not safe the cmmunity and that's why we would go to a hearing and ask for those sanctions or soe of those owners to make the necessary changes to make it safer for the community and follow up question to that is do you feel like in the ordinance you've got enough teeth to be able to make those owners make the changes that need to happen i think right now it's too soon to tell to be honest with you i think we need to get through this first round of hearings and see what sanctions the hearing officer prescribes and see how they follow through i can tell you we have been very impressed with how many of the hotels have responded to this they've responded in a very business appropriate fashion where they may understand ok this is the cost of doing business now i have to maintain a license and i have to stay in good standing with the license authority some of the hoels have not taken that attitude so our job is to go in for the hearing officer and see if we can get sanctions to fix that i think what would be best is after this next session if we find that those sanctions are not getting the desired result we would come looking for solutions at that time thank you you might not have an answer thank you and thanks again sergeant for the presentation really appreciate that and the update you brought you might not have the answer for this but my question is  i'm paraphrasing a little bit but you essentially said you're not sure if you need additional tools right now my question is does code enforcement or our building inspectors do you know if they have a similar view on that like they have the tools they need at the moment or at least too early to tell i think my best answer to that would be as we've received no feedback that they haven't felt lacking they haven't told us how if only we could do this we haven't received that anecdotally i think i can tell you that as the mayor mentioned this is a big personnel lift and so getting all these different teams together was a feat and getting their commitment especially during a pandemic to to do this work out in the public what was hard so first you know like mike sergeant sergeant i said hats off to them because you get these groups out into these conditions that you saw that take something i think that what we'll want to do now is find out from them after we go through some hearings do they feel like they did and that will be something we'll ask them when we recap the year because one thing that's been really need is like our fire marshal he came to one the first hearings he didn't have to he's like i want to come and see how it's going i want to see if it's working so we've gotten that buy in now that we know that first few times are like man as it can be a lot of work by the nine hotel they're like man we see what we need to be out here and that was really neat to see that kind of light bulb moment vocal and i guess my question to you perhaps is know what can we do as a council or what can what's the community's role how can they be helpful is it just you know reaching out when they  concerns or you know what well broken and community play i guess in helping curb some other the challenge is you guys are facing out there i don't know if there's an answer for that but i'm just i'm wondering how to talk to them about this in a constructive way yeah i think the best way to do that we've talked internally as a staff we really believe in the power that you guys to bring as a group to speak to your constituents and so i think what we're going to do is we're going to start letting you know when these hearings are because they are public hearings and you can let your constituents know so that way they can come they can choose to come if they want to i don't think it's appropriate for me as a law enforcement officer to to reach out and say hey come to this hearing but i think you as a counsel who represents people if we say here's the hearing date for the upcoming hotel hearings that will give them a voice because they can ask it to speak and so for those who want to speak they can feel empowered to do so and you're also welcome to attend as well i think we did we thought as long as you're willing that's the best way for you i've got a couple of questions and one i would like to comment on what you said about getting the information out so we can get it out to your constituents that would work for four i think some of our wards perfectly because we get calls on them all the time and i know you know that i wondered first of all if you if you ever had something i know the medical doesn't count tour calls for service but do you ever have the medical turn into something else you find something when you go to do a medical no call yes that's true so what what can happen is let's say we have a report of fall victim and we get there and if they fell because they're extremely intoxicated and they're from the next room over and they're causing trouble that turns into a detox hole possibly so that would be a  there is really we do our best to you have to humanize this process to make it fair right but then hugh the humans also bring difference of opinion right because we rely on a computer then no one disagrees with a computer except they go with that wrong but if the computer told us what what do we do so the first thing is our are our crime analysts review every single call for service that's held against a hotel that's the first step and we give them some basic guid and then what happens is when we get ready to go to hearing our cat officers review it again and our city attorney's office reviews it before they go to a hearing and in fact recently we had said here's a couple why i think we shouldn't hold it against we reduce that number even further so we're we're very careful to say hey we know it's not a perfect system that's why we go to a hearing it's just like anything in criminal justice there's a opportunity to speak publicly and so there may be calls where it is changed to hold against them or we decide later hey we're not going to hold this one against them because they make a compelling argument and our city attorney agrees so i give a little more there than you probably asked for because you were just asking about medical but that's how we approach all calls for service related to to this is they can change and we know that that's great information i appreciate would it be possible to get you said that now we have fourteen more that went to the top of the list where the others floated some of the bottom would it be possible to get a print out or information on those fourteen now that are at the top yeah i think so i think the one thing we want to wait for is what our city attorney he has recommended is let's let these go to hearing first so they have a chance to have a public hearing about it before we we post the results so that's one reason as you saw pictures inspections but we didn't tell you what the hotels were you did though see that on the second list i showed you with their calls for service number  now so that's public you guys have a copy of that so you can review that which is just their base number from the year right and we can make sure to give you that but any more data that's what the hearings for and that's what we would want to provide you along with the hearing officer  unbiased fashion that way the hearing officer makes a unbiased decision but definitely that call for service no it's in the powerpoint and we can make sure to get that for you for the twenty to twenty twenty year and if you want at any time during this i can call yes yep we did inspection they had a hearing that was due to an unsafe stairwell and some other structural elements where we said it's not safe to be on that upper level so again that's where the power of this program really exists it's not only what we can do as far as sanctions go but the fact that we got building inspectors fire inspectors to a place they may not have otherwise been and when you're talking about public buildings like this that's a pretty powerful thing to be a help all those people in that small amount of that small amount pictures that you showed is there ever an instance whre you automatically shut down some place that just you felt couldn't be repaired and so so far we've we haven't shut down entire places we have closed rooms like the denver unfortunate where we have to we have to displace someone from a hotel room because of a safety issue we have our navigators there to help and our navigators going door to door these places anyway because since we know that they're oftentimes temporary housing for the homeless what better way to start or engaging with them then while we're there anyway in a safe environment ok thank you appreciate it paul my question is surrounding the fact that we saw some of the motels and hotels their number went up significantly and i just wanted to see if you guys had done any analysis at this point to say are the owners or managers that are not compliant or is the pressure from those that are maybe more rigorously enforcing their rules kind of pushing pushing folks into more concentrated areas do we have any insight i just want to make sure that if there's folks who are just clearly not compliant at all that we understand that or if they're trying and there's just a lot of pressure from maybe folks who were the ones producing the calls kind of now being more i think it's actually a really good question as far as the for the end users the occupants as far as them being displaced from some of the motels and occupying some of the others that's that's a possibility i couldn't speak to that specifically blankets that's a good that's a good we may be able to look into as we get it a little further into this as far as the most of the the hotels that have have gone up with lodging facilities have gotten the numbers have gone up they have not gone to hearing it  can't it's going to be a little bit tougher to judge their their willingness to to work on some of these things based on what we've seen so far that we haven't seen as much involvement and as much willingness to do stuff up until this point  d now as i mentioned some of the other things we did as far as doing the safety walkthrough and doing the safety symposium some of bars that have gone up we're not present at those they didn't they didn't take advantage of some of the advice that we gave them that sort of thing so that's that's what we've seen so far but again i don't think we have a good answer until we actually have a chance to sit down with them as part of the hearing process and see how they follow up on that i think that's going to have a much better idea as far as how how seriously they're going to and i don't know what role we have to play but i have a question about as we require them to maybe bring the rooms up to minimum safety standards have we noticed that that has then increased the rental rates and is that further putting pressure on our communities of folks who are barely holding on i just didn't know if if rates are going as we're requiring these establishments to better take care of their properties again i think an excellent question but we're still pretty new into the process so i don't i haven't and certainly has heard otherwise i haven't heard of any of the rates increasing but again we've we've only been doing the hearings for the last month or so so we haven't seen that but it's something i think we'll probably want to keep an eye on you understand that facility would be notified two weeks prior to the state coming to inspect and the residents would be sedated really looked very nice and the place  nursing homes with the health department for a few years and they were not notified both ways have got through ups and downs frankly when they don't know you're coming you see things as they are on a daily basis i'm just throwing that out there i am a little concerned about big bunny and trail i know they take voucher and to they don't get paid really there are sometimes folks sitter issuing those vouchers don't pay them for a month or two so you know that's a tricky situation and also when you look at the amount of money they charge per night they you know to other folks it's the sizable amount s i would like to know to do the owners have what you would call a loose association where they stay in touch and actually learn from one another on how to run these places do you know if they do john there is no formal one we've been made aware of i know a lot of them are family owned and there's some families that work together there's other cases where there's cultural differences between the ownership so that they speak kind of separately from each other or work within their own cultures but i haven't seen any any formal creation of a group if they had one we'd prefer that because then we would ask that they come as a group to us just like you know if there was a you know we're fortunate to have a lot of great business associations in the city and so we go to the business association that we talk to the businesses and that's not here kind of when you were saying the pluses and minus one thing i would say i'm mad is we went really far to the point of being very open about these inspections because the one thing we don't want to do is ever get in a situation where we find criminal activity of a significant nature and then lose in court because they see this process as a ruse to avoid search warrants and that kind of thing so by us notifying them two weeks before and then knocking on every door about an hour before they start that helps us avoid that kind of case because we can say they were well aware it management was made aware two weeks ago they were we knocked on the door at seven thirty in the morning we went in a and there were still issues so yes do we lose some of that surprise factor absolutely but i also think we gained some of the respect and the trust of the tenants who were there because we've had a really good success rate of less us letting them into rooms letting us in their rooms when we tell them why they're there and they see a show up early and say we'll be back in about an hour we're not here to search your personal belongings we're not we're here to make sure the room is safe for you we've let a lot of people let us in and i'll just sit on the bed while we do our thing they they're just like ok great and so i think like you said it's tradeoffs but it's definitely for us we thought it's the best way so far because we've had a very high success rate of getting the rooms one thing i would argue is if they're cleaning up the two weeks before that's cleaning up they weren't doing before and i'm ok with that it's you error in this side of working with people after meeting some of the folks that live in these motels we are dealing with humanity that is struggling the bugs bunny or the white swan on their honeymoon night about fifty two years ago so i have a connection going back a long way with this part of town  to ask you about some of those pictures and those during the inspections are those photos of people's rooms that are occupied it's one of my questions ye so they can they can definitely be occupied rooms because we want to inspect every room on the premises so that's why we do that knocking early in the morning and we get consent from those who residents so if they've been there more than thirty days or they've signed a lease or something we ask for their protection from unreasonable searches and seizures and you know i mean potentially subjecting hotels to civil liability if if guest civil rights  violated in some way and they they they shouldn't make something of that and so that's a concern to me and also i mean whether  we're really thinking about what is consent in that regard because i think a lot of people who get a knock on the door from a police officer would tend to be pretty intimidated at that point and so it's just a concern i have is is watching out for those fourth amendment rights and then i think we kind of covered homelessness and you know it was my thought that many of these cash paying people might be homeless people who just have nowhere nowhere else to go and so might have a lot of their things there  from the guest list that hotels and i'm curious if that's true thank you both for your presentation absolutely so to start by answering your questions on the fourth amendment question of consent we agree with you that that's a a major issue and that's why we do the two week notification ahead of time to the management and that's still why we knock on the door well ahead of the inspection to make them aware hey here's what here's what we're doing and here's why we're doing it again for us the standard is if they're a track transient guest we're inspecting the room we're not inspecting them we're not looking through their personal belongings one reason we tell them at seven hundred and thirty we're going to be doing this so they have a chance to take care of their personal business and we want to make sure that in a court of law you know we can say no we gave them ample time but the door closed for them to handle their personal business and when we go in a room obviously if we see something in plain view we may have to deal with that as an officer but that's why we give them plenty of notice on the front end additionally when we do contact them i can tell you that we have yet we do not we have not and we will not force our way into a room during these inspections this is procedure if we have a criminal issue we'll deal with that separately but we we have left rooms when someone said no i refuse we haven't searched that room we like we like to try to avoid that because we know that every room is important because we need to see the whole of it and if we had suddenly a hotel of twenty rooms nineteen people said no you can't search it that's a problem for the efficacy safety of the program but so far that's been our standard is if they decline and they say even if they're a two day guest well then we go talk to management and say hey we need to work this out because they're not letting us inspect the rooms you're required to do but we haven't had that come up yet and again i think that's because we're trying to deal with people on a human level and say again we're not here for a criminal incident we're here for  administrative inspection to a question about running running people's names yes we do try and get the list what we call the list the day before so that's because we would not want to know who are coming into contact with so we do try to identify who's in the rooms ahead of time if someone has a warrant and we find that warrant on the system we will knock on their door first it's like we would i anyone was checking for once what we don't do is ask for anyone's name as a matter of fact when we're going room to room we don't just say hey what's your name hey what's your name because again we're not there for a criminal investigation we decided that it would be frankly derelict as a supervisor for me to risk my people's safety by saying i know i could get the names of anyone who's here and i could make sure that they have a violent tendency warrants i could see who was here but i'm not going to do so no we do decide that's something we need to look at but again we're not treating this as a criminal investigation if someone is not a listed party as a possible wanted party and they say i'm leaving i don't want be here they're free to leave we really have and we've made sure to explain that we actually talked about no proactive enforcement as part of the rule for this so that's an hour in our hopefully that answers your questions if you have any more on melinda mark and i are willing to definitely answer so i have mister abel and then  last week i believe it was thursday we had to show cause hearing having to do with a couple of these motels i ran across the notice in fact i stumbled across the is very interested in the notice was or clicks away and finally or other public notices found someone would really have to be looking for the particular notice in order to find is there any way we can post those notices more prominently and perhaps even to let council know when they part of the website that you're talking about i do though sure and we we we do try and put all the notices in one spot so that if if someone wants they go to the web site they can they can figure out you know regardless of what they're looking for they can see that all the different notices are there they're all titles we think that's the best practice so that they're all in one spot so people are having to go to different parts of the website i did that he's certainly willing to provide notice to counsel in advance of these and that might solve this issue you've had this concern on other isues as well and maybe that's something we can talk about yes certainly thank you sir i would add we're definitely willing to do that we'll set up a standardized method these first few hearings have been interesting because we're actually going to be interviewing new hearing officers for this it's a pretty labor intensive hearing process too as you can imagine with we still have we're going to have eleven more hearings to do over the course of the next couple months and that's pretty intensive so we're interviewing some new hearing officers for it once we start to get that laid out and we know when these hearings are going to definitely make sure you're aware from here on out when those are and i'll work with the city clerk and find the appropriate way for you to find out about that but i can counsel will definitely know when they're happening and then how you choose to like you mentioned with the carbon monoxide is just i'm just really glad that there is an opportunity to be proactive there when the one of the first departments that i lived in  really glad the drought there you're looking out for people's safety and i think that this chicken is really valuable and i look forward to hearing you know in a year or two  years or whatever the next appropriate time is to see if there are any fine changes that we need to make thank you for your for your work and your serv exhausts the list of council members who have their hands up is there anything else cool well sergeants thank you very much for this important update and i know the community was anxious to see this as well you know the motto is integrity intelligence and initiative and this is another example of how you're leading the way and finding new ways to address complicated issues it never goes unnoticed in a lot of your presentations you always speak to humanity and the people part of it that's at the end of the day what you're dealing with his people so thank you so much and please thank your team doesn't miss hearts and also the rest of the folks who are working on this from the other departments please share our gratitude with all right next up this brings us a little bit of normalcy as it's been a long time since we've heard from our lakewood advisory commission and a great group of dedicated folks who are working on a lot of different things and have a lot of different projects to present to us and to try to move forward and so i would like to welcome the members the officers of the l a see lawrence libya nicole m landry and miss piggy ralph so if you would like to come on board and council looks like this is a report and projects update and certainly i think moving forward something with your with your guidance would center staff for further review and then potential discussions also as we move into the retreat early next year so good evening nice to have you all with a nice to see different people good evening to you it has been a unique year hasn't it so far we were originally supposed to make this presentation in spring as we normally do but here we are my name is lawrence labure mayor and city council thank you for having myself and the vise chair  basically as everything is a little bit different today we're going to deliver our two thousand updates as well as what we've done in two thousand and twenty despite all of the disruptions or the changes in our process we remain diligent and productive in two thousand and twenty and so basically for the lakewood advisory commission we are going to present to you your plans for the future what we've done this last year what we've done last year and basically give you a quick update on my name is lawrence labure like i said two thousand and twenty chair of the lakewood advisory commission i also served for the commission during twenty nineteen the chair and basically nicole and peggy as i said are here with me today real quick we're just going to start off with a little bit of the advisory commission our purpose in our history in two thousand and seven the national league of cities created a building to inclusive to build created the  to allow residents to directly provide public input on selected policy matters to better reflect what we do in two thousand and eight mean the commission changed our name from the advisory commission for an inclusive community to the lakewood advisory commission this is the lakewood advisory commission has taken on additional duties such as providing ambassador reports to give council inputs from relevant relevant area meetings we've also as commissioners basically maintained a curren worked on over eighty projects and assignments some examples include but are not limited to the community celebrate recommend we recommended that the city hold an annual family orientated event which turned into our big boom bash which of and twenty we had to adjust that recycling and liquids parks and open spaces we presented a proposal to encourage the use of big belly trash and recycling bins in our parks and open spaces if you're out at any of our parks and you see those big belly trash bins you can see them all over in a variety of lakewood parks and open spaces we also recommended liquid liquor distance requirement we complete a research made recommendations to remove the distance requirement for hotel and restaurant local liquor license makes recommendations that promote civic responsibility and participation through education to create a more connected citizenry a couple of projects including a league leadership lakewood program and a nn cigaret tobacco licensing the neighborhoods committee makes recommendations that creates relationships and encourage involvement within diverse populations to improve neighborhoods pride and quality of life some projects that we've worked on there neighborhood awards and the city of lakewood fiftieth anniversary ideas  the sustainability committee makes recommendations that support and encourage balanced vision of conservative conservation and renewal some examples from them are recycling and lakewood parks and open spaces and additional community gardens and at this time and organizations public meetings and reporting back to city council on issues that may pertain to the city of lakewood currently ambassadors are attending the virtual meetings for jeffco parks and open space advisory committee of commissioners foothills animal shelter board jeff go public school boards of education and the regional air quality council meeting two thousand nineteen was a productive year for the lakewood advisory commission and to explore further opportunities to provide broadband service in the light of our current remote work in learning environment we research mayor and city council compensation amounts and plans from various shared the benefits of hosting a car free day event and how it would meet many of the city's core community values recommendations for locations coordinating with the existing and potential partners for the event were shared highlighted the current veterans memorials within the city and ways to promote them this year an online story map was available for a self guided tour and shared during the veterans day holiday in january two thousand and twelve the lhc provided some alternatives to libya the issues surrounding farmers markets and healthy food access to would resonate there are a variety of projects currently in the works we will provide a quick update for a few of these proposals this evening and several others are ready to be presented to city council city council assignments for the lakewood advisory commission include researching the viability of a renewable energy program for lakewood and research and recommend solutions to reduce the illegal use of fireworks in the city of lake grass roots assignments include creating a safe driving campaign research programs promote visits and another activities between children and the elderly and make mendacious four possible initiatives and lakewood research ways to reduce vehicle idling within the community work on a guide to promoting stability and like during the challenging times due to cope at nineteen research waste for tech lakewood wildlife pets and children from improperly discarded fishing line hook financial and social impacts of carbon nineteen on liquids small businesses and categorize city identified missing inadequate pedestrian and bicycle connections that link neighborhoods rec centers and parks in each ward for nicole the first one i want to mention is the drive safety campaign that we have ready to go to code for the city council the civic awareness committee research ways to raise awareness about traffic related lakewood streets and roadways they are recommending that the city implement a long term five year educational and awareness program utilizing all available media sources it further recommends the city's leadership take an active role to support the program they believe also that a mascot or character can establish a connection and bring focus to the program the civic awareness committee is excited to come before you with further details of idling and the last one i have for you is called renewable energy mitigate program or also known as ramp sustainability committees researched ways to bring renewable energy to the city of lakewood what best practices shouldn't lakewood be using they recommended a point based ramp program like other cities and communities that lakewood colorado already has they recommended a point based ramp program because i just read that sorry it needs to be an all inclusive residential industrial and commercial new construction as well as remodels they would like to see an option that if you choose not to participate through these programs that you could pay into an energy efficiency fund so we would like to present these proposals to you and hear more about them so please put us on schedule for two thousand and twenty one we have enough proposals right now that are either complete or in process that we could fill up the entire calendar of two thousand and twenty one so we really appreciate getting on the schedule and presenting all this work and research to city council thank you very much thank you conclude your i'm sorry i was on news i was mute that's i think the the sign of the times right on mute yourself it's the sign of the times right some kids might be name that this year thank you peggy i should also note that peggy will be our chair for next year for twenty twenty one she is i want to congratulate her for winning the election and basically taking the chair so rest assured you'll have a great leader taking over next year for the seat and as she said and i'll second it further you know we do obviously have a backlog of proposals and i understand that it is a unique year but i on behalf commission i can say that i can basically say you know we've had a lot of push as far as saying how when are we going to get on there and those kind of things so i to at least express that frstration that we've had is that we've been working hard and we want it we want to get these ideas out there and we want to get those things and we want to deliver those proposals so hopefully as you said return to some normalcy hopefully two thousand and twenty one we get some  more of that back that sad you know with the commission there are several openings on the commission and i would like to encourage any interested individuals to attend the committee meeting and a full commission meeting the c has representatives from all five awards and we encourage diversity on this commission we work hard to ensure that the residents have a voice in the community and feel valued i speak on behalf of the commission in saying that we highly enjoy having input on different community policies and potential projects this is a great opportunity for individual that allows us residents of all different backgrounds to be engaged and make a difference on behalf of the commission on behalf of nicole and peggy we'd like to thank you city council for the opportunity to make a positive income impact on our the welcome to the city bruce and we look forward to working as well so right now this concludes our presentation and please let us know if we can answer any questions for you well done thank you and don't worry i was going with ralph coming in as the new the new chair certainly feel your frustration as you can imagine this group also had lofty goals for two thousand and twenty that have been kind of parked for some time but i can assure you that we're trying to get back to normal trying to get whatever that normal and even if it's not a true normal something that we can continue to honor the hard work that you do in the group of put it is valuable yo do it because you care about your community and your wonderful  ers so we will certainly honor that going forward and try to find ways to get these things on the schedule and hopefully get some some staff input and then potential implementation so i do have a question looks like m know we've been anxious to hear them as well and i don't know if it would be possible to hear some of the presentations ahead of our retreat but that would be great if if that exactly thank you all very much course thank you for all your hard work i know you have been working really hard and we really appreciate and mister mayor maybe what we need to do since this council has begun using committee as a way of of  getting work done maybe we could have a representative of each one of the wards listen to the presenter asians as miss goodwin just talked about and report back to the full council that way at least for the time being we can listen to the proposal make recommendations and then they can get on with good work and we can you know hear their good work thank you thank you for that suggestion i would a little bit hesitate to form another committee i think we created a lot of committees and there might be some fatigue and some folks out to do double duty on those committees and that's it's challenging however if there are things that are ready to go i would suggest that we have those ready for the retreat or at least a few weeks before the retreat and council could review those and we could carve out some time to discuss the final product  would that be something that's amenable to counsel so would come to us in written form and we'd just that be part of our preparation with some advance notice if there are ready to go we could get three or four weeks to review those and be ready to discuss them i'm seeing some some yeses then if that would be something that be acceptable certainly to the l a see that would move your body of work forward with the complete assignments we will discuss the retreat here in a few minutes and have a better idea of some timing for that absolutely whatever you need there and we can provide that so right all right is there anything else that counsel has for this wonderful group well we thank you for joining us i guess the flip side is sometimes you've appeared before us on late nights so you're getting to hear before a forty five p m to be honest so i assume your is just starting well ironically we're done here done so okay well then let's extend this out make you stay up a little bit later all right well thank you so much have a great holiday and we'll see you after the new year or counsel we're going to go into reports i have quite a few things that i want to cover but before i do that miss hodson anything on your side that you wanted to anything you needed to chat about kind of cut you off spot then i was going to go towards two three four or five and then one i don't think you i don't think i have anything i was just excited again to introduce bruce our new city clerk and again just thanks to ben and bernie so few if you didn't notice bruce you've got your work cut out for you because the lhc falls under you just in case you didn't know that okay thank you thank you all right ward to any any updates i have nothing i don't have anything either and just for the sake going to bed early just i won't say anything thanks here yeah i just wanted to address a couple of things we didn't have a board meeting last month because of thanksgiving and we're running into the christmas holiday this next month so i've been thinking about trying to do maybe some midweek type of thing if i can get it together before the holiday so jut wanted to alert people to that just look on the website if we're able to do something like that i also just wanted to report that this past week we saw on channel seven a video of  pd asking aurora fire rescue to administer a forced injection of quote unquote calm down juice on a suspect and i've been talking about this for a number of weeks  concerning influence of law enforcement on medical decisions as i expressed this concern about in the past we hold stakeholders meeting with representative the first in the nation of its kind and hopefully save many lives we're already getting calls from other state for help with with their legislation as  before thanks mia paul i just want to make sure that our constituents knew that we will not have the december meeting but certainly you know we'll have our contact information if there she meeting bieda that you need be sure to reach out we will resume our meetings in january  on thursday six o'clock we have our development dialog committee meeting which is the topic is the districts and any proposed recommendations or changes in the way what their priorities are for the coming year we had a really good discussion really appreciate everybody's input helps karen and i really prepare for the retreat coming up  hear from our community a lot of the nonprofits that they support are nonprofits that we lakewood supported through our bieda nineteen response program and then you know if you are if you're a family who's able to order out and get takeout please do it actually does make a difference when we eat out and it certainly makes your night easier as well we heard from a lot of people love our local small businesses it's a challenging time and i hope everyone stays safe we're five will not be having a january meeting because i think it's our meeting would feel like the and you can get tickets online through lakewood high school and randi i'll leave it to you to brag on how well last week frank well charlie frankly i wan't aware of lakewood high school's play i had some need idea i love it thank you yes charlie and i are very grateful for the folks from finance it king aaron and you'll have to help me with the late other ladies name i can't recall they were excellent they had a very good powerpoint their presentation was well received didn't we appreciate really the fact that they will come on a saturday you can give their time thank you it's a little bit of a somber day particularly fr people more in my generation it's appropriate to continue to remember this day in the service of those veterans from world war two there are fewer and fewer of them that are still alive and when you see him we still need to thank thank you and good night  miss johnson well said and that is pretty cool a radio play kind of going way back in the day so going back to the basics i'll have to figure out where to find radio in my house so i have kind of a big laundry list of some council stuff i still need for responses on the retreat and i'd hope to get those back today if you can please have those back by noon tomorrow we started out with some weekend dates but that was  kind of workable for everyone so now we've gone to some weekday dates and really trying to just get some folks locked in for this so please if you could respond by noon tomorrow i need to move forward on that  be by our policies and procedures first regular meeting of january so please be thinking of that if you'd like to take on that role talk to your colleagues take nominations from the floor or ahead of time also committee assignments and so this is something and then i mentioned it to to miss harrison we have a lot of committees and i know our policies and procedures says i think something related to one or more i'd encourage council to maybe look at putting themselves out there and trying to get more involved on more than one committee if possible this is a lot of important work and also for our counsel members who are moving on and ha kind of stalwarts of different committees if you want to look at passing that baton on this year helping train folks for the next few years encourage that as well as we start to look at that i will send something out with all the different committees probably won't do it i think with the night well we'll do that in january certainly i don't know if it'll be at that first regular meeting or not but please give that some thought please talk to your ward mates about that and let us know  once i send it out let me know kind of what's your thinking car gives day that was touched on you know it is a tough year for so many people and it's a tough year for nonprofits that depend on donations it's just challenging all the way around so you do have a little extra to give please please do that tomorrow had a call with the saint anthony folks to get a better understanding of where they're at and you might have seen one in the memo i think they're about  or at least the jefferson county emergency rooms are about ninety three percent capacity one of the challenges that our hospital is facing is is people people shorted and so that's something that's kind of out of our control but there's also a component of morale trying to support our first responders and health care workers so you may see some things coming out that could potentially support local businesses or local restaurants by supporting them to help give back to the hospital i'll share with you if you'd like further some lobbying ideas that they the health care folks the hospitals will need as we go into the colorado general assembly session in january as well as the feds so stay tuned for that but they are very gracious for the support that they've had but it is very challenging for them right now and learned a lot from that process under the feds  i guess there was some talk today from the congressional side from congress from the house of reps on an extension of keeping the government open so negotiations can continue for potential relief package that would come our way so important you al have an incredible voice to reach out to our senators and our congressmen let them know that they have got to get some action the challenges are just going to continue to grow as things are shut down we are still in the red level i haven't heard anything that says we're going to purple but what we have heard is we're probably two to three two to three weeks away from seeing the impact of thanksgiving and that's really going to dictate what happens probably late december or early january as far as the states concerned so keep that in mind and that's super super critical councilor vincent i had the chance to meet with the owner of the love house that's pretty historic structure that is near and dear to many in the community but it's a challenging situation the good news is we have an owner that is willing and understands the history and cares about the history but we're going to have to get creative with some private investment and try to make something happen so you know folks in the community that care about historic preservation as well as maybe some creative development opportunities i think we could facilitate that into a further discussion we talked a little bit and i haven't heard from the business advisory group but there was some push t lower or cap fees and i think there was a mixed concern by  our place to cap fees or not and so we will continue i think maybe to here but i have learned something that is quite interesting so the some of the communities i have capped delivery fees for take out those delivery free services have now just added an extra charge onto their delivery to skirt the cap that was put in place so in denver they kept it up fifteen percent so those operators just added a two dollar fee so it might be  exercise in futility if we decide to go that route but for our business owners it is important to know that we do care and we'll try to do everything we can going forward to support you so i think that is all that i have but we'd love to wrap up the retreat information so we can lock that in and that's it anything else for the good of the whole all right we're glad to have bruce on board look forward to working with you here in the future and i think everybody else have a good evening be safe out there